He Took His Childhood Friend Away, So I Came Back a Mafia Heiress novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Key

Aurelio takes her to the bank and shows what her father left her and the thirty days she has to claim it; the ledger shows who has been taking from it.

The old man's name was Aurelio Dessi, and he cried in the back of the taxi until I handed him a tissue.

"Forgive me," he said. "I have stood at that gate every year on your birthday since you were twelve."

"Why?"

"Because they never let me through it."

He opened the leather case on his knees, took out a photograph, and put it in my hand.

It was my father, laughing, with a little girl on his shoulders.

I had one photograph of him in my bag.

I didn't have this one.

"Signora, the Santoros told you that your father left you nothing," Aurelio said. "Is that what they said?"

"They said he left debts. Rocco's father said he paid them to give me a roof."

"The old Don paid nothing." Aurelio's hands shook on the case. "Your father left you everything."

I looked out at the rain on the glass.

"Start from the beginning," I said.

He did, and he didn't dress it up.

My father had run the Rinaldi family, which owned the container berths at the Elizabeth docks and half the trucks that left them.

When he died in the fire, he had already written his will.

Everything went to me on my twenty-eighth birthday.

Until then, a guardian from an allied family would hold it in trust.

"Which family?" I asked.

"Santoro," he said.

I closed my eyes.

"The old Don took the guardianship and then took you into his house, so nobody would ask about either. When he died, his brother Nunzio took over the books."

"And my birthday."

"Is Friday."

"That's only five days."

"Five days, and then thirty more. But here is the part that matters, Signora. Your father was careful. The will says you must come in person, with the key you wear, within thirty days of that birthday. You must be sworn in before the family's captains. If you do not, the guardian keeps everything."

"Keeps it for good?"

"For good."

My hand was on the key under my dress before I realized I had reached for it.

"Nunzio wanted me to sign a form," I said. "He wanted me to give up any claim through my birth family. He asked for it Thursday."

Aurelio went very still.

"Then he knew the clock was running," he said, "and he needed you to sign away everything before Friday."

"I almost did."

"You didn't."

"Rocco told me to," I said. "He'd have let me."

I said it flat, the way you say a thing you plan to feel later.

Aurelio took my hand and held it in both of his.

"We will go to the bank when it opens," he said.

The Elizabeth Savings and Trust had a vault older than anyone working in it.

A clerk in a grey cardigan checked my face against the picture Aurelio had carried for sixteen years, checked the key against a card in a drawer, and then went to find the manager, who came out of his office with his tie crooked.

"Miss Rinaldi," he said. "We'd begun to think you weren't coming."

They took me down alone.

Box 1187 was a steel drawer the length of my arm, and the iron key turned in it.

I pulled it out and set it on the table.

There was a thick envelope with my name on it in my father's handwriting.

There was the will.

There was the deed to Rinaldi Port & Freight, three hundred and forty trucks and four berths.

And there was a green accounts ledger, bound in cloth, with Aurelio's initials on the spine.

"The original books," he said from the door. "I took a copy every month for fifteen years, from the day a friend of mine at the company started passing them to me."

I opened to the last page.

Every month, on the first, the Rinaldi accounts paid a sum to a trust at the Santoro house.

The sum didn't stop at the guardian's fee.

It went on. Nine hundred thousand dollars last year alone, signed with the initials N.S.

I turned the page back.

Four lines under his, in smaller figures, another payment.

Two thousand a month, same day, paid for eleven years.

"Who is S. Costa?" I said.

Aurelio's glasses had slid down his nose.

"She was seventeen when the first payment went out," he said quietly. "She is a friend of your husband's, I believe."

"His oldest friend," I said.

I read the line again.

Sabrina had brought me tea every night for three days.

She had patted my hand at the table and turned her phone face down.

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