I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 23 of 76

Chapter 23: The Trade

Damiano hit me before the glass did.

He took me down onto the floor, under the desk, with his whole body over mine.

The window came down on his back.

Two more shots punched through the wall above us.

"Stay down," he said into my ear.

I couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to. He weighed a ton.

Then different shots, from farther away, from the road.

"Mine," Damiano said. "They followed us from the hospital. I told them not to."

"Good," I said into the floor.

"Back door," Damiano said. "Now. Keep your head below the desk."

I reached up over the edge of the desk and swept my hand across the top.

My fingers found the passbook and the first sketchbook.

I stuffed them inside my coat.

We went out the back of the trailer on our hands and knees, down three metal steps, into the mud.

There was a hole in the chain-link where the bank had washed out. Damiano held it open, and I went through.

A black car came bumping down the gravel with no lights on.

The back door flew open. One of his men leaned out.

"Get in! Get in, get in!"

Damiano shoved me in first and fell in after me.

There was blood on my coat.

It wasn't mine.

Damiano was slumped against the other door, holding his left arm against his body.

His coat sleeve was soaked dark from the shoulder down.

"You're shot."

"It went through. It's the outside of the arm. It's fine."

"It's not fine. Hospital."

"No hospital. Every cop there will have questions, and Nonno's still there."

"Taylor Street," he said to the driver. "Call the doctor."

Dad was awake when we came up the stairs.

He was at the table in his robe with every light on, holding his phone.

He saw Damiano's arm, and he got up so fast his cane went over.

"Kitchen table," Dad said. "Lulu, towels. The clean ones."

Damiano's man came up ten minutes later with a doctor in a parka who didn't ask anyone's name.

I held the lamp.

The doctor cut Damiano's shirt off and cleaned the hole in the side of his arm and stitched it, front and back.

Damiano didn't make a sound. He looked at me the whole time.

"You held still," the doctor said, snapping off his gloves. "Most men pass out."

"I've seen her do this to a hem," Damiano said. "I knew what was coming."

Damiano sat at Pasquale's old table with his arm strapped across his chest.

Dad stood at the window, looking down at Taylor Street.

There were four men down there now instead of two.

"It was Vito," Dad said. It wasn't a question.

"It was Vito," Damiano said.

He went into the back room without his cane, holding on to the doorframe and the wall.

He came out with the box of my mother's things.

The tape was still on it. He tore it off with his good hand and his teeth.

He reached under her folded sweaters and her recipe cards and her wedding veil.

He came up with a red coffee can.

He set it in the middle of the table in front of Damiano.

"Your mother used to keep buttons in this," he said to me. "Fourteen years she's gone. I never threw it out."

Inside, rolled tight with two rubber bands, was a black notebook.

"Ten years," he said. "Every envelope I ever paid Vito Lazzaro to keep my sites working. Date. Job. Amount. Who carried it."

"Two envelopes," Dad said. "Every job, always two. One went to his captains, the way it was supposed to. The other one went to Vito personally. In his car. In cash."

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