Lethal Love novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: The Promise

Cosima took the phone out of my hand.

She read it standing up.

Then she sat down on the floor of the shop, right where she was, in her river-stained whites.

"Papa," she said.

Dom was already at the front door.

He didn't take his coat, because Oakley was still wearing it upstairs.

The bell rang, and the black car's back door opened and shut under the streetlight.

I grabbed my cardigan off the hook.

"Jemma," Gran said.

"I know."

"Then go."

I ran out and got in the other side of the car before the driver could pull away.

Dom didn't look at me.

"Dyker Heights," he said to the driver.

The driver looked at him in the mirror for a second too long.

Then he drove.

Nobody talked.

The houses got bigger and the lawns got wider, with stone lions on the steps and the first Christmas lights already strung.

We stopped across from a brick house with a white Cadillac in the drive.

There was one light on downstairs, in the kitchen.

Through the window I could see a big man in an undershirt at the stove, making himself something at midnight.

He was humming.

Dom reached forward and opened the glove box.

There was a gun in it.

He took it out and held it in his lap, the way he'd held the garage photo in the car that first night.

"He picked up our father's prescriptions," he said. "Every Thursday. From the pharmacy on Eighteenth Avenue."

His voice was very quiet. "Papa used to say, 'Gennaro's the only one who remembers my pills.'"

I didn't say anything.

"I was twenty-five," Dom said. "I found him in his chair with the Mets on. Gennaro got there before the ambulance."

He looked at the kitchen window.

"He held my face. In that kitchen. He said, 'You're the man now, kid. I've got you.'"

His hand closed on the gun.

"He killed my father to give me the chair," he said. "Then he killed my brother to take it back."

Across the street, Gennaro turned off the stove and licked a spoon.

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