My Don Married My Pregnant Sister So I Choose His Mafia Rival novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Papa's Study

Marcella throws Cosimo and her sister out of the house Papa left her alone, takes Angelina's taunts without a tear, and at 2 a.m. learns her night launch is burning with the old engineer aboard.

Behind me, I heard Ettore stop in the doorway.

He didn't come in.

He leaned on the frame with his hands in his pockets.

Cosimo's eyes went to him and stayed there a second too long.

"Get your feet off my father's desk," I said.

"Our father's," Angelina said. "He was mine too."

"He was. He left you a trust fund." I looked at the papers under Cosimo's hand. "What's that?"

"The truce terms. The Cardone seat and the Cardone property go to the Varrone family through marriage to a Cardone daughter." He spread his hands. "It doesn't say which daughter."

"It doesn't say property, either. You wrote that part in this afternoon."

His smile thinned.

Out in the hall, the front door banged.

My crew came in with flattened cardboard boxes under their arms, the deckhand first, then the two dock hands who worked the small launch.

The deckhand stopped so fast the others walked into him.

The housekeeper came out of the kitchen drying her hands, saw Angelina in the wedding dress and crossed herself.

"Good," I said. "Everybody's here. Then everybody can hear it."

I went to the cabinet behind Papa's desk.

Cosimo didn't move his feet, so I reached past his knees and opened the bottom drawer.

The will was where it had always been, in a blue folder with Papa's handwriting on the tab.

I laid it open on the blotter on top of his truce papers.

"The house on Todt Hill. The St. George pier. Cardone Marine and both launches." I put my finger on each line. "To my daughter Marcella, alone. Read the next part, Cosimo. It's short."

He didn't read it.

I read it for him.

"To my daughter Angelina, a trust, paid monthly, so she never has to ask a man for money."

Angelina's face went red under her makeup.

"Papa didn't leave a single brick with a bride," I said. "He left it with me."

"A piece of paper," Cosimo said.

"Notarized. Filed. Read at the funeral you organized." I closed the folder. "You stood beside me while the lawyer read it. You held my hand."

The deckhand made a small sound.

Cosimo finally took his feet off the desk.

Angelina didn't.

She slid off the arm of the chair, the lace whispering on the rug, and came around the desk to stand in front of me.

She was a head shorter than me in bare feet.

She'd never needed to be taller.

"You think you won something?" she said. "He never wanted you. You know that, right? Two years, Marcella. Two years he's been in my bed, and every Sunday he sat at Nonna's table and asked you about the tides."

"I know about the tides," I said. "It's my job."

"He wanted your piers. That's all you ever were. A dock with a ponytail."

She pressed one hand to the front of the dress, over her belly.

"This proves who he chose."

I looked at my sister for a long moment.

I thought of every time I'd held her hair back when she was sick.

Every report card I'd signed when Papa was on the water, every boyfriend I'd run off the porch.

"Then go home with him," I said. "Your bags can follow."

"This is my home."

"It's mine. Take the dress. Leave the key."

She stared at me.

Then she pulled the house key off her ring and threw it at my chest.

I caught it.

Rope hands.

Cosimo stood and buttoned his jacket.

He came around the desk slowly, and he stopped in front of me, close enough that I smelled the cathedral incense still in his suit.

He didn't raise his voice.

He never had.

"You embarrassed me in God's house, Marcella."

"You embarrassed yourself in my sister's bed."

"Your crew works for you." His gray eyes moved past me, to the deckhand, to the dock hands, to the housekeeper by the kitchen door. "That cathedral cost a great deal of money. Somebody is going to pay for it."

The deckhand swallowed.

He was nineteen.

Something moved in the doorway.

Ettore had taken his hands out of his pockets.

He crossed the study without hurrying and stopped at my shoulder.

He didn't touch Cosimo.

He didn't have to.

"Cosimo," he said. "I stood in that cathedral this morning as the enemy's witness. I watched the whole thing. So hear me witness this."

His voice was mild.

His eyes weren't.

"Her crew is my crew now. Her piers are under my name as well as hers. Anybody who sends a bill to a nineteen-year-old boy for your wedding will settle it with me personally." He tipped his head toward the hall.

"And I collect in Red Hook. You remember the last man who tried to run a tab there."

Cosimo looked at him for a long time.

Then he smiled at me, the patient Sunday smile I'd mistaken for kindness for fourteen months.

"Enjoy your house," he said. "Angelina. Come."

She went.

The lace dragged a trail of almond sugar down the hall.

The front door shut.

The housekeeper burst into tears and then into a stream of insults about my sister that I hadn't known she knew.

I sat down in Papa's chair.

My hands didn't start shaking until I put them on the desk.

Ettore saw.

He didn't say anything about it.

He sent the crew to the kitchen for coffee and closed the study door behind them.

"You're not staying here tonight," he said.

"I'm staying one night. I'm packing my father's study. Then I'll come to your roof."

"Then my roof comes to you." He looked at the old green couch under the window, too short for him by a foot. "I'll sleep there."

"You'll sleep terribly."

"I never sleep well on a wedding night."

"How many have you had?"

"This is the first." He loosened his tie. "I'm learning."

His two men took the gate.

I packed until midnight, then lay upstairs in my old room listening to the house tick.

At two in the morning my phone lit up on the pillow.

The deckhand.

I could hear wind, and shouting, and something roaring behind him.

"Captain, the night launch is on fire. At the pier. It's going up."

"Get back from it."

"I can't." His voice cracked. "The engineer's aboard. He was sleeping on the boat. He's still inside."

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