My Don's Friends Spoke Italian to Shut Me Out novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: One Sentence

Forty men in aprons put their hands under their jackets, and forty guns came out.

Two hundred chairs went over at once.

Somebody screamed.

Gaspare dropped behind the sound table with his pistol up.

The old captain with the white mustache dragged a woman to the floor by her sleeve.

I did not move.

The barrel of Tommaso's pistol was steady, pointed at my chest.

My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

Then Cesare stood up.

He did it slowly, with his hands open and empty at his sides.

He walked around the table and stepped between me and the gun.

"Cesare," I said.

He didn't look back.

"*Tommaso,*" he said, quite gently.

"Sit down, Cesare."

"*No.*"

He turned his head, just a little, toward the forty men along the walls.

They were hard young men from other cities, who had been paid to wear aprons and wait for a word.

I knew what they had been told to wait for.

I knew, too, that every one of them had been told that the Don didn't understand a thing.

Cesare drew one long breath.

I heard it, in the silence.

I'd taught him the sounds in the car, one slow word at a time.

I'd taught him in the dark, in bed, when he asked me for more.

He spoke.

"*Io sono Cesare Santelli.*"

I am Cesare Santelli.

His accent was awful.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

"*Sono il Don.*"

I am the Don.

"*Posate le armi.*"

Put down your weapons.

Nobody moved.

A pistol wavered at the end of the room.

Then, from the front table, a heavy voice said, "*Il Don ha parlato.*"

The Don has spoken.

It was the captain who had never looked at me in six weeks.

He stood up with a revolver in his hand, and he turned it, very slowly, toward the wall.

"*Il Don ha parlato,*" said the old man with the white mustache, rising from the floor with his sleeve torn.

Then the thin laugher from the street said it from the back.

Then the one in the camel coat.

Then eight voices at once, then twenty.

The sound of it ran around that ballroom.

*Il Don ha parlato.*

The captains turned, one by one, every gun at every table swinging away from Cesare and toward the walls.

The men in aprons looked at one another.

← Chapter 22 · All chapters · Chapter 24 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend