Seven Days Before the Mafia Princess Died novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Terms

In his car she learns his name is Ciro Landi, and she walks him to her father's gate as her fiance.

He drove with one hand and didn't ask where I lived.

The cemetery fell away in the mirror, and the cypress shrank to a pencil mark on the hill.

"Aren't you going to ask my name?" he said.

"You know mine. I don't know yours."

"Ciro Landi."

I turned my head and looked at him.

"The Landis are dead," I said. "Their house burned down when I was ten. Papa talks about it like it was weather."

"Most of us are dead." He checked the mirror. "I wasn't home."

His thumb moved on the silver bird at the end of his key ring, and I thought nothing of it.

The pain came then, low and hot.

I put my forehead on the cold window.

"Pull over," I said.

He pulled over in front of a pharmacy before I finished the word.

I got the door open and was sick into a paper bag he had somehow found in the glove box.

There was blood in it, bright and a lot of it.

I waited for him to say something careful.

He took the bag out of my hands and folded the top down twice.

Then he went into the pharmacy, and he came back with a water, a small bottle of mouthwash and a plastic spoon.

"Rinse," he said. "Don't swallow."

I rinsed.

He watched me do it without looking away once, and without that look people get.

"How long since you ate?" he asked.

"Tuesday. Soup."

"Then you'll eat tonight, and I'll sit there while you do."

"You don't get to give orders," I said. "I haven't said what you're buying with my week."

He leaned back against the car and crossed his arms.

"Say it."

"I don't want to be in a hospital bed with my mother pretending I'm not in it."

"All right."

"I want my family at one table, all of them, watching me die."

He didn't blink.

"All right."

"And I want my father to know it was him."

"Then we want the same thing," he said. "Your father has a chair at the head of a table, and I want a seat at it. You get me through the door, and I'll do the rest."

"What do you do to a Don at his own table?"

"Make him say what he did seventeen years ago," Ciro said. "In front of people who can't look away."

"My father didn't burn your house."

"Ask him."

I looked at his face.

He didn't say it like a threat or a boast, only like a man reading the time off a clock.

"What's the rest?" I said. "There's more. I can feel it."

"There's more," he said. "I'll tell you on the last day."

"Tell me one true thing now."

"I've been looking for someone for seventeen years," he said. "Your house is where I'll find her."

It wasn't enough, and it was more than my family had given me in a year.

I stood up out of the car's shadow.

My legs shook, and I put a hand flat on his chest to hold myself up.

His heart was going hard under the coat.

It wasn't a calm heart at all.

"Don't lie to me," I said. "I don't have time for it."

"I'm lying to you about one thing," he said. "It isn't the thing you think it is."

"That's a terrible answer."

"It's the only honest one I've got."

I laughed, and it hurt, and I kept laughing anyway.

Then I took a fistful of his shirt and kissed him.

I had never done anything like that.

I had never wanted anything I could just take.

He went still, and then his hand came up and spread across my back, and he kissed me back.

His mouth tasted of mint from the mouthwash.

Mine had to taste of blood, and he didn't stop.

When I pulled away I was out of breath, and so was he.

"That's for the water," I said.

"I'll keep that," he said.

"Don't. I'm dying."

"Yes," he said. "I heard. Get in the car."

We drove another forty minutes, past the lake and the long wall and the line of cypress my grandfather had planted for the estate.

Two guards stood at the iron gate, and when they saw the gray car they stepped into the road with their guns raised.

Ciro stopped and put both hands on the wheel where they could see them.

One of the guards leaned down to the window.

He looked at me, and his mouth fell open.

"Miss Serafina?" he said. "Your father said you weren't coming."

"Tell my father," I said, "I've brought my fiance to Sunday dinner."

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