Tempting the Mafia Twins novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Lucia's Stone

Cassie chooses the words for the stone and Don Sergio calls her a runaway in front of his men.

I flew to Chicago the next morning on my own money, and I told Carmine not to send a car.

He sent one anyway, and I took a cab.

Queen of Heaven Cemetery was gray and wet, and the leaves on the paths were the color of rust.

Carmine was waiting at the gate in his black coat.

He didn't touch me.

He walked half a step behind me up a gravel path, past rows of names.

He stopped at a square of grass beside a small cedar tree.

There was nothing on it at all.

No stone, no marker, no flowers.

Only a little brass plate stuck in the ground with a number.

I had been told five years ago that she was buried.

Nobody had told me she was buried like this.

I knelt on the wet grass in my good coat and put my hand flat on the ground.

"Hi, baby," I said.

Behind me, I heard Carmine make a sound and turn his face away.

The stonecutter stood at a polite distance with a leather folder against his chest.

He was a thin old man in a cap, and he wanted to be anywhere else.

"Mrs. Valenti," he said. "I have the stone cut and polished. Gray granite, as ordered. I only need the words."

"Show me."

He opened the folder to a drawing.

A plain rounded stone, no angels, no verse.

Carmine had ordered it plain, and I loved him for it, and hated that I did.

"Lucia Colleen Valenti," I said.

The old man wrote it down.

"Her middle name was my mother's. The date is October ninth, 2021."

"And a line, ma'am?"

I thought about it, kneeling in the mud.

"Loved before she was born."

"Cassie," Carmine said, very low.

"Is that all right with you?"

"It's all I would have wanted."

"Then that's the stone."

The stonecutter wrote it down with a hand that shook.

"Wrong," said a voice behind us.

A black umbrella closed with a snap.

Six men in dark coats stood on the path, and in the middle of them was an old man leaning on a cane.

Sergio Valenti was sixty-six, and he looked eighty.

His white hair was combed flat, and a thin clear tube ran up from under his collar and hid behind his ear.

Behind him were two capos and three men with their hands folded in front of them.

All of them stared at me.

"Papa," Carmine said.

"You didn't tell me she was coming." Sergio's voice was dry and flat. "You didn't tell me you'd gone to Minnesota to fetch a runaway."

"She's my wife."

"She's a girl who left your house in the middle of the night and left your name in the mud."

"She let this family explain her to every man in Chicago for five years."

I got to my feet.

My knees were soaked through.

"I was in the hospital," I said. "I had just buried my daughter."

"You had three days. Your husband was in that room. You could have spoken to him."

"I saw him with another woman."

"You saw what a girl of twenty-one wants to see." He made a small dismissive motion with the cane.

"The Family does not discuss it."

"The Family does not carve its name on a stone for a woman who ran."

"It's my daughter's stone."

"It is a Valenti stone, and I say what goes on it."

One of the capos looked at his shoes.

Another stared straight at me, with a slow smile.

I was the only woman standing on that hill, and every man there knew the speech Sergio was making was for them.

"Carmine," the old man said. "Tell the cutter to put the dates only. Tell your wife to go home."

Carmine stepped between us.

He did it slowly.

"No," he said.

Nobody on that path breathed.

"Carmine."

"No, Papa. The stone says Lucia Colleen Valenti, and the words my wife chose."

"It goes up on Monday."

"Anyone who wants it different can say so to me, here, in front of everyone."

He looked at each man in turn.

The capos looked away one by one.

Sergio stared at his son for a long time, with his thin chest rising and falling, and the tube hissing faintly.

Then he turned his flat gray eyes on me.

"Sunday dinner," he said. "The house on Deerpath. You sit at my table as his wife, where the whole family can see you."

"I didn't come back to sit at your table."

"Then you came back to be called what this family called you five years ago."

He lifted his cane toward the gate.

"You may choose, signora. You have until tomorrow."

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