The Don Played Broke to Test Me, So I Left With His Baby novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Empty Booster Seat

At nine the dining room was full.

Eight men sat along the long table, and Bruna sat at Cesare's right hand with a cup of coffee and her pearl earrings.

She stood when she saw me.

"Joanna," she said. "You're thin. Sit, sit, you should be eating for two."

"I'll stand."

Cesare took his chair at the head.

His left arm was in a sling under his jacket, and he had not slept.

"I called you here," he said, "because someone in this family sold my wife's schedule to Orazio Santangelo."

The old man at the far end put down his cup again.

"She's not your wife," Bruna said gently. "She walked out on you in front of all of us."

"She's carrying my child."

"Cesare, you're tired, you were shot, and you've had a terrible shock."

"Put it on the table, Jo," he said.

I opened my bag and laid out the bottle with its torn strip of tape, the tablet in its tissue, and the pharmacist's signed statement.

"Last week," I said, "Bruna put this in my hand in my kitchen."

"Laxatives," Bruna said. "I've told her a dozen times."

"It's not a laxative. It's a drug that ends pregnancies, in a dose that would have ended me."

The room did not move.

"That's a lie," Bruna said. She said it softly, and she looked sorry for me. "Someone has been talking to this girl. She's frightened and she's pregnant. You can't believe her over your own sister."

"I believe the signature," Cesare said.

"I picked up that bottle from a pharmacy. I thought it was harmless. I trusted the man who sold it."

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