The Don's Runaway Substitute novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Five A.M. at the Bus Terminal

Mara slips out before dawn with Fio's cash and boards for the Greyhound. Vincenzo is waiting alone on a bench in public, and a man by the vending machine photographs her face.

Vincenzo did not sleep that night, and neither did I.

He sat in the armchair by the bedroom door with his arms crossed and my phone in his pocket.

Around four he stopped asking who had told me.

Around four-thirty his head tipped back against the wall.

I waited until his breathing slowed.

Then I took my coat, my shoes in my hand, and the cash from the tin where I used to keep flower money.

The hall was dark.

The two guards at the top of the stairs were looking down toward the front door, not toward me.

Fio was standing in the kitchen in her bathrobe with a mug of coffee.

I froze.

"Oh good," she said. "I thought it'd be an hour."

"Fio, don't."

"He told the guards to keep you in," she said. "He didn't tell them to check my car."

She put down the mug and took four hundred dollars out of her robe pocket.

I stared at it.

"I'm not helping you leave him," Fio said. "I'm helping you breathe. My brother was scared last night, and I have never once seen him scared. Go sit somewhere else for a day and think."

"I can't tell you why I'm going."

"Then don't. Text me from a different phone and I'll know it's you."

She took my face in both hands and kissed my forehead hard.

Nobody had done that since my aunt.

I got into the back of her car under a blanket, and the guard at the gate waved her through.

She dropped me at the bus terminal downtown at ten to five.

I bought a ticket to anywhere with a seat and sat on the plastic bench at gate nine with my hood up.

The terminal was nearly empty.

A woman in a janitor's vest ran a mop slowly past my shoes.

A man in a gray cap was buying coffee from the vending machine by the restroom hall.

My bus was leaving at ten to six.

I had never gone anywhere without telling Vincenzo.

I kept reaching for a phone I did not have.

【He will find you. A Don always has a plan for a runaway.】

I read the line twice.

Then I stopped looking at the air and looked at the door, because someone had come through it.

Vincenzo walked down the row of benches in yesterday's shirt with no coat.

No guards walked behind him.

No one followed him in.

He sat down on the bench beside mine, with one empty seat between us.

"Fio doesn't lie well," he said. "I let her."

"You said nobody leaves."

"I did say that." He looked at the gate board. "I was wrong to say it."

My throat hurt.

"I'm not going to drag you out of here, Mara. You can get on the bus."

"Then why are you here?"

"To see you go with my own eyes, so I know you went on purpose and not because somebody frightened you into it."

He said it so evenly that I could not tell what was underneath.

I kept my chin down.

The cap man was still by the vending machine, stirring his coffee more slowly than anyone ever stirred coffee.

"Take your hood down," Vincenzo said.

"What?"

"Let me look at your face one more time."

My eyes stung, and I was angry that they did.

I pushed the hood back.

Vincenzo looked at me for a long moment.

He did not touch me and he did not smile.

"There," he said quietly. "Now I know what it looks like when you leave."

I did not understand why he said it like that.

I understood even less that he glanced, just once, toward the vending machine.

The man in the gray cap had set down his cup.

He took a phone out of his jacket and held it up at chest height.

I saw the little red light on the camera, and it was pointed at my face.

He took the picture without hiding it.

Then he turned and walked out the glass doors into the dark.

Vincenzo did not move.

He did not stand up, he did not shout, and he did not reach for his gun.

"Vincenzo," I whispered. "That man just took my photograph."

"I know."

"You saw him."

"I've seen him every day this week."

My whole body went cold.

"You knew he was following me?"

"Yes."

"And you let me sit here with my hood down."

He finally turned his head and looked at me.

There was something in his face I had never seen there.

It looked like shame.

"Get on the bus, Mara," he said. "Or come with me. But decide now. There are two more of them outside."

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