The Don's Widow Carries His Heir novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: Clean
I didn't touch either ring.
"Why now?" I said.
"Because you're the one who sits." Antonia looked at the gold letters over the door. "The wedding ring is yours. Keep it, sell it, bury it. I don't care."
"And the seal?"
"The seal is the family. My husband wore it. Then my son." She closed my fingers over the box. "It goes on the hand of whoever runs it."
I looked down at it.
It was heavy and old and worn smooth on one side, where two men had rested their thumbs.
"Antonia," I said. "I don't want to run what they ran."
She didn't look surprised.
"I know," she said. "So run something else."
I took the seal to the club the first Sunday of January.
I didn't put it on.
I put it on the green cloth in the middle of the table, in front of the five capos.
Then I sat down in the big chair.
My feet still didn't reach the floor flat.
"The card rooms on Spruce Street," I said. "The loan book. The machines in the back of the social clubs."
They waited.
"I'm giving them back to this table. You've got a year to wind them down. Pay your people. Close them. Nobody new."
Nobody spoke.
"The restaurants stay. The lots. The building on Atwells. The widows' fund."
"And who owns those?" said the man on the left.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Don's Widow Carries His Heir are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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