Chapter 9: The Commissary

The coordinator took the letter away to be scanned again, and told me not to answer it.

"If someone inside the program leaked that box number, I need to know who," she said. "Until then, you write nothing, to anyone."

I nodded and kept my face still.

All that day I thought about the round handwriting on the envelope.

Ciara had looked at me across the dinner table and said she didn't want the chair.

I told myself there were a hundred ways a smart woman could find a mailbox.

By six o'clock I'd run out of ways I believed.

On Friday night the whole team ate together in the commissary, at two long tables pushed end to end under a flickering light.

It was loud and cheerful, and there was real pie.

Eamon sat across from me with his hand in a clean bandage, eating with his right.

Halfway through the meal he put down his fork.

He stood up.

The talk at the table died down, and then the next table's talk did too.

"I owe Nine a speech," he said.

"Sit down," someone called. "You're bleeding on the pie."

"I'm not bleeding on the pie."

"There's a little bit of blood on it," said the woman beside me.

Eamon ignored them.

He looked at me down the length of the table.

"A month ago you stood in front of this whole team," I said, before he could speak, "and you called my work a coffin in aluminum."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Mafia Heiress They Could Never Find from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.