The Mafia Lost His Queen novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Alive

He stood there in the rain and looked up at us.

He didn't wave. He didn't shout.

He just looked at me across a dinner table when I'd said something he'd make me pay for later.

Rory let the curtain fall.

"Two men in the car," he said. "Driver and one more."

"He knows which window."

"He's known which window since this afternoon, I'd say." Rory pulled on his jeans. "Stay in here."

"No."

He turned around.

"Standing up," I said. "Next to you. You promised."

He looked at me for one long second.

Then he picked up the cricket bat from the floor, looked at it, and leaned it back against the wall.

"Get dressed, then," he said. "I'm not having him see you in my T-shirt."

I'd only got my jeans on when the knocking started.

Not loud.

Three knocks, polite and patient.

Rory took the chair out from under the handle.

He opened the door.

Armando stood on the landing with the rain on his shoulders. One of his men was behind him on the stairs.

Across the landing, a door cracked open. Rory's neighbor, an old woman in a dressing gown, peered out with her hair in rollers.

Armando didn't look at Rory.

He looked past him, into the flat.

At me.

At my bare feet, and my jeans, and Rory's gray T-shirt hanging off one shoulder, and my short red hair.

I watched his face come apart.

I had never seen it do that. Not when his father died. Not ever.

"Gianna," he said.

"Hello, Armando."

He put one hand on the door frame.

Then his knees went.

Armando Lucchese, Don of the Lucchese family, knelt down on a wet doormat on a council landing in Bermondsey at two in the morning.

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