Chapter 9 · What If My Don's Worst Foe Became My Only Safe Haven?

Chapter 9

Rafe Grieco was in her office with his coat still on.He hadn't touched anything. He was in the chair by the window, not behind her desk, which she noticed, because with him nothing was an accident.There was a flat black box on the desk."You sent my people home," Sera said."I asked. They went." He stood up. "You look tired.""I've had a week.""I know exactly what kind of week you've had." No edge in it at all. "Two trucks Friday. Teddy. The window on Harrow. Danny. And a piece of paper Monday from a company that doesn't have a name above the third layer.""You've been keeping up.""Sera." He looked at her. "I've been holding it back."She stopped halfway to the desk."The Malaras wanted the tunnel road on Sunday," he said. "All of it. I said no. So they took your driver instead, and I let that happen.""You let it happen.""Because if I'd stopped that too, every man in this city would have known inside a day that I'm still standing over you." He didn't look away. "And then you'd never have gotten a single offer. And I needed you to get the offers.""Why.""So you'd find out what they're worth."He picked up the box and put it in her hands."You've spent nine years being the only honest number in a room full of thieves and you've never once been out in the open. I wanted you to see it. Eleven men called you last week. Every one of them wanted to buy something cheap.""And not one of them offered you a chair."Sera didn't open the box."One did," she said.Something happened behind his eyes."Yes," Rafe said. "One did. And he turned you down yesterday morning, and I want you to know I found out about that at nine and I've been sitting here since six."She opened the box.Inside, on the cloth, was a stack of paper. And on top of it, loose, the emerald ring."That's the clean side," he said. "The banks, the yards, the restaurants, the marina, the auction rooms. Not run by you. Yours. Outright, in your name, with nothing of mine anywhere on it.""Rafe.""Vince signed page one and I signed page nine and it went in Tuesday morning, so it's already real." He put his hands in his pockets. "Whatever you decide today, it stays yours."Sera looked at the papers and did not touch them.Tuesday morning.Two full days before a man on a dock told her to come back when she owned something."And the ring?""Livia gave it back Wednesday." A pause. "She's going to Naples on the fourteenth. I didn't ask her to.""Rafe.""Let me finish. I've had six days to build this and I'd like to say it once."He said it evenly. He wasn't begging. She had the terrible thought that he had never in his life begged and wouldn't have known the shape of it."I'll step off the Cardone side. Aldo can have the tunnel road and choke on it.""I'll marry you in a courthouse on a Tuesday with nobody watching, or in that same church with the whole city in it. Your pick.""And I'll put your father in my mother's house on the hill with my own men on the door. The ones I'd trust with me.""And what do you get," Sera said."I get to stop losing."He shrugged slightly."That's the whole thing. I spent a year telling myself I was choosing between a woman and a family.""And?""And it turns out I was just choosing badly, over and over, and calling it duty. Because that made it sound like it wasn't a choice."Devane had told her, on the quay, exactly what this would be.He hadn't told her it would be this good.Sera set the box down on the desk."Two weeks ago," she said, "you told forty-one people I don't get to quit this family.""I was wrong.""That's not the part I'm stuck on."She put her hand flat on the papers and pushed them back across the desk toward him."No," she said.Rafe went very still."Sera""You want to know what Thursday was?" Her voice didn't rise at all. "Thursday was the floor at the Cortese being cold through my dress. And a man asking me to say it louder. And you doing the math.""I know what Thursday was.""You don't, actually. Because you were sitting down." She stepped back. "You want to give me all this now, and you mean it, and that's the worst part, Rafe. You'd have given me any of it on Wednesday if I'd asked. All it cost was me on the floor first."He didn't say anything."So no. I want one thing from you and it isn't in that box.""Ask it.""The tunnel road. Three years ago." She didn't move. "Nobody knew that route. Four people did. My father. My mother. My uncle.""Sera.""Who called you that night, Rafe? Before it happened. Not after."For a long moment he didn't say anything at all."You don't want it," he said. "I'm telling you that as the only man in this city who's never once lied to you about anything except this. Take the box.""Say the name."She watched a man who ran nine hundred people try to find a way out of a room, and fail."It was a woman's voice," he said.Her office was on the fourth floor and it was very quiet up there in the mornings. She could hear the radiator, and a gull, and her own blood."What did she say?""She said, 'He'll take the tunnel. He always takes the tunnel.'"Her phone started ringing on the desk.She didn't look at it. It rang out. It started again immediately, which nobody does, which meant something.She picked it up."Ms. Caravella." The night nurse at Ellencove, whispering, and behind her a sound like a door being tried. "There are men here. They're not the usual men.""Marguerite""They came up the back stairs. They've got the hallway and they've asked me twice which room your father's in."Sera's eyes came up and found Rafe's across the desk.And Rafe Grieco, who had never once in four years looked afraid of anything, put his hand out for the phone.

Chapter 9