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Chapter 1
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2026-09-01 18:23:15Blair woke up gasping, and for three full seconds she didn't understand why she was still breathing.
Her hands went to her throat before her mind caught up with them, checking for bruises that weren't there.
Her body remembered a locked door, air rationed too thin to call air. Her eyes disagreed. Sunlight. A water stain shaped like Sicily on the ceiling above her bed. Curtains she'd picked out at sixteen, in a room that had stopped being hers years ago and apparently hadn't heard about it.
"Blair!" Her mother's voice came sailing up the stairs, bright and utterly unaware that her daughter had just come back from somewhere she shouldn't have been able to leave. "Wake up, birthday girl — you've got exactly eleven hours left of being seventeen, and I need help with these flowers before your father ruins them trying to help!"
"Coming," Blair called back, and her voice only cracked a little.
She got up on legs that didn't shake the way she'd expected, crossed to the mirror, and pulled her shirt up at the hip with fingers that weren't quite steady.
No ink. No crimson wings inked into the skin above her hip — the ones she wouldn't get for another two years, in a life that hadn't happened yet.
Bare skin. Untouched. Exactly the way it should be.
She was still staring at it when her mother's voice came again, closer this time, from the bottom of the stairs. "Blair, I can hear you not moving!"
"I'm coming, I'm coming."
Downstairs, Fiorella was losing a war against too many peonies and a vase that clearly wasn't going to hold them all. Her father sat behind his newspaper at the kitchen table, reading glasses low on his nose, exactly as alive and exactly as unbothered as Blair remembered him being, once, a long time from now.
"There she is." He lowered the paper just enough to look at her over it. "Eighteen years old today. God help the rest of us."
"Don't jinx it," Blair said, and busied herself with the coffee pot so he wouldn't see what the joke cost her.
"Sit, sit. Eat something before your mother puts you to work." He turned a page without looking up. "You're paler than usual. Bad dreams?"
"Something like that."
"Mm. Eighteen's a hard birthday. Everyone expects you to suddenly know things." He said it like a joke. It landed somewhere else entirely.
"Stefano, tell your daughter she's not allowed to look that tragic on her own birthday," Fiorella called from the counter, not turning around.
"She's allowed to look however she wants," he said mildly. "Big days make people strange."
Blair sat down across from him with a coffee she hadn't asked for and had been given anyway.
"I still need the final headcount for tonight." Fiorella set down her scissors and started counting names off on her fingers. "Your cousins, obviously. The Renaldis. Did Andrew ever confirm?"
Blair's hand went still around her cup. "I don't know."
"Of course he confirmed." Her father said it without looking up, the way you'd state a fact about the weather. "Good boy, that one. Never misses your birthday."
"Right," Blair said, and something in her chest pulled tight enough to hurt.
Her phone buzzed against the table before she could think of anything else to say.
Andrew.
Happy birthday. Save me a dance tonight?
Six words. That was all it had ever taken.
"Who's that?" Fiorella asked, already reaching for another length of ribbon, only half listening.
"No one," Blair said, and set the phone face-down without answering it.
Her mother swept back through a few minutes later with an armful of ribbon and stopped in the doorway, wearing the particular look Blair had already learned, in the space of one morning, to dread.
"Oh — before I forget." Fiorella said it lightly, like it cost nothing. "Andrew's here."
Blair's coffee stopped halfway to her mouth. "He's here?"
"Downstairs, in the courtyard. Came early." Her mother was already turning back toward the flowers, entirely too pleased about it. "Said he wanted a few minutes with you before everyone else arrives."
"Go on, then." Her father waved a hand at her without lowering the paper, amused. "Don't keep the boy waiting on your birthday."
Fiorella was humming again by the time Blair pushed her chair back.
She sat very still for one more second first, and somewhere under her ribs, seven years of promises made in a locked, airless dark started quietly, inevitably, coming due.
Bab terbaru
After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don Chapter 116
Fiorella got up first and put the kettle on, because it was something to do with her hands. She set out two cups. She took the lid off the sugar bowl and put it back. Then she sat down again, folded her hands, and said, "Start at the beginning, and don't leave anything out because you think it'll hurt me."Blair told her.She had done it once before, on a cliff road in front of a man who had the right to walk away, and she'd thought that was the hard one. It wasn't. That time she had been afraid of being disbelieved. This time she was afraid of being believed. She watched her mother's face the whole way through, and it never closed.She said that she had been twenty-five. She said she had been a nurse, and that she'd married a boy named Andrew Esposito at twenty, and that it had gone wrong in the first month and stayed wrong for five years. She said he had been the kind of husband who was always very gentle in front of other people. She said that her mother had been allowed to see her
After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don Chapter 115
Alessandro stopped the car at the corner of her parents' street and turned off the engine. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he reached into the door pocket and took out a battered paperback with a cracked spine and a sailor's knot on the cover."What's that?""Rigging for small boats. I've been reading it for three days." He held it up with a perfectly straight face. "The Arancia has a mainsheet I've never understood. I thought I should."Blair looked at him. "You're reading a boat manual to keep from going in there.""I'm reading it so that I'm not in there. A man with my name arriving in a street full of carabinieri isn't going to help your father's blood pressure." He opened it at a marked page. "I'll be here. If you need me, send Marco. If you don't, I'll have learned something about cleats."She laughed, and it loosened something in her chest. She leaned across the gearbox and kissed him, once, hard, on the corner of the mouth. "Have you eaten?""There's a roll in the glo
After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don Chapter 114
They walked out along the breakwater at the end of the harbor, because Sofia had asked for the sea and it was the nearest piece of it. Two of Marco's men followed fifty yards back and pretended to look at the boats. The wind was cold and smelled of weed and diesel. Blair had her hands in her coat pockets, and Sofia had hers wrapped around her elbows.For the first part of the walk neither of them said anything much. It was good to be next to her. Blair hadn't expected it to feel like that. Sofia was thinner than she'd been a month ago, and the brandy-coloured eyes looked tired, but her step was steady, and when a gull went screaming off the rocks at their feet she laughed out loud."I'm sorry," Sofia said. "I know it isn't funny. I've been a bit odd all week.""You're allowed."They stopped at the end where the stone ran out. Sofia put both palms on the cold rail. "Two things," she said. "And I'd like to say both before I lose my nerve.""Go on.""The police came yesterday. Two carabi
After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don Chapter 113
Nicoletta made breakfast herself. She had slept an hour at most, and it showed under her eyes, but she moved around the kitchen with her usual economy, and by eight there were three plates on the table: eggs, properly cooked, and bread, and a dish of the small black olives. She set them down, sat, and folded her hands."Eat first," she said. "I'd rather not do this on an empty stomach, and neither would you."They ate. Blair was aware of Alessandro beside her, not tasting anything. His knee was against hers under the table, and he hadn't moved it since they sat down.When the plates were empty, Nicoletta pushed hers away. "My father was a small man in a small crew," she said. "I won't give you his name. He's dead, and I'd like him to stay that way. He ran errands for the Genovese family in Palermo, collecting, carrying messages. And he owed them money. A great deal. He gambled, and he lost, and he drank on what was left."Alessandro didn't speak. Blair put her fork down."I was the pa
After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don Chapter 112
Nobody said much on the way down the mountain. The cloud thinned as they dropped, and by the first switchback the road was dry and the sea had come up silver on the left. Lorenzo drove, because Alessandro said he couldn't. Alessandro sat in the back with Blair, and kept his eyes on the window.At the second bend Lorenzo looked at her in the mirror. "He said Andrew told him you couldn't be beaten.""Yes.""Did he guess?"Blair watched the guardrail go by. "He guessed something. He doesn't know what. If he did, he wouldn't have asked me at a table.""No." Lorenzo's eyes went back to the road. "Andrew was a young man who talked about himself when he was drunk. A great many young men do." He paused. "I'll see that it stays that way."That was all he said. It was a long way down, and for most of it Alessandro had his hand over Blair's on the seat between them, and neither of them moved.* * *They got home at one. Alessandro walked straight through the hall and into the kitchen and stood t
After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don Chapter 111
Nobody at the table spoke. The waiter came with a fresh cup for the third chair and went away again, and the sound of the cup touching its saucer seemed very loud."My mother told me her family was dead," Alessandro said."I know." Graziella folded her hands on the cloth. Her fingers were thin, with large knuckles, and she wore no rings except a plain band. "She told you that because it was kinder than the truth. Or easier. I've never been sure which. I'd have done the same." She looked at his face and something loosened in her own. "You have her chin. I was afraid I wouldn't see her in you. I did, the moment you sat down.""I'd rather you didn't do that.""No. I'm sorry." She nodded, as if he had confirmed something. "I'll try to be brief. I don't want to use up your patience."Blair kept her eyes on the woman's hands and her own hands over the clasp of her bag. Under the table the knife was a small, hard weight against her thigh. She was not going to use it. She was only glad it was
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