His Fiancée Gave Up on the Paralyzed Mafia Boss—Then His Aide Exposed Her Secret

At noon, Arya came down the gallery toward my bedchamber, her heels clicking with the sharp, rhythmic arrogance of an owner inspecting an empty tenement.

She didn't open the door wide. Through the crack, I watched her from behind the service curtain where Matteo had stationed me after two hours of the ash timbers.

She smelled of gardenia soap and new wool. She was wearing a tailored suit of dark bottle-green with bone buttons, and she carried a thin morocco-leather folder under her arm—the kind the bank attorneys used for real estate deeds.

"Vincent?" she called softly.

From the bed, beneath three layers of down blankets, a bundle of rolled towels and my old tweed overcoat gave the impression of a large man lying on his side, his face turned toward the wall.

On the nightstand, the open bottle of chloral hydrate let off its sweet, sick, heavy vapor into the warm air from the radiator.

"Dominic is downstairs," she said, her voice dropping into that smooth, practiced tone of regret she used for the daughters of the shipping agents she didn't like. "The notary is with him. We have the papers for the cold-storage parcels. We need to clear the title before the magistrate signs the decree tomorrow morning."

The bundle of towels did not move.

She stood there for twenty seconds, her eyes lingering on the silver watch on the mahogany stand, then on the brass key that lay beside it.

She reached out her gloved hand, picked up the brass key, and slipped it into the small pocket of her green coat with a quick, neat movement that had no guilt in it—only the tidy economy of a housewife taking an extra spool of thread from a drawer.

"Sleep, then," she whispered. "It’s better this way. Dominic says the winter in Greenwich is very quiet. You’ll have the view of the sound from the east wing, and they have two men who do nothing but take the chairs out to the terrace when the sun is up."

She closed the door with a soft, decisive *click*.

Two minutes later, the heavy oak table in the dining room below began to rattle with the luncheon plates.

I sat in the wheelchair Matteo had brought up from the disused carriage house—an old, heavy wicker-and-iron contraption with solid rubber tires that smelled of paraffin and dry rot. My legs were strapped into Marcus’s steel braces, the blackened leather cinched so tight around my calves and upper thighs that the skin was white where it showed through the split in my trousers.

Tessa was kneeling before me, checking the locking pins at the knees.

"The left lock is loose," she muttered, her fingers working the set-screw with a small iron coin. "If you put your weight on it before the pin drops into the detent, the joint will fold backward. It’ll tear the posterior ligament right off the bone."

"Then make it tight," I said.

She looked up at me. Her face was very close to mine. I could see the tiny flecks of amber in the dark brown of her eyes, and the small, pale scar over her left eyebrow where a basin had hit her in the county ward three years ago.

"You're going down there now?" she asked.

"They're eating my father’s mutton," I said. "And Dominic is drinking the eighteen-twelve port he’s been trying to buy from the estate since the day the old man died."

"There are six of them down there," she said, her voice dropping lower, until it was barely audible above the rattle of the rain on the terrace roof. "Dominic. The two boys from the terminal union. The notary from Market Street. And that fellow with the gold spectacles—Doctor Geller."

"Good," I said. "I like an audience when I settle an account."

Matteo appeared at the head of the service stair. He was wearing his clean chauffeur’s jacket—the black one with the bone buttons—and his hair was slicked back with bay rum, though his eyes were as cold and narrow as two gun slits.

"The Buick is at the side door," he said. "The engine is warm. If we have to leave in a hurry, the road to the lower turnpike is clear."

"We aren't leaving in a hurry," I said.

I looked at Tessa.

"Give me the sticks."

She reached behind the armoire and brought out two heavy ash walking canes—not the slender, silver-headed toys Dominic carried on Sundays, but thirty-six-inch clubs of seasoned northern white ash, an inch and a half thick at the throat, shod with heavy two-inch rubber ferrules from the pneumatic tool shop.

She put them into my hands.

The grain of the ash was rough, dry, and cold.

"Marcus said five steps at a time," she whispered, her fingers lingering on my wrist for half a second before she let go. "Then three seconds to let the blood come back into the head. If you go down, Corvino, don't try to save the sticks. Save your skull."

"Get the door, Matteo," I said.

The gallery was ninety feet long, floored with wide planks of heart pine that had been scrubbed with vinegar and wax every Saturday for fifty years.

The first step was iron.

The steel brace on my right leg locked with a sharp, metallic *clack* that sounded through the quiet house like the cocking of a rifle. The rubber ferrule of the right cane hit the pine three inches ahead of my toes.

*Weight.*

The ash bent slightly—perhaps an eighth of an inch—under the hundred and ninety pounds of my frame. The muscles across my shoulders and the long bands of the latissimus dorsi, developed over twenty years of hauling line and turning winch drums, knotted into two ridges of iron along my ribs.

*Left.*

The left leg swung. It didn't have the clean, sharp swing of a sound limb; it moved with the stiff, mechanical arc of an iron pendulum, the heavy steel brace keeping the knee from dissolving into water.

*Clack.*

The left pin dropped into the detent.

The floor groaned beneath the ferrule.

I stopped. My breath came short and hard through my teeth, tasting of salt and old lime. The wall sconces—the little brass cups with their amber silk shades—flickered in the draft from the stairwell.

*Five steps.*

*Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack.*

At the head of the grand staircase, where the oak balustrade swept down into the two-story hall like the prow of an armored cruiser, I paused.

Below, through the open archway of the dining room, I could see the chandelier—eighty crystal prisms catching the yellow light of twelve beeswax candles. I could see the back of Dominic’s gray wool coat, his thick neck red above the stiff white collar, and Arya sitting to his right, her bottle-green sleeve resting on the mahogany table next to a stack of blue-bound legal documents.

Dominic was laughing. It was that wet, confident chuckle he used when he had bought a city alderman for five hundred dollars less than the going rate.

"...doesn't need the money where he’s going," Dominic was saying, his fork poised over a plate of roast saddle. "The state pays the basic maintenance, and the trust will disburse twelve hundred a month for the private room and the orderly. The rest of the harbor dividends go into the reserve account for the pier extension."

"And the notary has verified the signature?" Arya’s voice was smooth, tranquil, without a ripple on its surface.

"The notary works for me," Dominic said, turning his thick head toward the man in the dark suit who was dipping his celery into the salt cellar. "Don't you, Frank?"

"The documents are in order, Mr. Corvino," the notary said, wiping his chin with a linen napkin. "The incapacity affidavit is attached to Exhibit B. Once we file at ten tomorrow, the transfer is ministerial. The judge won't even look up from his coffee."

I took the ash canes in my palms.

The stairs were twenty-two risers of solid red oak, three inches thick, covered down the center with a strip of crimson carpet held down by heavy brass rods.

I didn't use the elevator my father had installed in sixty-two.

I put the right cane down onto the first riser.

*Thump.*

The rubber ferrule bit into the carpet.

The laughter in the dining room stopped.

It didn't taper off; it died in the middle of a syllable, the way the sound dies on a dock when a crane cable snaps with twelve tons of rail iron in the air.

A chair scraped back across the parquetry.

*Clack.*

The steel ratchet on my left knee locked with the force of an anvil falling on stone.