The Don Called Me Nobody Chapter 02

The Don Called Me Nobody Chapter 02: The Man Who Buries His Problems
“I asked you a question,” Camilla said.

“No, ma’am. Just the coffee.”

Eyes down. Shoulders in. Small.

Three years of practice.

Dominic Vitale didn’t step aside, so I had to pass close enough to smell gun oil and cold air.

He didn’t look at Camilla.

He looked at me.

“You read the terms.”

Not a question.

“I set down a tray.”

“For eleven seconds. Then you read the terms. Then you went white.”

Camilla laughed, too loud. “Dominic, she’s the cleaner. She can barely read the labels on the bleach.”

Something shifted behind his eyes.

He walked past her into the study without answering.

I made it to the service stairs before my hands started shaking.

Bianca found me in the laundry at midnight with two cold sandwiches and the face she makes when she knows something.

Bianca runs housekeeping. Bianca also runs the key-card system, the camera logs, and the staff files, because rich men never think about who holds the keys.

Bianca is the only person in this house who likes me.

Bianca also knows one thing about me, and she has been sitting on it for a year like a woman holding a live grenade.

“So,” she said. “The girl.”

“So.”

“Gianna Vitale. Nineteen. Their parents got hit when she was nine. He raised her himself.” She unwrapped her sandwich. “Volkov wants twenty million and the east docks. Deadline is forty-eight hours. Dominic already said yes to everything. He’d say yes to his own kidneys.”

“That’s sad.”

“Nina.” She stared at me. “Nina.”

“Don’t.”

“Last spring, somebody rewrote Camilla’s guard roster in pencil the night before the Delgado meeting. Moved four men off the back gate. If they’d stayed, the whole back of this house would have been a shooting gallery.” She leaned in. “I asked how you knew the Delgados would come from the alley. You said, and I quote, ‘I watch a lot of TV.'”

My stomach dropped.

“Cleaners don’t watch that kind of TV. Cleaners don’t correct the head of security forty times and slide it under her door at midnight. The men have a name for it. The Laundry Ghost.”

“Bianca.”

“They think it’s some old capo who wandered in drunk. I have never once told them it’s a twenty-nine-year-old woman with bad shoes.” She stood. “Whatever you’re running from — fine. But that girl is nineteen.”

I said nothing.

She dropped a sticky note on the dryer on her way out.

STUDY. TOMORROW, 4PM. War council. Camilla’s presenting the exchange to the Don and the old man from the Commission.

At 3:52 Camilla appeared in the laundry doorway.

“Mop. With me.”

“I’m on until six.”

“You’re on wherever I say. Pour drinks, stand by the wall, and do not open your mouth.” She checked her lipstick in the dryer glass. “Dominic wants everyone in the room. God knows why. Just stand there and look clean.”

I stood there and looked clean.

The study filled. Camilla. Sal Bruno, the underboss, fifty-six, wedding ring, a laugh he only uses around her. Four captains. A lawyer.

And on speaker, from Atlantic City, the old man from the Commission — the one who decides which families are allowed to go to war.

Dominic Vitale at the head of the table. Not drinking. Not touching the folder. Watching everyone the way you watch a card table for cheating.

For twenty minutes it went fine.

Then the old man on the speaker said something that stopped the room.

“You’re running a single midspan handoff against Volkov? No. You want the Costa Terms. Split exchange. Nobody’s done a bridge any other way since Costa wrote it.”

Dominic’s head lifted. “Then get me Costa.”

“Costa’s dead. Shot on the Marlow Bridge three years ago.” A pause. “There was a kid. Ran the exchange herself. Best I ever saw. Vanished the same night. Nobody’s heard her name since.”

My tray tilted half an inch.

Camilla smiled, easy and beautiful. “With respect, I don’t need a dead man’s homework. I’ve walked the bridge. My plan is sound.”

“You’re certain,” Dominic said.

“I’d stake my life on it.”

I stood against the wall in a gray uniform holding a bottle of scotch and thought:

Not your life. Hers.

Dominic closed the folder.

“Full walkthrough tomorrow. Nine a.m. Everyone. If I don’t like it, I go alone, my way.”

Sal went gray.

Camilla said, “You’ll like it.”

Then Dominic stood, and as he passed my corner, he stopped.

Close enough that I could see the four days without sleep under the ice.

“You’re in the room tomorrow,” he said quietly.

“Sir, I’m not—”

“Nine a.m., Miss Ruiz.”