Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 04

Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 04: Rule #1

I didn’t move.

I lay there in the dark with my heart going like a bird in a jar, and I listened.

A floorboard. Breath that wasn’t mine. Close. Close enough that I felt the air change beside my face.

Then the soft click of my door pulling shut.

I counted to sixty. I turned on the lamp with a hand that didn’t feel like it belonged to me.

The door was locked. From the inside. The chair was still under the knob. Exactly how I’d left it.

And on the pillow beside my head sat a small white box.

I didn’t want to open it. I opened it.

A second necklace. Identical gold. Identical little key.

Underneath, a photograph on cheap printer paper. Me, two nights ago, sitting on the fire escape in the dark with a cup in my hands, Rafe’s shoulder just

inside the frame.

Someone had stood in that alley and taken it.

Someone had been close enough to hear us breathe.

On the back, in black ink:

Rule #1: don’t fall for the don.

I checked the closet. I checked under the bed with my phone flashlight, shaking so hard the beam jumped across the floorboards, and I saw nothing but dust and a chewed tennis ball.

I did not see the folded note that had been under there since my first night.

I sat with my back against the door until the sky went gray.

Here’s what I should have done: woken up five men who solve problems for a living and told them everything.

Here’s what I did: nothing.

Because I’d done this before. In Boston I told people. I told building security. I told HR. I told the police, twice. And every time the answer came back the same shape — he manages nine figures, Ms. Quinn. He says you two dated. Do you have proof? – and every time it made him bolder, and every time it turned me into the woman who tried to ruin a good man’s career.

And now I was living above a restaurant owned by a crime family, and I knew exactly what this house would do about a problem like Julian Voss.

They would kill him.

And then I’d be the reason Matteo Bellandi lost a second parent.

So I put both necklaces in a drawer, put on mascara, and made pancakes.

That afternoon Gio went to the bakery to give Delia the bracelet.

He came home at seven with the gift bag still in his hand and his face

wrecked.

“Somebody got there first,” he said. “Three days ago. Three days.” He

dropped onto the couch. “I kept waiting for the right moment. Turns out the right moment was any of the four hundred moments before that one.”

Sal got the grappa. Benny got glasses. Nico got the speech.

“Lesson, everyone.” Nico pointed around the room. “Say the thing. Say the stupid thing out loud before somebody else says it better.”

Gio drank, then stood up so fast the table jumped. “Incredible advice from

a man who’s never said a true sentence in his life,” he snapped, and went out

the back.

Rafe followed him.

I went to the kitchen for water. The window over the sink was cracked two inches, and their voices came in on the cold.

“-it’s not about Delia,” Gio was saying. “It’s about you. Look me in the face and tell me you don’t feel anything for Nora.”

Silence. Long enough that I stopped breathing.

Long enough that I let myself hope.

“I don’t love Nora,” Rafe said.

Flat. Final. Like reading a weather report.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m going to bed.”

I stood at that sink with a glass in my hand until the water ran cold over my

fingers.

Fine, I thought. Good. Simpler.

I went upstairs. I passed the hallway mirror and stopped, because there was something taped to the bottom corner of it – low, where you’d only see it if you were exactly my height.

A strip of paper.

Seven words. Black ink. That same handwriting.

You looked beautiful in the candlelight, Nora.

There were no candles in that alley.

The candles were in the dining room. On the table where I’d eaten dinner with five men, six hours ago.

He hadn’t been outside.

He’d been inside.