Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 07

Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 07: The Bodega Cameras

It was Mrs. Abara from the bodega across the street.

Sixty-nine years old, quilted housecoat, a deaf pug named Bishop in a

cardigan.

She’d watched the whole thing from behind her lottery display. And she wanted us to know that after somebody took a crowbar to her roll-down gate in August, her son had bolted four cameras above the awning.

Those cameras faced our door.

We crowded into her back room while she made tea nobody drank, and Gio scrubbed through eleven days of footage on a laptop.

We found Julian four times.

Tuesday, 11:40 p.m. – walking the sidewalk slowly, hands in his pockets, face tipped up toward my window.

–

Wednesday, 2:51 a.m. – coming up out of the alley beside the restaurant. Leaving at 3:09.

Thursday, 6 a.m. – sitting in the Maybach for two hours while I made pancakes for five men I’d decided not to worry.

Friday – again.

Nobody spoke. On the screen, in grainy infrared, a man walked out of the alley where I slept and stretched his arms over his head like he’d had a good

night’s rest.

And then the camera caught him stopping. Standing. Looking up at the

corner window on the third floor.

Matteo’s room.

Gio made a sound like he’d been punched.

Nico stood up. “Okay. Okay. So we handle it.”

“No,” I said.

“Nora-”

“No.” My hands were shaking. “You handle it, and it’s you in a cell, and then it’s a war with the Ferraros over the boy, and Matteo loses everything. That’s

how this works. That’s exactly how this works.”

Rafe hadn’t said a word. He was staring at the frozen frame of his son’s

window.

Then he stood up, walked out Mrs. Abara’s front door, and I heard a fist hit the metal gate once, hard, and then nothing at all.

When he came back in, his knuckles were split.

“We do it her way,” he said.

Nico’s mouth actually fell open. “Rafe. We have never once in the history of this family-”

“I know what we’ve never done.” He picked up his coat. “Gio. Copy everything. We’re going to the Seventy-Sixth.”

You should know what it costs a Bellandi to walk into a police precinct.

They made us wait ninety minutes. A detective named Marisol Vega came out and looked at Rafe the way you look at something on the bottom of your shoe, and then she looked at the footage, and something in her face changed.

She took my statement for two hours. And at the end of it she said a sentence I had never once heard from law enforcement:

“This is a pattern. This is documented. This is enough to start.”

An emergency order of protection. Five hundred yards. Served Monday

afternoon.

I sat in the car in the precinct lot afterward and shook for ten minutes.

That night Rafe knocked on my door at eleven.

“Get your coat.”

“It’s eleven.”

“Get your coat.”

He took me up. Six flights, then a ladder, then a door with a key that shouldn’t have been his – and onto the roof of the building next door, where somebody had built a glass greenhouse forty years ago and then forgotten it.

Dead lemon trees in clay pots. Cracked panes. And through the glass, the whole harbor, and the bridge, and Manhattan burning gold across the water.

“My mother kept this,” he said, handing me a thermos. “Now you know where I am when I’m not downstairs.”

We sat on the floor with our backs against a planter.

He told me his father did eleven years and died with fourteen months left. That his brother took over and lasted nineteen months. That Rafe came home from the Marines for a funeral and never left, and that every single day since, he’d been trying to figure out how to turn this thing into something his son

could inherit without a gun in it.

Then he said, “About what I said. To Gio. Outside the kitchen.*

My heart started up like an engine.

“You said you don’t love me.”

“I lied.”

Wind pushed against the glass.

“Say it again,” I whispered.

“I lied,” he said. “I’ve lied every day since you stood in my doorway with a car full of everything you own and told me to watch you.”

I don’t know which of us moved. I know his hand came up and cupped the back of my neck. I know his forehead came down against mine. I know that half an inch before it happened-

-his phone went off. Then mine.

Group chat. Nine messages in eight seconds.

Nico: WHERE ARE YOU

Nico: BOTH OF YOU

Sal: nora do NOT come down yet

Benny: call vega

Gio: someone painted the shutters

Gio: it’s her name

Gio: it’s her name over and over