The Don Called Me Nobody Chapter 06

The Don Called Me Nobody Chapter 06: The Name I Buried

Bianca cornered me in the boiler room at seven that night.

“Do you understand what she’s doing?” she hissed. “That sweep is aimed at one person. She pulls your file, finds the holes, and you’re not fired, Nina. In this house, a lie in your file means you’re a plant. You know what they do to plants

“I know.”

“Then tell them the truth!”

“And what’s the truth, Bianca?”

She stopped.

I sat down on the concrete step, and for the first time in three years, I said it out loud.

“My name is Serafina Costa.”

Bianca’s face did something complicated.

“Costa like-”

“Like the terms. Yes.”

“Like the-” She sat down hard. “Nina. The Peacemaker’s daughter. They tell stories about you like you’re a saint.”

“They shouldn’t.”

“Why the mop? Why on your knees in this house?”

So I told her.

The call at 1:40 a.m. My father’s driver, dead in the front seat. My father in a Volkov basement.

I ran it myself. I had to. He’d trained me. He’d told me a hundred times, if it’s ever me, Fina, you don’t hand it to anyone

else.

Marlow Street Bridge. 4:31 a.m. He walked toward me on the span, hands up, smiling, because I’d done it – I’d gotten

him back.

At 4:38 a rifle I hadn’t found on a roof I hadn’t cleared put a round through him from three hundred yards.

He died at 4:39 with his head in my lap.

I have replayed it four hundred times. I did everything right. And sometimes a man just wants a body more than money, and no plan on earth fixes that.

I wiped his blood off my forearms in a gas station bathroom.

And I understood something I could not un–understand: every single thing I knew, he taught me. My voice was his voice. Every rule in the Costa Terms had his handwriting in the margins.

Which meant every time I picked up a phone to bring someone home, I’d be holding a dead man’s hand.

So I stopped.

I gave up the name. I refused the estate – the house in Brooklyn, the accounts, forty million dollars sitting in a bank I’ve never once looked at. I told his lawyer, Mr. Abruzzi, to give it away and stop calling.

Then I found a house across the river where nobody knew my face, and I got on my knees.

Bianca was crying. I wasn’t.

“Nina,” she said. “You’ve been punishing yourself.”

“I’ve been resting.”

“That’s not what rest looks like.”

I got back to my room at 9 p.m.

The door was unlocked.

On my cot: my coat, my rosary, and a photograph I’d kept at the bottom of a shoebox for reasons I never let myself

examine.

Atlantic City, six years ago. A twenty–four–year–old woman in a black dress, laughing, next to a silver–haired man with her exact eyes. Behind them, four Dons, all looking at her like she’d just saved their lives.

Because she had.

It had been at the bottom of the box for three years.

It was sitting face up.

A sticky note on it in violet ink.

Interesting hobby, Mop.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

DOMINIC VITALE: Gianna’s alive because of you. She asked for “the lady on the phone.”

DOMINIC VITALE: Also – my people pulled every photo ever taken of Raffaele Costa.

DOMINIC VITALE: Atlantic City. Black dress. Miss Costa.

DOMINIC VITALE: Now come upstairs. In forty–eight hours my captains vote on whether the woman in my laundry is

a rat, and I’m the only man in this house who can stop them – and I want something in return.