The Kingpin's Debt : A Buried Evidence, Vanished Wife Mafia Romance, livre ebook

Three hundred and twelve fifties. Forty-seven twenties. The rest in tens and fives, rubber-banded into neat stacks built over three years of double shifts at a diner and a night cleaning job at a hospital.
Twelve thousand, three hundred and eighty dollars.
She is short. Two thousand, six hundred and twenty dollars short.
The cash smells like old copper and desperation. Vivienne Castellano counts it for the fourth time, fanning the bills across her kitchen table. Every birthday card from a cousin in another state went into these stacks.
The clock on the microwave reads 6:47. Five hours until midnight.
Her phone rings and she answers before the second buzz.
*Tell me you have it.*
*Viv, listen.*
*Tell me you have the rest.*
*I thought I could. The game, I had a system, I just needed one more.*
*You went back.*
She takes the stacks to the address on the card because there is nothing else left to do, and she stands in a hallway she has been warned about her whole life holding three years of her own labour in a supermarket bag, two thousand six hundred and twenty dollars short of being allowed to leave.
What follows: the sum of all debts, the man who owns the numbers, a crowbar left on a floor, blood on a ledger, a second kiss of Judas, a racketeer's book kept in a hand nobody expects, the weight of a crown, and a stranger standing in a safe house.
*He lied.*
*Yes.*
*He lied about everything.*
*Yes.*
The same smile she saw the night he kissed her through the partition in a holding cell. Tender and fierce and entirely unsuitable to the setting.
Dante will absorb the debt, buy the paper and make the number disappear. And the first person who goes near Vivienne to apply pressure to him is going to discover exactly how little of his reasonableness was ever a personality trait.