The Mafia Debt, livre ebook

Four in the morning on Taylor Street, and Giulia Caruso is working the dough by feel. The canestrelli come out of the oven at five-thirty, edges just shy of burnt, the way the Rossi kitchen likes them. She boxes them in white cardboard, ties the string with a knot that would hold through a car wreck, and sets the envelope on top. Three thousand in twenties and fifties. Her whole week, plus what survived the Christmas rush.
Her father missed last Monday's payment. She covered it without telling him.
At the back door of Il Sangue Rosso it is not Dante who takes the box. It is Luca Vitale, gold chain, oily hair, a folded slip of paper he holds up like a prize. Her father was at the track Tuesday. And Wednesday. And Thursday morning, before she was even awake. The number is six thousand today, or Salvatore takes the bakery.
Across the street, in the doorway of a shuttered barbershop, Marco Caruso stands with his hands in his pockets and does not look at his daughter.
The real figure, when she finally makes him write it down, is fifty-three thousand. Worse than the amount is where part of it came from - a man called Enzo, outside the family, a loan Salvatore Moretti knows nothing about.
Salvatore's offer is work: her hands in his kitchen every day until half the debt is cleared, and one condition of her own. She will work for Dante Rossi, not for Luca. She does not trust a man who tried to add a zero to her father's balance before breakfast.
What she does not know about Dante yet: the plain gold band he has never taken off belongs to a wife who is dead, there is a bank account in Michigan and a small voice on a phone call he takes behind a closed door, and the scarred knuckles were Salvatore's idea of a lesson.
There is also, as the old man mentions over a cigarette, a leak in the family. Fresh eyes in the kitchen might help him plug it.
A mafia romance built out of flour, ledgers and a father who cannot stop - closed-door, with a heroine who pays a debt she never signed, a man who has been somebody else's instrument for years, and an ending that involves a lamp-oil fire in an alley and a bakery with a new name on the chalkboard.