Seven Days Until the Donna Vanishes

"Once this goes in the fire, it doesn't come back out," Abram said.

He tapped the folder between us. My birth certificate. My Social Security card. The marriage license with Nico's signature slanting across the bottom.

"Seven days," he said. "After that, Juniper Castellano is a woman who never lived. Last chance."

"I'm not changing my mind."

Abram had run the same print shop on Halsted for forty years. Every Family in Chicago used him sooner or later, which was why every Family kept him safe, and why he never asked questions.

He didn't ask one now. He just looked at my wedding ring a beat too long, then reached for his stamp.

Outside, on a phone I'd paid for in cash, I booked a one-way flight to Melbourne under a name I'd learned twenty minutes earlier.

Then I went home.

No cab in Lake Forest will drive past the stone pillars at the bottom of our road. Nobody has to tell them whose land it is.

So I walked the last quarter mile under the oaks.

I saw the car before I saw the men. Nico's black Maybach, pulled onto the gravel shoulder just short of the gate. Paulie and Sal stood ten feet off with their backs to it, smoking, watching the road.

I stepped behind the hedge before they turned.

The car was rocking on its suspension. Slow. Heavy. Unmistakable.

The back window was halfway down. Nico was slouched against the leather, a cigarette between two fingers, his other hand spread wide on a woman's bare hip.

He reached out to tap ash onto the gravel, and the light caught his ring. A plain gold band with my name engraved across the outside. JUNE.

So every man who kisses my hand, he'd told me, knows exactly who I belong to.

I called him.

He picked up on the second ring. "Hey, piccola. What's wrong?"

"Where are you?"

"Still at the docks. The Vitale shipment's late and their guy is being a pain in my ass." A soft laugh. "Give me an hour, baby. I'm all yours."

I hung up.

Through the hedge, I watched him toss the phone onto the seat. The car started moving again. Harder.

Paulie said something, and Sal laughed into his fist. I'd baked Paulie's daughter a birthday cake last spring.

I walked home through the trees so nobody would see my face.

An hour later, Nico came through the front door with two dozen red roses and a box of pistachio cannoli from Taylor Street.

I didn't get up.

"I know, I know." He crouched in front of the couch. "Vitale's people held me up. I'm a bastard. Pick my punishment."

His collar was open. Below it, small dark marks were scattered across his chest. A mouth had been there. More than once.

He hadn't even noticed.

"Nico. Do you still love me?"

He went still. Then he took my face in both hands like I might break.

"What kind of question is that? Everybody in this city knows I'd die for you. I almost have. Twice."

He wasn't lying about that part. That was what made it unbearable.

I grew up in a house where love meant broken plates. My father drank. My mother threw things, some nights knives. When they finally divorced, I promised myself no one would ever get close enough to do that to me.

Then came Nico Castellano. The Don's only son, nineteen, too handsome to be safe, and sure he was going to marry me.

He asked me out seventy-eight times. I said no seventy-eight times.

The seventy-ninth, a car pulled up beside us at a red light and its windows came down. I remember his body slamming over mine, then the weight of him not moving. Three broken ribs. A bullet through the shoulder.

I'd spent my whole life building walls. He walked through them bleeding.

His father had already promised him to the Ferraro girl, a marriage that would bind two Families for a generation. I was nobody. No name, no blood, no use.

Nico told the Don no.

In our world, you don't tell the Don no. Especially if you're his son. So Nico walked away from the name and the money and started over with two trucks and a bar on the South Side. Three years later, Salvatore Castellano walked into that bar himself and asked his son to come home.

Nico had one condition. Me.

Two years after our wedding, the Vitales took me off the street, put a gun to my head, and told Nico to kneel in front of thirty men.

He did. He didn't even hesitate.

The men laughed about it in every back room from here to Jersey. Their wives looked at me like I'd won something.

But in the fourth year of our marriage, he set up his new assistant in an apartment on Lake Shore Drive.

Tessa. Twenty-three. She kept the books at the club.

He held me every morning and called me his whole life. Every night, he went to her.

I'd known for three months. I didn't scream and ask a single question.

I did one thing. I went to see Abram.

"Nico. Do you remember what I said on our wedding night?"

His thumbs stopped on my cheeks.

"If you ever stop loving me, tell me. I won't fight. I won't beg." I smiled a little. "But if you lie to me, I'll disappear. And you'll never find me."

Something flickered behind his eyes.

Then he laughed, low and easy, and kissed my palm. "Nobody disappears on me, piccola. Not in this city."

His hand tightened around mine anyway.

Seven days.

He had seven days left to believe that.