Page 54 of The Mad Don
“Max —”
“I don’t trust him.” His voice is low and fast. “Yana, I’m serious. I’ve worked with collectors my whole career. That man’s backstory is bullshit. The anonymous father- I’ve checked. There’s nothing under it. Who is he actually?”
“Max, I’ll explain what I can later. I promise. But not here. Not now.”
I turn to go back, and over his shoulder through the open loading door, I see something.
The doctor.
He is being walked toward a black car at the loading bay.
And the man walking with him, with a hand at his elbow guiding him in, is a familiar face.
I squint to be sure. The brace on his leg. The way he carries himself. It is Fabiano, Giovanni’sCapo.I learned his name tonight because Giovanni called him several times to give him orders.
“Yana?” Max is watching my face. “Is everything okay?”
Fabiano did not come to the show. Giovanni left him at the mansion to handle things. He told me himself. So why is Fabiano her, at the back of the gallery, putting the exact man we came for into a car?
Did Giovanni send him? Without telling me?
Or does Giovanni not know?
“Yana.”
I pull myself back.
“Be good,” I tell Max. “Go home. I mean it.”
I go back through the front.
I expect the car to be gone; maybe Giovanni had lied about the after-party and sent his Capo to get the doctor without my interference. But the car is there.
I get in.
The door closes. The driver pulls out.
I look at him.
“Did you ask Fabiano to come tonight?”
“Fabiano is at home.”
I frown. Giovanni grabs my arm and pulls me toward him. I gasp in shock.
“Why did it take you fifteen minutes to use the bathroom?”
I pull back.
“Are you crazy?”
His other hand comes up and takes my face, fingers spread along my jaw.
“You dare run off with another man under my nose.”
“Don’t be crazy.”
But my body is already betraying me — the grip on my jaw, the heat from the roughness of his hands. I feel the same warmth that I have felt every time he has put his hands on me, and I hate it, but it is there anyway.
