“I’m okay,” Finch wheezes, as she tries to check his vitals. “I’m laughing, that’s all.”
“Mr. D’Amato,” she says, turning to me with the kind of glare my Nonna used to give me. “Someone much higher up the chain than me allowed you to be here with your husband, even though it is not protocol in the unit to—”
“Oh, please don’t send him away,” Finch pleads, and I don’t know how he does it, but within sixty seconds he has Nurse Ratched twisted all the way round his little finger.
Speaking of fingers, I grab his hand and glare at him, and then the nurse. “Where is his wedding ring?” I demand. I’m appalled at myself that I’ve only now noticed its absence.
Immediately, the nurse is bristling again at my tone.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words coming out stilted. “Only my husband is very precious to me, and that ring is a symbol of my…regard.”
At that, she actually smiles. Perhaps I’m benefiting from Finch’s training without even realizing. “Of course, Mr. D’Amato,” she says. “We had to remove it when he came in for safety reasons. But it’s right there in the drawer next to his bed.”
I pull open the nightstand drawer and see Finch’s ring sitting in there, as she says. “Thank you,” I tell her, dismissal in my voice, and at that, the smile wavers, but she finally leaves us alone. Once the door is closed again, I grab up the ring and ram it back on his finger. “This stays on. Always,” I tell him in a low, insistent voice. “Understand?”
He makes a face. “Why’re you so worried? Think someone’s gonna snap me up if you don’t keep a ring on it?”
I hold his hand up in front of his face. “This ring shows you’re mine. It’s a sign that anyone who touches a hair on your head will have me to answer to. As long as you wear this ring, no one will harm you—unless they want to die themselves Understand?”
Finch goes pink. I can see it even in the dim lights of the room. “I understand,” he says at last. “I’ll keep it on. Only I’m not the one who took it off this time.”
“Then don’t ever do something this dumb again, so they have to take it off for you,” I growl.
His green-gold eyes search my face. “Alright,” he says at last. “No more drugs.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Well, this time I mean it.”
“Do you?” I ask. “Because if this shit happens again, you’re going to rehab. And not fun rehab, like a retreat or something. Real rehab, where they dry you out for a month before making you go to twelve-step meetings for another six months, and then you go to a halfway house. Understand?”
“I understand,” he says after a moment. “But I have a condition attached to my sobriety.”
I shake my head. “You don’t get to make conditions on this one, angel.”
His face lights up with a grin. “You don’t even know what it is. Maybe I just wanna blow you or something.” At my raised eyebrow he says, “I want you to keep telling me what your Don said, about where you need to improve. What’s he expecting of you?”
I give an irritated snort. “Who knows. That Sam Fuscone, he’s a fool, but he’s got a nice traditional family, and his wife makes a mean scaloppini. Tino likes his Capos to have wives who can entertain.” We’re one of the smaller Families, but one of the richest and most influential. And a lot of that influencing seems to happen over private dinner parties.
“Oh, baby,” Finch says, a slow, wicked smile spreading over his face. “I was fucking born to entertain. Only we can’t have big shots over to that shitty apartment,” he adds.
I press my lips together, wondering if I should tell him this last bit. Am I really going to accept Tino’s offer? He pressed the townhouse on me again, and it took every bit of cunning I had to ask for time to think it over without insulting him. But negotiating the complex web and expectations that come along with gifts and favors has defeated better men than I, and I wanted to be sure to think through the implications.
But I see now that Finch has a point, and I wonder if this was also Tino’s point.
“So, about where we live…” I begin with a sigh, and Finch’s eyes light up.
Once we’ve moved into the new place, my clothes look even worse, hanging there in the wardrobe next to Finch’s suits. Even I can see the difference in the quality, feel the difference when I take one of his cuffs between my fingers and rub the material. It makes my cheeks burn to think that I’ve been going around in my suits telling people they’re designer. Anyone with a passing knowledge—anyone who’d ever actually touched something classy, like Finch’s clothes—they must have known.
Finch is in his element. Watching his eyes glow with relief and joy when we drew up in front of the new building made it worthwhile to know I’d have to waste my time debugging the damn place, and then again regularly every time one of my crew comes over.
You can never really tell where allegiances lie in this business.
But after Finch has run up the front steps and burst into the place like a kid on Christmas morning, Frank comes over to give me his initial report and I get my first surprise.
“It’s clean,” he murmurs. And at my skeptical look: “I’m telling you, bro. It’s clean. I checked it myself. Not a peep on the scanners.”
I love my brother, but I don’t trust anyone to do as thorough a job as I can do myself. So I take the scanner and I spend the first three hours going through
