My Ex Mocked My Missing Engagement Ring—Then the Mafia Boss Slipped One on My Finger

Il Buco was closed.

The heavy oak doors on Bond Street were bolted, the iron gates half-drawn, but through the lace curtains, the amber glow of fifty beeswax candles flickered against the brick walls.

When Paul opened the door for me, the restaurant was completely empty except for three waiters in white aprons standing like statues near the wine cellar stairs, and Dante Caruso, who was sitting at the low farm table in the back room beneath the hanging copper pots.

He had changed his suit. This one was navy—so dark it was nearly black—with a vest that fit him like an iron corset. He had rolled his shirtsleeves up twice, exposing thick, pale wrists covered in fine dark hair and a plain steel watch with no brand on the face.

He didn't rise when I walked in. He simply watched me approach, his silver eyes tracking the hem of the coat, the way the cashmere moved against my shins, before rising to my face.

"The sleeves are a quarter-inch long," he observed.

"They're fine," I said, standing by the chair opposite him.

"Sit, Emma."

I remained standing. "I want to know how you knew about the repair on my cuff."

Dante picked up a short water glass, turned it once in his fingers, and set it down. The ring on his little finger—a heavy signet of dark, tarnished iron carved with an eagle clutching three arrows—clicked against the wood.

"A man who does not notice a broken stitch in the dark does not live to be thirty-seven in my line of work," he said. "Sit down. Your shoes have no arch support. You’ve been on your feet since six this morning."

A prickle of heat hit my collar. "You've been having me followed."

"Since eleven-fifteen last night," he corrected. "Before that, you were simply an efficient girl with cold hands who didn't steal the tip from Table Six."

I finally pulled out the chair. The wood was heavy, centuries old. "Why?"

"Your husband."

"Ex-husband."

"The distinction is legal, not operational," Dante said, gesturing to the waiter.

The man moved instantly, setting down a shallow bowl of white bean soup drizzled with green oil that smelled of crushed grass and sea salt. A loaf of rustic bread, still steaming from the crust, followed.

"Marcus is an idiot," I said, watching the steam rise. "He's loud, he's broke, and he has three pending lawsuits from former clients. He isn't dangerous to someone like you."

"To me? No." Dante picked up his spoon. "To you, he is a small dog with bad teeth. He will bite until he catches an infection, and then he will blame the leg. He owed eighty-four thousand dollars to a sports book in Astoria that answers to the Lucchese family. Did you know that?"

My spoon stayed in my hand, frozen halfway to the bowl. "He told the arbitrator the debt was from our joint tax liability."

"He lied." Dante took a sip of the soup, his expression entirely neutral. "He used your signature on the second mortgage to guarantee the line of credit in Queens. The house in Cobble Hill was foreclosed on twelve days ago, Emma. The notice was served to his office. He hasn't told you because he’s hoping to sell your car and your grandmother's remaining silver to buy sixty days of air."

The room seemed to drop ten degrees. The soup in front of me looked like paste.

"The brownstone is gone?" I whispered.

My mother's paintings had still been in the attic. My books—four boxes of first-edition poetry I’d collected since high school—were in the dry-storage under the stairs.

"It belongs to a holding company now," Dante said. "Specifically, to a holding company that reports to my third cousin in Staten Island. The paintings are in a temperature-controlled vault in Secaucus. The books are in my library on 72nd Street."

I dropped the spoon. It clattered against the porcelain with a sharp, ugly ping.

"You took my things?"

"I secured your assets," Dante corrected smoothly. "There is a difference. If Marcus’s creditors had reached that basement first, your mother’s watercolors would have been on an eBay lot by Tuesday morning to pay for his parlay on the Knicks."

"Why do you care?" I leaned across the table, my fingers digging into the ancient wood. The anger—the raw, vibrating rage that I had kept buried under catering trays and silence for three years—finally broke the surface. "You don't know me. You saw a pathetic woman getting humiliated in a ballroom by a man she was stupid enough to marry, and now you're playing the dark prince? You think I need another man to manage my life? To tell me what coat to wear? To buy my books back from the bank?"

The three waiters near the cellar stairs didn't move, but their postures went rigid. Nobody spoke to Dante Caruso like that; even I knew that from the way Brenda had looked at the carpet.

Dante didn't blink. The lead in his eyes seemed to darken, turning the color of wet slate before a thunderhead.

He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. The iron signet ring gleamed under the candles.

"I do not play, Emma," he said, his voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying register that sounded like steel sliding across silk. "And I did not see a pathetic woman. I saw a woman who stood three inches from a man who had broken her life and did not drop her tray. I saw a woman whose hands shook, but whose eyes were clear. That is not weakness. That is endurance."

"I don't want your pity."

"If I pitied you, I would have given Marcus ten thousand dollars and told him to drown himself in the Hudson," Dante murmured. "I do not spend my evenings in empty restaurants with people I pity."

"Then what is this?"

He reached across the table.

His hand was large, the fingers scarred at the joints, but he didn't grab my wrist the way Marcus had. He simply laid his palm flat on the wood, three inches from mine, an open invitation.

"Marcus went to the Lucchese people this afternoon," Dante said. "He told them that his ex-wife had attracted the attention of Dante Caruso at the Sterling Hotel. He offered to sell them your schedule—your shifts, your subway route, the hours you spend alone in the basement laundry on 14th Street—in exchange for his debt being cleared."

The candle flame between us seemed to waver.

"What?" I breathed.

"They accepted," Dante said. "Or rather, they thought they did, until their captain received a telephone call from my uncle's office at four o'clock. As of six tonight, Marcus does not have a debt to the Lucchese family. He has a debt to me."

"And what does he owe you?"