I Bought the Don

My father loaned his money to the mafia. The mafia still owes me. Ava Bruno has been running her dead father's boxing gym in Tampa since she was twenty-two. She is four months from foreclosure when she finds a paper in the safe — a loan her father made to the old Sabatini family twenty years ago, unpaid interest still running, nine million dollars in today's money. She drives to the Sabatini estate and asks for the man at the top. Salvatore Sabatini is fifty-two. He has run the family since his father died. He will not pay her. He will buy the gym above value and give her a seat on the family's legitimate foundation board as a consultant. He thinks that is a fair offer. Ava takes it because the gym is worth more than her pride. She knows a job offer from a man like Salvatore is not really a job offer. One Florida summer later she knows exactly who he is, exactly what he has done, and exactly what he wants. And when his enemies come with my father's paper in their hands, I bring the original to the table. I didn't come to Tampa to be a don's wife. I came to be a don's equal. He said yes.