Bound to My Mafia Stepuncle novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Sugar

Riley sets a camera on the medicine cabinet and shares 3 a.m. pasta and banter with Angelo, and the video shows her sister's bracelet at the cabinet.

Angelo was across the room before I finished the sentence.

He took the bottle out of my hand and shook it so hard the tablets rattled.

"Who fills this?"

"The pharmacy in Ardmore," Domenic said. "My driver picks it up."

"Who touches it after?"

"Everyone." Domenic lay back against the pillows. "Everyone touches everything in this house."

Angelo was already heading for the door.

I got in front of him.

He stopped an inch from me, and I had to tip my head all the way back.

"Move."

"Where are you going?"

"To wake up every person in this house and ask them one at a time."

"With the gun?"

His eyes went flat.

"If I have to."

"Then whoever did it stops tonight," I said. "They flush the rest. They cry when you yell. And you never find out who it was."

"I'll find out."

"You'll find out who's scared of you. That's everybody."

From the bed, Domenic made a sound that was almost a laugh.

"She's right, Angelo. Sit down."

We worked it out at the foot of that carved bed at half past two in the morning.

Domenic's doctor would bring a fresh bottle straight to me at dawn, hand to hand.

I'd keep his real doses in my scrub pocket and give them myself.

The fresh bottle would go in the cabinet like nothing had happened.

Before I put it there, I sat at the desk with a blue ballpoint and put one tiny dot on the back of every tablet.

Sixty dots.

Angelo watched me do all sixty.

"You're a strange woman," he said.

"I'm a careful one."

I propped my phone on the bookshelf between two leather books nobody had ever read, camera on the cabinet, and set it to record.

Then I gave Domenic a real tablet from my pocket.

Twenty minutes later his hands let go of the sheets, and soon he was snoring.

Angelo stood at the foot of the bed and listened to it for a long time.

"You hungry?" he asked me.

"It's three in the morning."

"That's not a no."

The Corso kitchen was bigger than our whole first floor in Port Richmond.

Angelo flicked on the light over the stove and nothing else.

He filled a pot with water, salted it like he was mad at it, and got out a head of garlic.

"You cook?" I said.

"Our mother cooked. I watched." He sliced the garlic so thin I could've read through it. "Domenic was already grown and Paulie never came in the kitchen unless there was something to steal."

"How much older is Domenic?"

"Twenty-six years. Different mothers. When I was born he was already running the trucks." He tipped the garlic into the oil. "He taught me to ride a bike. Paulie taught me to cheat at cards."

"Useful."

"Very."

The garlic went gold.

The kitchen smelled like every good thing I could remember.

He put the pasta in front of me in a chipped bowl that had clearly been his for years.

I ate it standing at the counter in my scrubs.

He ate his out of the pot.

"So what happens on a night shift," he said, "when somebody dies?"

"You wash them. You tell the family. You go sit in your car for ten minutes so they don't see you."

"And then?"

"And then you go back in, because the man in room nine wants his pudding."

He looked at me across the counter.

"Why do you do it?"

"Somebody should be awake with them," I said. "Nobody likes to go in the dark by themselves."

He didn't say anything.

He just pushed the last of the pasta toward me with the back of the spoon.

"What about you?" I said. "The knuckles."

"I run a gym."

"Do you hit people for your brother?"

"Not anymore."

"Which brother?"

The corner of his mouth went up, the way it had at my car.

"You ask a lot of questions for the help."

"I'm not the help. I'm the night nurse."

"In eleven weeks you're family," he said. "My brother's wife's daughter. You know what that makes you?"

"Tired."

"My niece."

"Step-niece," I said. "And I'm not calling you Uncle Angelo."

"Thank God."

That was when I laughed.

A real one, out loud, with my mouth full of pasta, in the kitchen of a family that owned the docks.

It surprised both of us.

He looked at me.

Then he looked away, fast, and ran the water in the pot.

I slept from eight until two the next afternoon in my small white room with the door locked.

When I woke up, I went straight to Domenic's room.

I took my phone off the bookshelf.

I opened the walnut cabinet.

I shook the bottle into my palm and turned the tablets over, one by one.

Not a single blue dot.

My hands were cold.

I sat on the edge of Domenic's bed and scrubbed back through the video.

Hours of an empty cabinet.

Then, at 1:14 in the afternoon, the cabinet door swung open.

A woman's hand reached in.

Pink nails, not my mother's long ones.

Short and glossy.

The hand took the bottle and slipped another one in its place.

Something gold flashed on the wrist as she pulled back.

I froze the frame.

A thin gold chain.

A little gold letter hanging from it.

A C.

My mother had bought that bracelet for Corrine's twenty-first birthday.

I had wrapped it.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend