Bound to the Mob Alpha's Baby novel · Chapter 2 of 32
Chapter 2: One Mile
Vin won't put him down, the Binding proves itself two blocks from the car, and Nonna feeds him soup before Aoife calls crying that men are chaining the shop.
Vin didn't put him down.
He turned around with Mickey in his arms and looked at his uncle across forty feet of white tile.
"I heard you," Vin said.
"Then you know what he is." Pietro tucked his hands in his pockets. "His father robbed this family."
"My father fixed your locks for twenty years," Mickey said. "Say his name, if you're so sure."
Pietro didn't say it.
He smiled at the receptionist instead.
Shawn came out of the hall behind him, rubbing his shoulder from the door.
He wouldn't look at Mickey.
Vin carried Mickey out through the glass doors.
A black car was idling at the curb with the back door already open.
The driver was a gray-haired man with a boxer's nose.
He took one look at the blood on both their faces and didn't ask.
Vin set Mickey on the back seat and climbed in beside him.
"Go," he said.
The car pulled out onto Grand Avenue.
Mickey wiped his lip with his sleeve and ruined a cream sweater.
"Your nose," he said.
"It stopped when I picked you up." Vin handed him a handkerchief. A real one, ironed. "Yours?"
"Stopped."
"That's the Binding."
"That's a story grandmothers tell."
"So is a man getting pregnant on a roof," Vin said.
Mickey looked at him.
Vin was looking straight ahead, and the corner of his mouth moved.
Mickey didn't laugh.
He wanted to.
"Your uncle told you I was a thief," Mickey said.
"He told me the man on the roof was a thief working the gala." Vin's jaw went tight.
"I went back to that hotel three times. Nobody would give me a name."
"I was the hotel's locksmith. I had a badge."
"You had a mask."
"So did you. I didn't decide you were a pickpocket."
"You told me my cufflinks were fake."
"They were plated."
Vin looked down at his own wrists.
The driver coughed into his fist.
At a red light on Ashland Mickey opened his door.
"Mickey," Vin said.
So he'd gotten Mickey's name from somewhere.
"I need to see something," Mickey said, and got out.
He walked.
Past a laundromat, past a taco place, past a bus shelter with a mattress ad on it.
One block.
Two.
The sidewalk tipped under him.
The sour taste came back first, then the heat up his neck.
Then the blood.
He grabbed a parking meter and looked back.
Vin was standing in the street beside the open car door with his own handkerchief pressed to his face.
He didn't come after Mickey.
He waited for Mickey to decide.
Mickey walked back two blocks with his head tipped forward, dripping on Ashland Avenue.
When he got close enough to touch Vin's sleeve, it stopped.
Vin's stopped too.
"Okay," Mickey said. "It's real."
"Get in the car," Vin said. "Please."
The please sounded like it hurt him.
Mickey got in the car.
Vin lived in River Forest, which figured.
The house was old brick behind old trees, with a long drive and lights already on in every window.
A tiny woman in a black cardigan opened the front door before they reached it.
Her hair was white and pinned up, and she was holding a wooden spoon.
"Nonna," Vin said.
She looked at the blood on his collar, then at the blood on Mickey's sweater, then at Mickey's face.
She didn't ask one question.
She took Mickey's wrist and led him down a hall into a kitchen that smelled like garlic and bay leaf.
She sat him at a table with a red oilcloth on it.
She set a bowl of soup in front of him, little pasta stars and chicken.
"Eat," she said.
Mickey ate.
He hadn't kept anything down since breakfast, and the soup stayed.
She refilled the bowl without asking that either.
Vin stood at the counter with his coat still on.
He ate a heel of bread standing up.
"Sit down," Nonna told him.
"I'm fine."
"Sit."
He didn't sit.
She hit him lightly on the arm with the spoon and went out of the kitchen.
It was the two of them and the soup.
"I need to say something," Mickey said. "And I need you to not say anything until I'm done."
Vin nodded once.
"This is mine." Mickey put his hand on his stomach.
"It's my body and my call. Your uncle doesn't get a vote, and you don't either."
Vin's eyes went gold at the edges.
He kept quiet.
"I'm keeping it," Mickey said. "I decided in that exam room, before you walked in. You walking in didn't change anything."
"Okay," Vin said.
"That's it? Okay?"
"You told me not to say anything."
"I'm done now."
Vin took off his coat at last and laid it over a chair.
Under it his black shirt had blood dried stiff down the front.
"Then I'll say one thing," he said. "Whatever you need, you ask me for it."
"I don't ask."
"I know. You told me that on the roof too."
Mickey hated that Vin remembered everything he'd said up there.
He hated more that he did too.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
Aoife.
He answered, ready to apologize for the stick.
She was crying.
His sister didn't cry. She had cried once, at their dad's funeral, and punched a wall right after.
"Mick," she said. "There's men here. They've got chains. They're chaining the shop door, and Shawn's with them."
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