Bound to My Mafia Stepuncle novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Night Shift

Riley takes the job as Domenic's night nurse on her own terms, Angelo catches her with the pill bottle and calls her a spy, and she crushes a pill to find it's sugar.

"Who?" I asked.

"If I knew that, sweetheart, I wouldn't need you." He caught himself and almost smiled. "Forgive me. That's my brother's word."

He tucked the bloody handkerchief into his breast pocket.

"My doctor fills the bottle. My housekeeper keeps the cabinet. My whole family walks in and out of that room all day."

"And the pills stopped working."

"I take two and feel nothing. I lie there and count the ceiling tiles until the sun comes up."

Through the window, Paulie threw his head back and laughed at something.

Corrine laughed with him.

I knew exactly what I should say.

I should say no.

I should get in my car, go home, and never stand this close to the Corsos again.

"Three conditions," I said instead.

Domenic folded his hands on the stair rail and waited.

"You pay me what an agency charges for a private night nurse. Not a favor. A wage."

"Done."

"I get a room to sleep in during the day. With a lock I hold the key to."

"Done."

"And nobody tells my mother."

That one made him laugh, carefully, so it wouldn't turn into a cough.

"She'll find out."

"Then she finds out from me."

"And your tuition?"

"I'm getting that back from her," I said. "Not from you."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he held out his hand, and I shook it.

His bones felt like a bird's under the skin.

The next night I told my charge nurse at the hospice I needed a leave.

She didn't ask why.

Night aides don't get asked why.

At ten o'clock I drove through the Corso gates in my old silver Corolla with my stethoscope on the passenger seat.

Two men in overcoats watched me park.

One of them said something into his phone.

The housekeeper met me at the door, a tired woman in a gray cardigan who didn't smile.

She gave me a key on a red ribbon.

My room was at the end of the east hall, small and white, with a lock that turned.

Domenic's room was the opposite of mine.

A carved bed the size of my mother's kitchen.

Velvet curtains.

A walnut medicine cabinet on the wall by the bookshelf, the kind with a little brass key nobody ever turns.

He was already in bed, gray against the white pillows.

"You came," he said.

"I said I would."

"In this house, that's not the same thing."

I took his blood pressure.

I checked his breathing.

I gave him two tablets from the bottle at eleven.

I wrote it on a chart I made myself on the back of a grocery list.

By one o'clock he was gripping the sheets.

He didn't make a sound.

The quiet ones are always the worst off.

At two, I got up and opened the walnut cabinet.

I shook the bottle into my palm and started counting.

"Put it down."

The voice came from the doorway.

Angelo filled it, shoulder to shoulder.

He was in a black T-shirt now.

When he reached up to grip the frame, his shirt pulled up over the gun at his belt.

I didn't put it down.

"I'm counting his medication."

"At two in the morning. In the dark." He came into the room without a sound. "Donna send you to see how much longer he's got?"

"My mother doesn't know I'm here."

"Your mother doesn't know what day it is unless there's a ring on it."

He held out his hand for the bottle.

"You walked out of his dinner Tuesday calling her a thief. One night later you're in his bedroom with his drugs. You know what that looks like to me?"

"Like you can't count either," I said.

His jaw moved.

He took my wrist.

Not hard.

Just enough to tell me he could.

"Angelo."

Domenic had pushed himself up on one elbow.

"Let go of my nurse."

Angelo let go.

"Your nurse," he said. "Since when do you have a nurse?"

Domenic looked at his little brother for a long time.

Then he looked at me, like he was asking.

I didn't help him.

It wasn't mine to tell.

"Since I found out I'm dying," Domenic said. "Pancreas. They gave me weeks. That was three months ago."

The room went very still.

Angelo didn't move.

His hand on the bedpost went white across the scraped knuckles.

"You told me it was your back."

"I told everybody it was my back."

"I'm not everybody."

"No," Domenic said gently. "You're the one I didn't want to watch this."

Angelo turned to the window so we couldn't see his face.

His shoulders went up once and came down.

Nobody said anything for a while.

I looked down at the pills in my palm.

Sixty in the bottle when the pharmacy filled it, according to the label.

Twenty-two left.

They were white and round, stamped with the right numbers.

But I had held a thousand of these in my hand at the hospice.

These felt too light.

I set one on the marble nightstand.

I pressed the bottom of a water glass down on it, hard, and turned.

It didn't crumble into chalk.

It crunched like a sugar cube.

"What are you doing?" Angelo said.

I licked my fingertip and touched it to the white dust.

Then I put it on my tongue.

Sweet.

I looked up at both of them.

"He isn't feeling anything," I said, "because this is sugar."

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