The Mafia Heir's Revenge Baby novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Six Years

Six years later in Boston, Juniper catches a Corsaro soldier robbing her lab and finds Carmine's order on his phone: the doctor has a kid, use him.

Six years later, the alarm at Amberlight Labs went off at ten past midnight.

I was already in the building.

So was my son.

Archie was five, asleep on the lab couch in dinosaur pajamas, one sock on.

Bess Mulcahy was sitting on his feet, eating his leftover fries.

"That's the vault," she said, with her mouth full.

"I know it's the vault."

"Nobody gets into the vault."

"Somebody's in the vault, Bess."

I pulled up the camera on my laptop.

A young man in a black hoodie was crouched at the steel cabinet in the back room.

He had the door open.

He was holding the reader.

It was the size of a phone, matte gray, with one green light.

Put a single hair in the slot, and in twenty minutes it tells you whose head it came off.

Philadelphia police were starting a pilot with it in thirty days.

Half the families on the East Coast had been trying to buy it, bury it or steal it for a year.

None of them knew who I was.

The investors called me Dr. L, because I never did interviews and never let anyone take my picture.

"I'm calling the cops," Bess said.

"Wait."

The only way out of the vault was through the cleanroom airlock.

The airlock doors close on a button at my desk.

The young man stood up with the reader in his hand and walked into the airlock.

I pressed the button.

Both doors hissed shut.

He spun around and threw his shoulder into the glass.

It's three inches thick. It didn't care.

"Mom?"

Archie was sitting up, rubbing one eye with his fist.

"Is that a robber?"

"That's a robber."

"In the airlock?"

"In the airlock."

He climbed off the couch and came to stand next to the screen in his one sock.

He studied the young man for a long time.

"He's not very good at it," he said.

Bess choked on a fry.

I went down the hall and stood on my side of the glass.

The young man was maybe twenty.

Gold chain, and a South Philly accent thick through the intercom.

"Open the door, lady."

"Put the reader in the tray."

He looked at the reader, then at me.

He put it in the tray.

The tray slid through to my side, and I picked it up.

"Who sent you?"

He laughed.

"You don't want to know who sent me."

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

He didn't answer it.

It buzzed again.

"Take it out and put it in the tray," I said. "Or you sit in there till Monday. There's no bathroom."

He swore at me for a while.

Then he put it in the tray.

The screen said CARMINE.

I stood very still.

Six years, and my hand still knew the shape of that name.

The call ended.

A text came in under it.

"Pop's worse. The doc says weeks. He said whoever kills the cop pilot gets the chair. Tell me you have it."

So the old man was dying.

And Carmine wanted his father's chair, and he'd sent a boy to my lab to get it.

He didn't know whose lab it was.

He had never once, in five years, asked me what I did all day at Penn.

"You know him?" the young man said through the glass.

"I was married to him."

His face went slack.

"You're the wife? The one who ran?"

"I didn't run," I said. "I walked."

Bess came up beside me with Archie on her hip.

He was much too big to be carried, and he allowed it only after midnight.

"Who's Carmine?" Archie asked.

He'd read it off the screen. He reads everything.

I'd told him the truth about where he came from, as much as a five-year-old can hold.

That he grew in the tank, in a warm amber light, and that I'd wanted him more than anything.

That his father was a man in Philadelphia who didn't want children.

He'd thought about it, and then asked if the tank had a window.

"Somebody I used to know," I said.

The phone buzzed in my hand.

Another text from Carmine.

"The doctor has a kid. Use him."

I read it twice.

Archie was looking at me with his serious dark eyes, waiting to be told what was happening.

Bess read it over my shoulder.

"Juniper," she said quietly. "I'm calling the cops now."

"Call them," I said. "He can tell them all about it."

I wasn't shaking.

That surprised me.

For six years I'd kept us small.

Boston, not Philadelphia. Dr. L, not Juniper. A holding company's name on every filing.

I'd thought that was how you stayed safe from Carmine Corsaro.

It wasn't.

He'd found my door anyway, without even knowing it was mine.

And the first thing he'd said, about a child he'd never seen, was use him.

I opened a reply.

My thumbs were steady.

"Saturday," I typed. "Your father's table. Come yourself. Dr. L."

I pressed send.

In the airlock, the young man slid down the glass and put his head in his hands.

"Lady," he said, "you have no idea what you just did."

"Mom," Archie said, "can I come to Saturday?"

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