Chapter Thirteen
Gus and Cage had returned with Sayer. I walked in, my arms laden with Target purchases. They all stood up, clearly not knowing what to expect.
“We’re going to be here for a while,” I told them by way of explanation. “I didn’t pack enough.”
“You went to Target?” Sayer asked, suspicion clear in his tone.
Adding irritation and self-righteousness to my confusion, I asked, “Is that okay?”
“I would have gone with you,” Sayer said, trying his best to remain chill. “Or Cage. You probably shouldn’t be walking around town by yourself.”
I shrugged. “I took a cab.”
“Come on, Six. You know better than that,” Sayer groaned.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I bristled—he didn’t get to mess with my independence. If he only knew where I’d been. But I didn’t need to poke the bear more than necessary.
“I’m going to put my things down. When I come back, we can make a game plan.” To Juliet, I said, “Come on, sweets. You need a shower.” Juliet hurried to my side and we disappeared into Sayer’s bedroom.
I closed the bedroom door and set the bags on the bed. I looked around and sighed while Juliet rummaged through my purchases. “We should probably get a hotel,” I told her.
Her eyes got wide and a huge smile broke out on her face. “Is this for me?” She pulled out a sweatshirt with a giant sparkly unicorn on the front.
“Do you hate it?” I teased her. “I can take it back if you hate it.”
She grinned and hugged the sweatshirt to her chest. “Thank you, Mommy. I love it!”
“Shower first.” She nodded and ran to the bathroom. I got her set up and came back to sort through the new clothes. A knock at the door kept me from making too much progress.
Pulling the door open a crack, I came face to face with Sayer. “Can we talk?” he asked.
“For a minute.”
He walked into the bedroom and shut the door behind him. His sharp gaze moved over the cluttered bed and our girly things all over his very masculine room. I felt self-conscious as he surveyed our mess. I had planned to clean it up while Juliet showered, but he’d interrupted.
“We’ve kind of invaded,” I mumbled, trying to internally talk my cheeks out of blushing.
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “I didn’t know I’d like it as much as I do.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned around and leaned back against the footboard of his bed. “Your invasion.” He held up Juliet’s special blanket that I’d brought from home. “I like you in my space, Caro.”
The butterflies were back, swooping low in my belly, reminding me of last night and this man without his clothes on.
“What are we doing, Sayer?” I moved my pointer finger back and forth between us. “What is this?”
His expression darkened. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what the hell are we doing? We can’t just keep… having… you know, late night bang sessions every time we’re alone.”
“Is that what you think we’re doing?”
Ignoring the menacing gleam in his eyes and the way his body had hardened to stone, I pushed on with my argument. “And Juliet is still trying to process this. Do you know she had no idea she even had a father? She thought she came along without one. This morning was the first time she realized that you had been missing from her life. That was a blessing I suppose, but now you’re here, and she has to learn to cope with you. I don’t want to confuse her with our behavior.”
His voice dipped low, gritty with emotion I couldn’t begin to understand. “And why would it confuse her if her mother and father acted like a mother and father?”
I stopped moving around the room, trying to tidy up, realizing I needed to face him for this conversation but unable to find the courage to do so. My heart ached, like there was a fist squeezing it tight and unwanted tears pricked at my eyes. “I don’t want to play house, Sayer. I don’t want to pretend. And I don’t want to make promises to Juliet that I can’t keep.”
“You mean with me?”
I nodded, brushing away the one lone tear that escaped.
“Because you think I won’t stick around or what?”
“I—”
“You’re the one that left, Six. Not me. I’m not the flight risk here.”
“That’s not what I—”
“And you’re the one that claims we broke up. I’m still trying to remember exactly when you let me know things were over between us.”
“Wait a second—”
His gaze found mine, holding me captive, transfixing me to the spot. “When there are people around you don’t seem to want anything to do with me, Six.” He reached out and grabbed my fingers, tugging me to stand between his legs. “But… when I get you alone…” His free hand trailed up my thigh, wrapping around my hip and holding firmly. “You’re sending some pretty wild mixed signals.”
I knew he was right, even though his touch and his closeness and every single thing about him made it difficult to think straight in general. This was the part I needed to lie my way through. I needed to make it clear that I wasn’t interested in a relationship with him or making up for lost time. I didn’t want to mend the rift between us or continue on as if nothing had happened.
Because a lot of shit had happened. Starting with the reason I’d run. He’d chosen the bratva over me. He’d picked his brothers over our future. And now… now that he was back, he was as full of mystery and secrecy as ever. If he couldn’t trust me, how could I trust him? And if I couldn’t trust him, I couldn’t have him in my life.
It was dangerous enough already.
I was the best liar in the business and all I needed to do was string Sayer along until I could safely get Juliet out of this city and possibly the country. I just needed to tell him enough half-truths that he didn’t question my motives, my decisions, or why I couldn’t seem to say no to him. I formed a beautiful lie. I was going to tell him that I didn’t want anyone to see us together. I didn’t want anyone to realize they could still use us against each other. We had to put distance between us to keep Juliet safe.
Admittedly not my best con… but it could work. At least build a foundation. I called upon a lifetime of practice, opened my mouth and told him… The truth. “I don’t know how to trust you again.” And as if that wasn’t bad enough, emotion made my voice wobbly, completely revealing how upset and fragile I was.
So much for being good at what I did.
“Because you think I picked the Russians over you?”
“Because I know you did.”
He shook his head slowly from side to side, disagreeing with me in the gentlest way. “You’re a smart girl, Caro. The smartest I know. And usually you read a situation with scary accuracy, but you’re wrong about this. I have always, only picked you. Even back then. Even when I refused to leave the bratva. That wasn’t for them. Hell, that wasn’t even for me. That was because I knew I couldn’t protect you. Because I was trapped in that goddamn hellhole and I thought the safest scenario for you was if I stuck with the Russians.”
The shower shut off in the bathroom and Juliet called out, “Mommy, I’m done!”
“Be right there,” I called back, hoping she didn’t hear the tears stuck in my throat.
Sayer stood up, bringing our bodies close together. He gripped my hips and tugged me into him, holding me against him. “You’ve been running for five years. Not just from the brotherhood, the FBI, and your past, but from me too. But we’ve found you. You’re back in this city, back in the bratva, back in the fucking trenches. Stop running from me.”
I didn’t even know what to say to him or how to respond. He was right, and I hated it. I hated that he’d boiled down all of my problems and crises to the biggest issue of them all—him. I was still running from him. Like a terrified rabbit, I’d abandoned all common sense and logic in a panicked flight as far as I could get from him. Only I kept running in circles. I kept ending up back where he was.
“Mommy!” Juliet called again. I knew she must be cold.
Sayer leaned down and kissed the shell of my ear. “I will never hurt you again,” he whispered. “But you have the ability to destroy me. Figure out what you want, Six. Figure out what you need.”
He turned and walked out of the bedroom, leaving me to gasp for air. He left me with all of my emotions scattered around the room, broken and jumbled and frustratingly confused. With superhuman strength, I pulled myself together and followed the sound of a naked four-year-old chanting for me from the bathroom.
“Finally!” she cheered.
I smiled but couldn’t find the strength to talk to her the entire time I helped her get dressed and dealt with her hair. She turned around and hugged me, and I soaked in her quiet strength and sweet spirit.
“Guess what, Mommy?” Her words were muffled against my cheek.
“What, baby girl?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” I pulled back, but kept her close. I set her up in Sayer’s bed with my Kindle Fire and told her to have some rest time. She didn’t even argue.
After I’d tucked her in beneath the quilt, I paused in the doorway to admire her. She was so pretty, so breathtakingly beautiful. She was just this perfect picture of innocence and my heart swelled with the realization that her kidnapping hadn’t messed her up too much. Maybe she would have some attachment issues. She would probably want to sleep in my bed for the next ten years. But physically, she was unharmed. Emotionally, she was minimally damaged.
I didn’t forgive Atticus for any of it, but it could have been so much worse. I had seen the bratva beat children before, torture them to get at their parents. The worst stories included house fires and bloated bodies washing ashore for the police to find.
This wasn’t their first kidnapping by a long shot. The brotherhood regularly used and abused children to assert dominance on those that needed bending—politicians, judges, business owners. They were heartless when it came to the treatment of weaker humans and relentless when it came to getting what they wanted.
We had been lucky. But not because we deserved kindness. I knew it had more to do with effective manipulation. I would comply because of the threat to my daughter’s life. And if I didn’t? They would use more convincing techniques.
Now to survive the Volkov demands. How was I supposed to clear their name and get them out of prison? That seemed impossible.
“I saved you a seat,” Frankie called from the table.
Grabbing a bottle of water from the refrigerator I sat down in between Frankie and Sayer at the only seat left. They watched me, apparently waiting for some kind of mental breakdown.
Or plan of action.
I went against my instinctual fear and gave them truth instead. Apparently, I was brimming with honesty today. “Mason texted me this morning. We talked. He knows I’m here and what I’m trying to do.”
“How?” Gus demanded at the same time Frankie exploded with an outraged, “Mason Payne?”
Cage looked ridiculously confused and I could tell he was racking his brain for the reminder of who Mason Payne was. But Sayer sat there as calm and collected as he’d ever been. “What did he want?”
I stared at my hands twisting together on my lap. “For me to give up.”
“You haven’t even started yet,” Frankie grumbled.
“I think that’s the point.”
Cage leaned forward and asked, “Mason is…?”
“FBI,” Sayer supplied. “He’s been after the Volkov for a long time. He’s the agent that I worked with for my release.”
“We had a sort of relationship before Sayer went away,” I confessed. “That relationship consisted of him bullying me into sharing information I never gave up. In turn, he would try to entrap me, and I used my charming wit to evade him. He eventually gave up and went after Sayer.”
Gus chuckled. “And that worked. He probably should have started with Sayer.”
“But Caro’s so much prettier,” Frankie added, but her flinty eyes told me she hated Mason as much as I did.
I searched my memory for a time when she’d had to deal with him. She had never said anything about him. She knew about him from after we’d left DC, but as far as I could recall, she had never met him.
Turning to Sayer, I noticed his scowl and wondered if it was from Gus’s comment or Frankie’s. “He did say something interesting…” Sayer raised his eyebrows. “He said my freedom was bought and paid for a long time ago. Do you happen to know anything about that?”
He leaned forward, resting his elbow on the glossy table. “Like I said earlier, Six, you’re the only one that thought we broke up when you left town. Do you really think I wouldn’t take care of what’s mine?”
“Maybe out of spite?”
He made a sound in the back of his throat but didn’t bother deigning my comment with a reply.
“What are you going to do, Caro?” Frankie asked, helpfully moving the conversation forward.
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about breaking into Mason’s office, but by now, more than just Mason has all the information and evidence for trial. We could bribe a juror or two and try for a mistrial, but Roman doesn’t want to wait that long. We could somehow break them out of jail, but then they’d have to leave the country, or at least the state, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t on their list of possible scenarios. Also, this isn’t a movie and I don’t know the first thing about breaking out of places. Breaking in sure. I’m your girl. But sneaking three people out of a highly locked down facility is a whole different monster. What I’ve come up with is… we should all leave the country. Let them chase us through South America.”
Gus leveled me with his most severe glare. Clearly, I’d disappointed him. “They would, Caro. They’d follow us all the way there and then shoot us down in cold blood on some street in El Salvador. They’re as happy to kill us there as they are to kill us here.”
“I mean, fine, be a pessimist about it.”
“I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.”
I turned to Frankie, my only real ally. “That’s what every pessimist says.”
“We need real solutions,” Cage cut in. “Real answers. We’ve got a solid column of Don’ts. But we could use some Do’s right now.”
We all fell silent, concentrating on a way out of this gigantic mess. “What if we’re going about this the wrong way,” I hedged, realizing it was mostly my life at stake anyway. “How much did you give Mason?” I asked Sayer.
He folded his arms over his chest and lifted his chin stubbornly. “A lot. Enough to put them away forever.” The briefest second of insecurity flashed in his cobalt eyes and he admitted, “But I don’t know exactly what I gave them, I didn’t necessarily hand over information to them. I gave them the tools they needed to find the information themselves. I gave them the inner workings of the business, the tricks of the trade. I walked them straight to the top.”
“If this goes to trial, there’s no chance of bail, no possibility of escape?”
“Come on, Caro, what’s the first rule of thieving?”
“The thing you don’t expect to go wrong will always go wrong.”
He nodded. “Yeah, there’s a chance they could get out, but I’m pretty confident they’re hoping that chance is you.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what your meeting with them was about?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
I couldn’t help but flinch at his bold honesty. Hadn’t he just had the conversation with me about wanting us to work? And he was still keeping secrets from me.
Okay, maybe it was my fault for asking in front of a group, but something told me he would more likely tell a room crowded with people than ever let me find out. I had two options at this point. I could beat this dead horse. Or I could move on.
Since my daughter’s and my life were at risk, I decided to move on.
“Anyway,” I continued, “If we don’t get involved, the pakhan are likely to be sentenced for life or longer. So maybe we should spend less time on how to get them out and more time on how to keep them in?”
Gus’s eyes grew huge. “A double cross? Are you serious?”
“What’s left of the bratva? Nothing, right? It’s all but dismantled. There are a handful of loyal men that the FBI hasn’t touched yet. Maybe they don’t want them. Maybe they don’t need them. But either way, there has to be a way to get them out of our way and go on with our lives.”
“You’re talking about getting people killed?” Frankie asked uncomfortably.
“I’m talking about us not getting killed.”
“You’d have to keep the pakhan convinced you were working for them,” Sayer added, thinking over my solution. “Until everything is finished, they’d need to be under the impression that you were still on their side, that things were still going in their favor.”
Gus nodded and leaned forward. “If they got one whiff of what you were up to, you’d be dead. Juliet would be dead. We would all be dead.”
“Give me something else then. I don’t even care if it means they get out and I’m stuck working for them for the rest of my life. If you have a solution, I’d love to hear it. The way I see it, this is our only option. We either figure out a way to lock them up for good or we’re going to end up there with them.”
“This could work,” Sayer decided, his voice soft with conviction and the first signs of hope. “It’s nothing more than a long con.”
I met Gus’s eyes and then Frankie’s, saving Sayer’s for last. “We’ve all done one or two of those before. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“When’s the last time you completed a job?” Gus asked, fear making his voice angry and tense.
“Crenksy’s. Before Sayer did his stint.”
“That was almost six years ago. You’re crazy to think you still have what it takes. A job like this is going to take finesse. Under perfect circumstances it would still be impossible to pull off and this is anything but perfect. You have a child to think about for god’s sake.”
Leaning forward, I slapped my hand against the table and glowered at my friend. “I lied to you just now. About the job. It wasn’t six years ago, and it wasn’t Crensky’s. The last time I pulled a job was two days ago living in fucking Frisco, Colorado. The last five years of my life have been nothing but long con after long con. I live in a white-collar apartment and send my daughter to pre-kindergarten. I’m on time to dentist appointments and have a running tally of how much yogurt we have in the refrigerator constantly in the back of my mind. I work nine-to-five, fixing broken hot tubs and smiling politely at all the wealthy, ignorant assholes that come through Maggie’s. Does that sound anything like me? Does the Caroline from your memories smile politely and wave at other driver’s and give a flying fuck about small town politics? No, Augustus, the answer is no. Am I out of practice? There’s probably a good chance that I’d struggle to pick a lock the first go around. But I can lie my face off whenever I need to. That skill I never quit practicing. That’s a skill I’ve been honing, mastering, and taking control of since I left this goddamn city five years ago.”
Gus pulled his hands back and mumbled a surprised, “Yeesh,” under his breath. “I get it. You don’t have to bite my head off.”
“Let’s do this then,” Cage grinned, enjoying the tension at the table. “Let’s take down the rest of the Russian mafia.”
His enthusiasm wasn’t exactly contagious. Mostly we just looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Yes, it was a decent plan—the best one we had—but it wasn’t going to be easy. We all had ties to the brotherhood. Especially Frankie and Gus. Even my dad would eventually be a problem.
But it was more than that, harder to accomplish than it sounded. The brotherhood was our family too. We’d pledged our allegiance and wore the tattoos and scars to remind us. We’d looked up to Roman, Dymetrus, and Aleksander for most of our lives. We’d relied on some of these people, especially Atticus, to have our backs, to keep us alive.
And now we were truly going to backstab them. We were going to promise security and freedom and loyalty—and deliver wrath instead.
I turned to Sayer. “What do you think?”
He knocked his knuckles on the table and gave me a slow, cocky smile. “I say, let’s burn this motherfucker to the ground.”
Chapter Fourteen
Sayer
Ten Years Ago
Mine.
The word soared through my head, taking root in my chest and spiraling down to some unknown, hidden place inside me. My soul maybe? Was there a deeper, more permanent place inside the human body than the soul? A place that couldn’t be destroyed, even in death?
Okay, that was overly dramatic, but that’s what she did to me. That’s what she’d been doing to me since I was thirteen years old. She made me an idiot. A dumb, mushy idiot.
I smiled at her across the room. A happy idiot at least.
Gus sat down next to me, a tumbler filled with vodka and ice in his hand. I glanced at him, noticing the pissed off expression on his face. “What’s with you?”
He took a sip of vodka and pinched his eyebrows together. “I’m working on my scowl.”
“You’re doing what?”
“I’m brooding.”
“What are you talking about?”
He took another sip of vodka and shrugged. “I’m brooding. I’ve heard it works with the ladies.”
“I’m so lost.”
He gestured across the club with his vodka. “It worked for you, didn’t it?”
Realizing he meant, Caro I ducked my head to hide my smile. “I’m not broody.”
“You’re the broodiest of all the broodys,” Gus accused. “You’ve got that smolder down to a science. You smolder, they come running.”
I nodded at Caro who was deep in conversation with Frankie, arms waving wildly in front of her as they discussed something serious. “She did not come running.”
Gus grinned, agreeing with me. “Because she was the long con. She didn’t run, but she walked straight into that trap.”
Smirking at my friend, my brother, I said, “That’s the whole point, yeah? Finding the long con. The one that’s worth the time and effort and ground work.”
He had no idea what I was talking about. His eyes were blank with confusion. “I’m pretty sure no girl is worth all that trouble.”
His doubt made me smile wider. “You just haven’t met the right one.”
“Listen to you,” he scoffed. “You sound like an old married guy.”
What I didn’t tell him was that I had been waiting to be an old married guy since the day I met Caro. He knew I’d been after her for a while, but he had no idea how long the game had gone on. But now she was mine and she knew it too.
We’d made things official the night we found incriminating evidence at Jack’s house. That had been the single best night of my life.
Although now that things were solidified between us, I anticipated many more of those nights to come.
Glancing at my wrist watch, I noticed how late it had gotten. I jumped to my feet and rolled my shoulders. Everything inside me wanted to go to Caro, wanted to sit with her the rest of the night, talk to her, touch her, look at her. But I had shit to do.
“Where are you going?” Gus asked, seeing me make a move to leave.
“I got a thing.”
“What do you mean, you got a thing?” His eyes narrowed with suspicion. Gus saw too much for his own good. “The girls are here. The night is young. You have a thing here.” He pointed at the floor. “Right here.”
I smiled at him, defusing whatever tension was brewing between us. “Relax, man. I’m coming back. I just need to step outside for a minute.”
Gus looked around at the crowded room and acknowledged that it was busy. Since the first day I had met Gus, he’d understood that I needed space from crowds, that I was easily overwhelmed by a lot of people and most of all if thrust into a situation where I felt stressed out, I would need to remove myself from that situation until I cooled off.
All lies. But we were all liars. All of us. Thieves, liars, and criminals. It was true that I kept to myself and my circle of friends was small. It was also true that I didn’t like a lot of people touching me, or the stifling, acrid air of bars or parties, but I wasn’t crippled by any of those things. They didn’t bother me so badly I needed to run away from them. They were more annoying than anything.
It wasn’t a breath of fresh air I was after, it was an appointment. And I was already ten minutes late, on purpose obviously.
I said goodbye to Gus and pushed my way out of the club onto the stifling summer streets of DC. A good friend would have felt guilty for lying, but Gus was just as bad. For instance, he led everyone to believe he was a party guy that loved to booze and smoke. He hated both things. He barely tolerated any kind of alcohol and I had never seen him truly drunk before—although he pretended as often as he could.
He also pretended not to give a shit about generally everything. That was, of course, a carefully crafted illusion. Augustus Usenko cared about everything more than anybody I knew. It was going to get him in trouble one day.
Until then, I’d let him have his lies. And he’d let me have mine.
Casting a look over my shoulder to make sure nobody had followed me out, I shoved my hands into my pockets and headed for the corner. People were everywhere on this Friday night in July, filling the bars and taverns on either side of the street. Tourists and locals mingling together in a press of sweat and alcohol and carefree fuckery.
I weaved through the clusters of drunken revelry, bumping hard with my shoulders when they didn’t get out of my way. These people stuck to the sidewalks and reputable establishments plying their refreshments this evening. But there were darker streets in this part of town, seedy alleys and scary side streets that herded them this way. They stayed under the neon lights, but I was part of the shadows. I was the wrong side of the tracks walking among them.
If Caro was with me, she’d take her time picking pockets on the walk. She’d glide through the crush of the crowd, never seen, never noticed, and would come out the other side with enough money to pay rent with this month plus some.
I didn’t have the patience or the dexterity to do what she did. Her graceful fingers were light as a feather and quick as lightning. I was all muscle and force, punching my way through things. I admired her skill, the absolute resourcefulness she survived on.
The pakhan had called her The Fox. Not just because she could break into anything and not get caught, but because she had a playful side to thieving. They admired her penchant for souvenirs and taking something for herself. She amused them with her growing collection. Although she had no idea they paid so much attention to her.
I turned down an alley not unlike the one where I’d first met Caro all those years ago. Ivy had spread along either side like a choking sickness, covering the rough brick altogether. It blended with the smell of dumpsters, the cloying scent overwhelming the too-humid air.
My contact stood at the end of the alley, next to a ten-foot chain-link fence that had been cut and peeled back at the corner. Conlan O’Donnell waited for me, his hands tucked into his pockets like mine. His gaze darted around manically, looking for anyone possibly following me or eavesdropping. His shoulders were bunched up around his ears giving the lanky Irish giant the look of insecurity.
He was anything but.
“Where’s Luca?” I asked as way of greeting, my voice low.
“Here,” Luca called from the shadows.
“For fuck’s sake,” Conlan hissed with a lilting Irish accent. “How long ya been standing there?”
“Long enough to know you whistle like a fuckin’ woman,” Luca snickered.
I should have broken them up before they really got going, but I found them amusing. “Whistling, huh?”
“Aye, sure, get it all out now,” Conlan growled. “When you two bastards make me wait for as long as I have, what d’ya think I’m going to do?”
Luca and I shared a look. Neither of us had an answer, but we were entertained nonetheless. “Let’s get down to it then,” I suggested. “Since we’ve apparently taken up enough of your time.”
Conlan’s top lip pulled back, revealing white, straight teeth that gleamed in the darkness. “Word on the street is that Yakuza are going to make a power play sometime next month. They want a stronger foothold in the city. They want the ports. They want a piece of the pie.”
Luca turned his head and spit on the ground. “They can want it all they want, doesn’t mean they’re going to get it.”
“There is someone,” Conlan went on, ignoring the angry Italian. “If they get what they want, it could be worth reaching out to him. He’s like us.”
Conlan meant a future boss.
Luca and I glanced over our shoulders at the same time, anxious that the subject of our meeting was out in the open. This city had spies everywhere, eyes and ears on every corner, down every alley. We couldn’t trust anyone.
Not even each other.
“What’s his name?” I asked, curious about this Japanese kid I’d never heard about. Although I’d been busy lately. Jack wasn’t the only traitor in the brotherhood that had needed sniffing out. The FBI were coming down hard on the Russians. It was a precarious time in our organization.
And a perfect time for Yakuza to move in to the city if they were going to.
“Ryuu Oshiro,” Conlan explained. “His friends call him Ry.”
“Three pieces,” Luca reminded us. “The pie has three pieces. Italians, Irish, Russians. We each get a slice. And we keep the peace for as long as we last. Business works better together, but also with people you know. We don’t know this guy. We don’t know what he’s about.”
Conlan raised his hands in surrender. “I’m just giving you my report. I didn’t suggest we take him out for coffee for Christ’s sake.”
“We’ll see what happens with the Yakuza and then decide,” I told them, my voice suggesting they shouldn’t argue with me. “If we need him, we’re not going to be stupid about it.”
Luca nodded, seeing reason. “Yeah, all right. We’ll see what happens.”
That meant the Italians were going to do whatever it took to keep Yakuza out. We’d see how that panned out for them. They’d tried to keep the Russians out too. And the Irish.
It was time for the Italians to learn how to share.
“What else?” I asked. We moved onto more technical details. The three of us were working our way up the ranks of our respective families with one goal in mind—to take them over. Conlan was the farthest along, already a member of the small inner circle with his boss. Luca and I were getting there. Slowly, surely, we were working our way through the ranks of soldiers and underbosses and men that would try to kill us someday, but we were getting there.
I loathed working with either of them. We weren’t necessarily friends. Friends gave a flying fuck about each other.
We didn’t. I had real friends. And I had real enemies. These two men were more like the necessary evil I tolerated to get what I wanted.
We filled in the remaining ten minutes with updates and job details. The Irish were taking on double the shipments of guns and working with Cubans coming down from New York. The Italians had internal problems with another family wanting a piece of DC. And I shared our latest infiltration of FBI informants.
“The FBI have a hard-on for your bosses,” Luca snickered. “They won’t leave you alone.”
“It’s because you went after the politicians,” Conlan concluded. “They were corrupt enough before you decided to pull the puppet strings.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I remembered watching Fat Jack die, seeing a kid named Ronnie dragged away by the two spies and beaten to death. I repressed a shiver and kept those details to myself. “Maybe we let Yakuza have what they want? Take some of the pressure off us.”
“Off you,” Luca clarified. “They’re not taking anything of mine. If you want to let them in, be my guest.”
Conlan shrugged. “Like you said, we’ll let it play out. See what happens.”
I took a few steps backward, ending the meeting. When we started repeating things it meant there was nothing new to say. “Next week.”
Luca followed me, falling into pace with me. He raised a hand to Conlan who disappeared through the hole in the fence. “I’ve heard there’s a new agent that blames the Russians for his sister’s death. It’s personal for him. He’s not going to let it go.”
“What’s his name?”
We paused at a nearly hidden, rust red door. “Payne,” Luca offered. “Mason Payne. I’ve heard it said he’ll do anything to bring the Russians down.”
“I don’t like to hear that,” I told him honestly.
Luca nodded sympathetically. “You’re not really Russian anyway.”
I understood what he meant. I wasn’t tied to the Russians in the same way that Luca was to the Italians and Conlan to the Irish. They’d been born into their families. They had blood in the game. I didn’t.
If I belonged anywhere it was with the Irish. Only I had no interest in them. I’d handed them over to Conlan a long time ago. And he would lead them well one day. Sure, they didn’t know it yet. But that was all part of the plan.
The long game. I’d been working long cons since before I knew what they were. Laying the foundation, assembling my team, luring the mark, reaping the payday. It was all I knew how to do.
To Gus’s point, I didn’t think of Caro and our relationship as a con. It was real to me. As real as anything could be.
However, I couldn’t deny that I’d approached attaining her in the same way. And it had worked. That was all that mattered.
The walk back to the club felt faster, but moving toward something familiar always felt quicker than walking toward an unknown. And even though we’d been meeting for five years, Luca and Conlan were still very much unknowns.
The club was even busier than when I left, packed with people wall to wall. They were all mostly people I knew from the brotherhood, but the occasional unsalted tourist had found their way inside too. Some of them because they were in search of girls, drugs or danger. And some because they truly had no fucking clue.
That was how the world worked. You were either searching out something dangerous and illegal or you were inhabiting the same space as something dangerous and illegal, you were likely too dumb or too willfully ignorant to notice.
Organized crime happened all across the country. We moved girls, guns, and drugs in broad daylight because the population as a whole was too stupid to know what to look for. Or they saw something suspicious and turned the other cheek, reasoning away the instinct to tell someone.
“Where have you been?” Atticus stood in the dark hallway at the back of the building, the door I had first knocked on to join the bratva. Bear, the usual bouncer, was nowhere to be seen.
“What does it matter to you?” I tried to push past him, but he moved to stand in my way. I let out a sigh and gave him my full attention. Maybe if I gave him what he wanted, he’d leave me alone.
“I’m just trying to figure out where you went, kid. Breath of fresh air? Out for a walk? Down a dark, secretive alley?”
Shit, had he followed me? Maybe. But he didn’t know anything. If he did I’d already be dead. “Yeah, all of those things. Again, what does it matter to you?”
Anger flashed in his eyes. He was annoyed I was honest with him. He wanted my lies so he could run back to the bosses with my disloyalty. He switched tactics, his eyes narrowing noticeably and his shoulders lowering and smoothing out to indicate that he wasn’t as mad now.
The thing about Atticus was that he lacked finesse. He didn’t have the grace it took to pull off real cons. Exactly why he played the muscle. He didn’t break into buildings and meticulously extract what we needed. He rode along on jobs in case we ran into the inevitable hiccup.
And he knew it.
For the most part I thought he was okay with his lot in life, the role he played. But ever since we were kids, he’d been carrying around the suspicion that he was the dumb meathead we kept around in case of a fight.
Five years ago, I’d used him to move Caro’s bratva destiny along and I knew he suspected me of that night. He didn’t get that it wasn’t about him. That night had been all about her. Sure, he was a casualty, but like I said earlier, the long game was all I knew.
I was a con. From start to finish, I only knew how to lie, steal, and manipulate.
“Caro’s looking fine tonight.” He licked his lips, letting his slow grin imply reasons he wanted me to punch him in the face. “Do you think she’s still a virgin? I heard a rumor once she had sex with a security guard to keep from getting arrested. She’s wound tight though. It’s hard for me to imagine her stripping down in the middle of a bank.” He let out a dark chuckle. “I shouldn’t say it’s hard for me to imagine…”
I struggled to grab hold of my fury. “Shut up if you know what’s good for you.”
He was too stupid to listen. “I should probably test her out for myself. You know, see if the rumors are true.”
He was backed against the wall with my forearm pressed against his throat in the next second. His smile didn’t disappear, and it was enough for me to push harder against his trachea. “Keep talking, asshole. Give me a reason to fuck you up.”
His voice was distorted because of the pressure of my arm, but he managed to get clear words out. “Did I hit a nerve?”
“She’s with me,” I growled, struggling to maintain my logic and reason. “She’s mine. If I ever catch you looking at her like that again I will end you.”
“Fuck you, Wesley.”
“Hey, what’s going on back there?” Bear called from the bar.
I needed to walk away before I did something I regretted, but the temptation to beat the ever-living shit out of Atticus was almost too much to resist. “Stay away from her, Atticus, and I might just let you live.” I backed up a step and pulled my arm away from his reddened neck. “If I’m feeling generous.”
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and slumped over. “I’m going to find out why you’re always sneaking off. And I’m going to go to the pakhan with it so they can tie you up by the balls and cut out your tongue.” His pointer finger swung to the main room where Caro was still hanging out. “And then I’m going to take your little piece and introduce her to a real man.”
I’d seen what Atticus did to the girls he dated. I’d gone to the pakhan about it, but they were spineless when it came to him. Or ignorant. They saw him as the loyal, clever, unapologetic sociopath that might occasionally go too far, but would always do what was best for the bratva.
But he was so much worse than that. He wasn’t a sociopath, he was a psychopath.
“You okay?” Bear asked when I passed him in the hallway.
“Fucking fine.”
He put his hand on my shoulder, stopping me. “If you let him get to you, he’s won.”
Sound advice from the guy that introduced me to the pakhan once upon a time. “You’re right.”
“He’s just running his mouth. Every brother knows she’s untouchable.”
“We’ve only been together for a few weeks—”
Bear chuckled. “Not because she’s with you, dummy. Because of the bosses. Atticus doesn’t give two shits what you think, but he’ll stop because he’s been ordered to stop. Get it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled, my mood sinking to darker depths. “I get it.”
“Good. Now go to your girl and thank the fucking gods of providence that they let you go anywhere near her.”
They didn’t have a choice. I was there the day they planned to bring her into the brotherhood. I was the reason they had access to her at all. And although we’d rarely spoken about it since then, I understood that I’d earned the right to date her.
A right I did not take for granted, but also a right I’d never give up.
I pushed past Bear and walked toward the bar. Caro was still with Frankie in their corner. Gus had joined them and they were laughing now. Unable to resist her gravitational pull, I made my way over to them. Her head lifted at my nearness and our gazes collided, crashing into each other.
She was so beautiful, so completely stunning. Her short hair framed her face and her big brown eyes seemed to drink in the sight of me.
Atticus couldn’t touch her. The bratva couldn’t fucking have her. She was mine.
Without speaking a word, I pulled her to her feet, took her seat and then tugged her back onto my lap. Much better. She soothed some feral part of me that no one else could. She tamed the beast inside me, lulled the dragon to sleep.
“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice just loud enough so I alone could hear her.
“I had dumb shit to handle.”
Her thumb brushed over my bottom lip and I knew she was asking for a kiss. But before she claimed one, she said, “We should find a different occupation then. That way you don’t have to keep dealing with dumb shit.”
Her lips pressed against mine, shy, tentative, so slow I couldn’t help but respond immediately. My arms wrapped around her waist and I pulled her into me, greedily accepting all the kisses she wanted to give me.
The whole time I kept thinking that she was wrong, that I would always have to deal with dumb shit. Because as much as I liked to call her mine, they weren’t going to let her go. They weren’t going to give her up and let her have her independent life. She belonged just as much to them as she did to me.
And if I wanted to keep her, if I wanted us to be forever, then we would both have to be bratva forever. There was no escaping this life, even if I planned to take over one day. There was no leaving DC behind. Not if we wanted to survive.