My brother and partner-in-crime knocked then strode into my office at my bark to enter. “The Cullen brothers are wanting a word.” A slight twitch under Devlin’s right eye told me the story. “You want me to keep them waiting?”
The Cullens were in deep shit for thinking they could get away with stealing from my family. I should keep them cooling their heels all night. But hell, it might be more fun to torture them. I could use a good workout.
“Give me five and send them up.”
Devlin nodded and looked like he was about to say more before changing his mind and exiting. I shifted—the Irish king, ready for action.
Stepping up to the one-way glass overlooking the main venue of the Emerald Club, I scanned the crowd, alert for possible signs of trouble. Our family hadn’t risen to the upper echelons of Montreal’s crime families by turning a blind eye. No, we’d done it by an eye for an eye, the golden rule.
“Power isn’t handed to you. It’s seized, by whatever means necessary.”
Amen, Dad. Rest in peace.
I was a true son of my father. To everyone else, I was a monster, mob boss, a killer, king of the underworld, a man who took what he wanted. One exception to the rule—I don’t hurt innocents. But for clarity’s sake, innocence was a rare commodity in my world.
I glanced over at the huge oil painting of my father painted at the height of his power, his posture stern on the straight-backed chair, his eyes dark and shadowed, a man never to be crossed. My mother stood behind him and his four sons lined up by his side.
“Family. Honor. Security. Protecting everything we had struggled for over the years—that always comes first, son.”
I honored his words with a nod. We might have arrived on the shores of North America starving and in rags, but since then we’d fought tooth and nail to rise and take our proper place in society, aligning ourselves with people and places that mattered.
“Never forget where you came from, Quinn…or what you will die for.”
I will find his killer, Da, I promised both my father and my baby brother, Mikey.
The door opened and the Cullen brothers, Red and Sammy, both considerably paler than usual, stood there waiting to be invited into my office. Neither was able to look me in the eyes.
“In. Sit.”
Silently they both entered and took a seat. The scraping of the chair legs on the easy-to-clean floor grated on my last nerve. Fucking. Cheating. Assholes.
“What do you have to say for yourselves?” I kept my tone cool and my voice low, not giving any of my seething anger away. I’d been told that was far more intimidating.
Red, the older brother, licked dry lips. “I got myself in trouble with Lenny. My gambling got out of hand, I admit it. It’s not my brother’s fault.”
Lenny ran an illegal gambling enterprise not in our territory.
“You should have come to me. Made things right.” I got to my feet and circled behind the pair, standing over them. Sweat dripped down both their necks and dampened their shirt collars. Huge wet patches bloomed under their arms. Both men stank of fear.
Red twisted his neck to look up at me, the white of his eyes visible. “I have something to trade. Some intel. About Conn Byrne.”
I grabbed Red by the scruff of his neck, twisting the skin tightly in my fist. “What about him?”
“Please, let Sammy go and I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me now.” His brother was just as much to blame for not stepping up and doing the right thing.
“Conn Byrne ordered the hit on your brother Michael.”
The words were lobbed into the room like an incoming missile. The air itself vibrated around me, sending all my senses as taut as a high wire. I glanced over at the painting of the family again, seeing only my baby brother. Mikey. The only one of us able to make my dad smile with his sunny, mischievous ways, seeming unaffected by the dark trials of being raised in the pressure cooker that was the criminal underworld.
“And you know this how?” Maybe this pair of assholes did have something to trade. Thoughts of revenge burned ice-cold in my blood.
“Overheard it. Me and Sammy were hanging around Hazel’s waiting for Shania to be finished with a client last night.” Euphemism for a whore Red liked to fuck. “When in comes Lann Gallagher. You know, he’s connected to the Byrnes—”
“And Conn’s right-hand man,” Sammy broke in.
“He didn’t see us but he was talking to Nico Accardi and they were laughing about pulling one over on us. They were both drunk out of their skulls, otherwise they wouldn’t have spilled it. But I heard Nico say that one less Lyons was fine with him. That Conn had the right fucking idea. And now that their families were going to be connected through marriage, things were only going to improve for them with such tight connections. More territory to milk.”
My gut burned with anger. Revenge. It screamed my name, filled my body with the strength of twenty men.
I punched Red a solid blow on the jaw and he took the pain, knowing he had that and more coming. I reached in my jacket pocket and pulled out a switchblade, freeing the blade with a press of my thumb. The point gleamed in the overhead light, a proper weapon for gutting fish. Or humans.
My cell phone rang, interrupting my workout. The name on the screen had me snapping out a “Lyons,” in answer.
“Sorry to bother you, boss, but we have a situation at the front door.”
I growled. “Isn’t Ian there? Ask him.”
A slight hesitation made my gut roil. “It’s about Ian. He’s not himself tonight.”
Code words. “I’ll be right there.”
I shut down the call. “Don’t move,” I warned the pair and stalked from the room, taking the stairs two at a time in my agitation. Favors expected by family members always burned. Ian gets out of rehab, again, and everyone cheers. Then I’m begged to give him a job and this is how he returns it? And right now, with the Italians trying to gain hold on our turf, we needed to stay sharp, provide a strong united front to protect our clan. Those damn Accardis and their homing in on what’s ours.
Arriving late to the party with open beaks didn’t entitle them to the same share as those that came first. Us. Hell, we were in America three decades before them and paid in blood, sweat and fucking tears for the price of admission to the American Dream by digging ditches in fetid conditions in New Orleans, making things easy for the Italians.
History, it’s a bitch. But no point in changing it to suit the political times—what happened, happened. To suggest anything else was pure shite. And now learning that Nico Accardi knew about my baby brother was the last straw. A new plan was called for, one that took out Conn Byrne and crippled Nico.
I swept by the patrons at the bar on my way to the heavily guarded front entrance. The constant threat of possible retaliation by our sworn enemies remained high since we’d been actively pushing them all back toward the west end of Montreal where they damn well belonged. Everyone needed to be on full alert, not jerking off.
I stormed out through the front doors, the cold winter blast of air no brake on my anger, focused only on hauling Ian up by the short hairs. There was no line at the entrance this early in the evening…no witnesses.
“Where is he?” I asked John, a good man who knew the score.
John gave me a respectful nod, pointing at the alleyway across from the club known for drug dealing. “He’s been in there for the past thirty minutes or so. I saw some piece of shit go in and come out again. I’d check, but I can’t leave my post. I know he’s your cousin, so I thought I should call you.”
I placed a heavy hand on his shoulder as reassurance. “You did right. I’ll handle it from here.”
Undoing the buttons on my suit jacket, I pulled my gun from the holster, clicked off the safety then hurried across the narrow one-way street. Slowing down to allow my eyes to adjust to the dimness, I walked into the darkness, scanning the area for my bastard cousin. In the quiet, the scurrying of small creatures, probably a rat or two due to the restaurant that always overfilled their garbage containers farther down the alley. The stench of rotting food filled me with disgust. What kind of animal shot up in a place like this?
“Ian’s not quite right. Keep your distance.”
Words from my dad about his brother’s boy came back. Some incident with a teenage girl years ago that cost the family dearly. But Ian had been young as well, probably just sowing his wild oats. I’d always kept an eye out for Ian, never sure who he was going to be on any given day. He was the guy most likely to be voted his own worst enemy.
Shit. There he was. Passed out. Overdose? I leaned down to check his pulse, noting it was steady.
“I should just leave you here for the rats to gnaw on,” I said, putting my gun back in its holster. I pulled the twenty-nine-year-old to a sitting position before hauling him to his feet. “But your mother deserves better.”
“Whatyadoing?” Ian slurred, obviously in a drug-induced haze as he leaned heavily on me.
“Hauling your ass out of here.”
No answer to that. I steered the idiot across the street and pulled out my key fob from my jacket pocket, depositing him in the back seat of my Mercedes that was always kept at the curb.
“And don’t you dare throw up,” I warned, tossing a wool blanket over him.
“You know we…we met before. In…my past life. When I was king of all of Ireland. You know I didn’t mean to do those bad things, right?” he babbled.
I snorted. “But you just can’t stay off the coke.” My anger burned cold again, and I wanted nothing more than to knock some bloody sense into him. But I’d tried that numerous times, to no avail. And tonight, I had other things on my mind that mattered far more than this junkie piece of shit.
Michael and revenge.
He didn’t argue but slumped back in defeat, closing his eyes.
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