Irish Vice (Diamond Ring Irish Mob Trilogy #2)

Chapter 1

1

SAMANTHA

“ S amantha Kelly.” My husband sounds stiff as he introduces me to the stranger in our dining room. “This is Birte Antóinín Mason. My wife.”

My wife.

I start to laugh, because Braiden must be playing a joke. He’s hired this bizarre woman to stand in our dining room, wearing her high-necked white gown, clutching her tiny gold cross, and chanting in her sing-song little voice.

But Braiden isn’t laughing.

Last night, he killed a man for me. He was shot, his arm grazed by a bullet aimed at me. He acted without even knowing who sent the man with a gun. Braiden killed to save his wife. To save me .

Now, his voice cuts through the rabid-squirrel chittering of my brain. “Say something.”

I can’t piece together words, can’t ask the questions I’m terrified of having answered. But Birte Antóinín Mason drops an obedient curtsey, as if she’s just stepped out of finishing school or an etiquette class taught by the world’s strictest nuns. “ Dia duit, Samantha, ” she says.

“English,” Braiden says to his wife. And then, to me, “That means ‘God be with you.’ It’s a common greeting in Ireland. Like ‘hello.’”

It feels absurd to respond, as if this woman hasn’t just turned my world upside down. But it’s rude to stay silent. So I say, “Hello, Birte.”

Braiden looks more relieved than he should at those two words. He glances at the pair of plates in his hands, at the neatly halved omelet he made for us in the kitchen. “Please,” he says, gesturing toward the dining room table. “Let’s eat.”

I can’t imagine shoving eggs into my mouth, chewing and swallowing like my stomach isn’t folding into an origami crane. But I can’t figure out what else to do, so I take my usual place at Braiden’s left hand. I watch as Birte settles at Braiden’s right.

Once he’s put a plate in front of each of us, he retreats to the sideboard. It takes him an absurd amount of time to match two cups to their saucers. He adds four spoons of sugar to one cup and a splash of milk to the other. He tops both with tea.

Braiden sets our drinks in front of us before he sits at the head of the table. Birte gets the one sweetened for a child. I get the one for an adult.

Birte crosses herself and bows her head. I have a feeling she changes whatever she was going to say, translating from the Irish, or maybe from Latin. “Bless us, o Lord,” she says. “And these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

She crosses herself again and then looks at Braiden and me expectantly. I sat through enough blessings before meals at Zia Sara’s house to remember to say, “Amen.”

Braiden chimes in half a beat late. Birte frowns at him, but then she spears a bite of omelet. After chewing and swallowing, she says to Braiden, “Get some tea. Just like me. That’s the key. ”

He leaps up like a Kentucky Derby favorite breaking free of the gate. He doesn’t bother with a saucer; instead, he fills a cup almost to the brim with tea as dark as motor oil. He drinks it straight down, like medicine, ignoring the wisps of steam that curl around his face.

As he goes back for more, I finally find my own words. “Birte,” I say. “Do you live on the third floor?”

“Third floor,” she says, turning the words into a little song. “Locked door. No more.”

Her weird little rhymes must exhaust her, because she settles down to a steady refueling, shoveling bites of omelet into her mouth so fast she barely takes time to chew.

“Braiden?” I ask.

He’s the one who told me the door at the end of the hallway was forbidden. He spanked me for defying him, for testing the knob when I thought he wasn’t watching.

He doesn’t want to answer. I know him well enough by now to read that on his face and in his posture. But there’s no way in hell I’m letting this go. “Braiden!” I say more sharply. “Does Birte live on the third floor of this house?”

“Yes,” he says.

His flat answer ignites all my lawyer instincts. He sounds like every reluctant witness I’ve ever deposed, coached by his own attorney to limit his responses to single words as long as humanly possible.

There’s a story I’m owed here. A story he’s been covering up. A lie he’s been living, that he’s forced me to live from the moment I entered Thornfield.

“It was Birte I heard singing my first night here, wasn’t it?”

He nods, but he doesn’t answer out loud.

“Say it,” I order. “I need to hear you say it.”

“It was Birte.”

“And it was Birte playing the piano?” It’s strange to talk about her in the third person, as if she weren’t sitting right across from me. But she doesn’t react to her name. She merely hums to herself and sips her overly sweet tea, and I wonder what in the world could have happened to make her act so strangely.

“Birte plays the piano,” Braiden says.

“And it was Birte I heard crying, the night…” The night Braiden and I first had sex. The first night I slept in his bed. When I sat up in the middle of what I thought was a dream, and Braiden calmed me. Soothed me. Lied to me.

“Samantha…” Braiden says, and I hear him searching for a path out of the crater he’s blasted for himself.

“Stop!” I snap. He’s the only one who calls me that, who uses my full name. I used to love it, because I’m Sam to the rest of the world. But now… “You don’t get to say my name. You don’t get to tell me more lies.”

“I never meant?—”

“How the fuck will you finish that sentence? You never meant to lie to me? You never meant to hurt me? You never meant for me to find out you have another wife living in your goddamn attic?”

I consider throwing my cup at him. It’s filled with tea, after all, and he knows I hate tea. He only poured it out of habit, because he was serving her.

Forget about tea. I want to throw my plate. I want to hear the china shatter. I want to see egg and coagulated cheese slime the wall.

Even that isn’t enough. I want to grab my knife, close my fingers around the grip, and press the edge against Braiden’s throat. The blade is too dull to cut flesh, but I could lever it into his windpipe, cutting off his air so he’d never tell me another lie again.

But all of it—tea and egg and stupid useless butter knife—will just make a mess. Braiden will get up and walk out of the room. He’ll go to his office and run his criminal empire, and I’ll be left sitting at the table with Birte. Eventually Fairfax will arrive, the elfin man who keeps this entire household running like one of those printing presses that spits out sheet after sheet of perfect hundred-dollar bills.

As soon as I think of Braiden’s chief of staff, I realize he’s as guilty as my husband. Fairfax must know that Birte lives on the third floor.

Who else is in on the secret? Aiofe, Braiden’s ten-year-old ward? Grace Poole, the Irish woman who looks after Aiofe? What about Braiden’s brother, Madden? All his men, who are constantly in and out of the house for meetings?

“It’s complicated,” Braiden finally says.

“I’m sure it is.” Each word is as bitter as cyanide.

I married Braiden because I thought I had no choice. Mafia kingpin Antonio Russo had just murdered my cousin and announced he was coming for me.

Braiden was the only man I knew who could keep me safe—and he got to goad his arch-rival at the same time. We had the ideal marriage of convenience, one made more perfect by the discovery that Braiden and I were more compatible in the bedroom than I ever could have dreamed.

Braiden likes to issue orders. And I—much to my surprise—like to follow them.

Liked to follow them.

I can’t imagine getting down on my knees in front of Braiden Fucking Kelly ever again. I’ll never put on the emerald collar he gave me. I won’t submit to the twisted things he likes to do. The twisted things he taught me to crave.

I trusted him. I knew he’d never hurt me—not in any way I didn’t long for. He was my husband. He called me mo chailín maith— his good girl.

His. Good. Girl.

I’m not any of those things.

I’m not a girl . I’m a grown woman who figured out how to escape my birthname of Giovanna Canna, how to flee my own Mafia-infested family. I left Philadelphia and took on a new identity—Samantha Fucking Mott. I put myself through law school and became general counsel of the largest, most prestigious freeport tax haven in the state of Delaware.

I’m not good . Eleven years ago, I made the worst mistake of my life—That Night. My college graduation, when I drove drunk and crashed my car and killed two of my cousins, along with a stranger. My secret was safe until five weeks ago, when Antonio Russo revealed it to the world. I’m still grappling with the fallout, paparazzi stalking me, my law license in jeopardy.

But more than anything else, I’m not his . Braiden doesn’t own me. He never did.

I was an idiot, letting Russo reveal the truth about That Night. I thought I was saving Braiden. I thought I was protecting his criminal enterprise. I thought I was being true to the man I loved.

The only saving grace in any of this is that I never said those words out loud. I never told Braiden Kelly I loved him.

And now I never will.