Chapter 19 – Liam
“And that’s all she did?” I asked, still speaking in Gaeilge.
Connor shook his head. “After confession, she took a roundabout way home, walking down Flintwood Avenue. We stopped once so that she could tie her bleeding shoe, but then we just kept walking back to your place.”
I sat back in my chair, ignoring the grizzly looks from my lawyer. Amanda sat in the corner, at a desk we’d had brought in for when she worked from the office. Since she’d started working here a few weeks ago, she had a handle on matters and only came to the jobsite once a week.
The fiery blonde hated when I spoke with my men in our ancestral tongue.
“Was she looking around?” I asked.
Connor’s brows drew together. “Who?”
“My wife,” I snarled. “Was she looking around?”
His response was the zip of electricity before lightning struck. “When?”
“At the park. On the walk. When she stopped to tie her fecking shoe.” Something about the deviation from her routine struck me.
At this point, Tuesday mornings in the Bay Front Park were a consistent pattern. I would clear my schedule to follow Gabriella next week. She wouldn’t know, and neither would my men. If she suspected I was onto her, she might deviate to throw me off the scent.
But I was certain there was a point to her ritual.
“I don’t know, mate. She was smiling and giddy, a real pain in the arse.” Connor brushed a hand over his hair in frustration. “I suppose she did watch the people in the park and on the street. I don’t think it was to assess for a threat.”
The overwhelming feeling threatened to strangle me.
Gabriella was interested in that park for a reason.
Why else would she go there, so far away from her neighborhood?
If she just started walking there after we married, I wouldn’t have thought much about it.
But she’d returned. Carried out her morning ritual.
She hasn’t rendezvoused with anyone…yet.
I’m going to find whoever it is. I’m going to drive a blade through his fecking eye, pluck it out, and make him eat it before he bleeds out.
If my wife thought she could write about her mysterious obsession on my turf, because yes, the park was on my turf! I fucking ruled this place. I would burn if it had to find the truth.
“Betty!” I raised my voice.
When the decrepit hag slid her chair into the open doorway, she was scowling at my tone. “What’s the craic?”
I pursed my lips. “I want a list of all residents on Flintwood Avenue.”
She snorted. “Sure, and I want the goose that lays golden eggs.”
“Drop everything else. That is your priority,” I bristled.
“I feel a smoke break coming on.” She yawned. “Might have to call it a day. There’s a storm brewin’ in here, and I don’t feel like tolerating the chill much longer. Me old bones can’t take it.”
She didn’t have to give me that stern look. I understood her point. She was talking about me.
“Please, Betty,” I ground out. “Please make this your top priority before the day is over.”
With a wink, she chirped, “Now that’s better, lad. Sun’s comin’ out after all.”
She was the only woman in the world who got away with that shite.
Amanda slapped her palms on either side of her laptop. “What is going on?”
“Nothing, cailín,” Betty called out in English. “We’re just having a chat about the weather.”
“Uh-huh, the weather my ass,” Amanda muttered. “Connor, before you go, can I ask you something?”
My second in command swiveled in his chair, eyeing the wife of one of Boston’s most powerful men as if she were going to drop a grenade on his lap. “Yes?”
“Where can I find a dog to adopt?” Amanda drummed her fingers on the desk.
“Um, the pound?” Connor threw me a look as if to say “Is she serious?”
“Mrs. Messina, I don’t pay you to solve the pest control problem.”
Amanda’s body jerked back as if I’d stuck her. That ruby red mouth, painted a deep crimson, pressed into a thin line. Without a word, she turned to her screen and kept typing.
The foreman’s voice crackled through the walkie-talkie on my desk.
There was a problem with a flatbed of supplies that spilt.
I couldn’t catch a fecking break. Snatching the thing, I jerked my chin at Connor.
We didn’t make it ten feet from the portable office before Betty’s shrill whistle stopped us in our tracks.
“I don’t know what’s come over ya, lad, but quit being such a fucking prick,” she growled, ambling down the steps as if she were an Olympic champion. “That poor girl’s daddy is being incarcerated today.”
My mind scrambled to process the information. I knew Archy Loring was going to prison for the rest of his life. It just slipped my mind that today was lockup. “Good. Fecker deserved much worse.”
Why Amanda’s husband hadn’t plucked Loring off the street and made him squeal as he was chopped into itty bitty pieces, I didn’t know.
“Be that as it may—” Betty planted her hands on her hips. Those chicken-thin arms waggled in the air. “You were nothing but an arse to her. Go back and apologize.”
Connor coughed, trying hard to hide his smirk.
I glowered at him, but that only made him laugh harder.
“I’m busy,” I snapped. “They’re ruining good piping.”
“He can handle that.” Betty jerked her thumb at Connor. “You need to be thinking of alliances, lad. Her husband is the same people as your wife’s. Don’t shite where you sleep.”
Fucking hell. “Connor?”
“Yes, boss?”
“Fix this shite.”
“On it.” Connor jogged away, his laughter caught on the breeze, lifting to the heavens.
“If you ever scold me like that again—”
“Oh, pipe down.” Betty scowled and began to amble up the steps to the portable. “I used to wipe your arse, boy.”
“Betty, I mean it.”
She rounded on me, those blue eyes, like a cloudless summer day, bore into me. “Then don’t be doing any more stupid shite that needs scolding.”
If only it was that easy.
I followed her back into the portable. “Amanda, I’m sorry.”
She dashed her hands on her face before she rounded on me. Good saints above! Had she been crying? Vincenzo was going to kick my ass.
“It’s fine.” My lawyer waved her hand. “I’m just…out of sorts today.”
I nodded, because a gnawing discomfort settled between my shoulder blades. “If there’s anything I can do—” My voice trailed off.
“Thanks.” She tipped her chin up. She was too fucking proud to let me see her tears.
It didn’t feel right. I didn’t know the first thing about apologies, but this one wasn’t going well.
Fucking waste of my time. But….
There was a pragmatic reason to see her happy.
There’s a good reason to see someone else happy.
The idea took shape, forming in my head, and then my lips began to move before I thought it out completely. “One of my guys breeds pups. Should I ask him when he’s got a litter ready to find homes?”
That changed the mood entirely.
Amanda perked up, sitting eagerly on the edge of her chair. “Yes, please. If you don’t mind. Or I can call him. I kind of wanted one today.”
A dog…. A companion.
“I’ll call,” I decided. “Don’t you have cats, though?”
Amanda laughed. “I need another, and two dogs. Then, well, we’ll just see about the next addition to the family.”
Her smile gave me the jitters. From the front of the office, Betty began to hum a lullaby my mother sang to me when I was very young. The haunting tune felt like maggots squirming in my bones.
“A menagerie. Cute.” I went to my desk and dialed my soldier. After a brief conversation, I hung up. “He had a litter ten weeks ago. There are four pups available.”
Amanda was happy. Which meant her killer husband would be happy—even if she brought home a dog without asking him.
Amanda didn’t strike me as the type to ask Vincenzo’s permission.
I gave Amanda the cellphone number of the breeder, telling her to arrange it with her goons.
There was someone else I needed to make happy.
Yes…yes, happy is good.
And there were simple ways to accomplish that.
I opened my computer and drafted an email to myself. The list of ideas grew faster than I could type.
What the fuck is the point?
My molars ground together. The point was that I didn’t want Gabriella miserable.
I didn’t have delusions that she would prefer me, a scarred monster, over whoever her heart longed for.
Until I eliminated that thorn, I didn’t stand a shot with my wife.
But there were measures I could take immediately to start the process.
Sitting back, I flicked my middle finger over the roller on the mouse. The list of ideas scrolled across the screen.
But my mind wandered to the question putting pressure right behind my eyes. A headache began to form. Where was her lover? I was beginning to think he wasn’t local. Otherwise, he would have made contact by now.
She did study abroad….
“Betty,” I clipped in Gaeigle. “After you make that list, I have something else I need you to look up.”
Betty’s frown appeared in the doorway. “And that would be?”
“Recanati.”
That one word had Amanda flicking a glance in our direction.
“I need you to hunt down information about a trip my wife took there.” Pressing send on the email, I rose and went to the front door. “Please, Betty.”
She grinned. “On it, boss.”
Stepping into the sunshine, I let the light chase away the ghosts. Gabriella’s lover would die a slow, painful death.
And she would be happy with me.
I would accept nothing less. Not because I needed that result to feel better. Other people were allowed to be happy, but I didn’t have to be exposed to the disease.
No, happiness wasn’t in the cards for someone like me.
I had a whole mob to rule. Football season started next week.
The pre-season meant I would be working most nights in our speakeasies and back rooms. And the men were focused on that, illegal gambling that went with the sports season, so they weren’t jabbering too loudly about the wedding.
Our Clan seemed to have accepted it, and since my wife didn’t slit my throat, I guessed we were okay.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of an unknown threat that haunted every step I took.