Chapter 1 #2
Uncle, he called himself, as though we were back home and he’d just dropped by the farm.
He didn’t need a DNA test; he had Da’s eyes, his voice, and that Byrnes look on his face when he watched us.
He told us the truth about our heritage—how Mam and Da had tried to bury who we were.
We weren’t just shepherds’ sons from a quiet Irish town.
We were sons of a powerful Irish clan that had once ruled with violence and ironclad loyalty.
Our parents had tried to run from that world.
And, fuck us, we’d walked straight back into it without even knowing.
Then Luca Genovese had sealed our fate in that Long Island ritual room with Nik at his side, blood on our palms, SIGs in velvet boxes, and offshore accounts set up in our names.
Made men. Captains. Property of a war that was bigger than we’d ever imagined—and apparently useful enough to be given responsibilities for parts of it.
Tonight was the first time the play was mine.
Not Luca’s.
Not Nik’s.
Mine.
If it went well, I would give The Syndicate a handle on Hayes and his MS-13 friends. If it went to hell, we’d be knee-deep in a war with the feds, the press, and every bleeding-heart voter on the eastern seaboard.
I shoved off the wall, boots scraping softly on stone, and kept moving down the passage.
The frosted-glass side door glowed faintly. There was no movement beyond it.
The woman would most likely be near the front. Alone. On her knees, with hands folded, and a veil hiding her hair. The perfect picture of purity.
Scarlett Hayes.
Her public dossier painted her as a fragile thing—a traumatized teen shipped off to a rigid Catholic boarding school in Spain after her mother’s death.
Then she was tucked into a cloistered Carmelite monastery, where they drilled obedience into the young women and swore them to silence, poverty, and chastity.
She’d been hidden for years, brought out only for carefully staged appearances at St. Patrick’s and a few photo ops with dear old Dad.
I didn’t buy the story, but it made for one hell of an image.
Every appearance was choreographed—her face dipped, half-turned, hidden beneath veils. The press never saw more than a pale profile and layers of a drab brown habit. Hayes made sure of that. The less they saw of her, the more they believed him.
But beneath that polished story was something far uglier—especially in the way her father used her to polish his own righteousness.
All the while, the war with Delgado was bleeding into City Hall.
Hayes was letting a cartel animal carve up his city—moving flesh through his clubs, laundering money through his charities—in exchange for a Senate seat and a pat on the head from men in D.C.
who treated young women as if they were party favors.
Hayes wanted power. Delgado wanted flesh. The White House wanted plausible deniability.
And The Syndicate wanted control—wanted to stamp out the flesh trade because there were lines even the old families refused to cross.
As for me? I wanted to be the man Nik and Luca trusted when this kind of shit had to be handled.
I pressed my palm to the cold glass, feeling the faint vibration of a heater somewhere deep in the old walls. The unlocked door silently opened, and I slipped inside.
Quiet and clean replayed in my mind.
I would be in and out before the guard outside got cold enough or bored enough to check on her. No mess. No witnesses.
God willing.
If He was even listening.
The church wasn’t dark. Warm pendant lights washed the soaring Gothic arches in gold, the illumination catching on carved stone and making the space feel impossibly tall.
Uplighting along the sanctuary walls lit the vast murals from below, turning the painted saints into giants standing guard.
White marble steps and balusters rose from the floor, catching every shimmer of light.
Red poinsettias decorated the sanctuary, their color echoing the clusters of flickering red prayer votives, whose flames trembled like heartbeats in glass.
And there—dwarfed by it all—kneeled a lone figure before a bank of candles.
For a second, I forgot to breathe.
She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Perfect. Angelic. Her face caught the light in a way that didn’t feel real.
Fair skin turned soft and luminous in the glow, her delicate features framed in shadow, all serenity and quiet grace—full red lips, temptation begging to be tasted, the kind of original sin no man stood a chance against. Too beautiful for the world she’d been forced into.
Too beautiful for a father like Hayes selling his soul to the likes of MS-13. No wonder he hid her.
Then the rest of her came into focus.
She was wrapped in the full Discalced Carmelite habit, layer upon layer meant to smother any hint of the woman beneath.
A brown wool tunic fell to her ankles, heavy and plain.
The long scapular draped over it in two simple panels.
A white mantle rested across her shoulders for the holy day, the whole thing swallowed under a black veil that hid her hair and framed that impossible face.
Simple winter boots peeked from beneath the hem—practical, nothing fancy.
All that fabric.
All that modesty.
As if the church was trying to bury her under its rules.
And still she shone.
Of course, the one piece of leverage I had showed up on her knees, looking every bit the temptation begging to be ruined.
Too bad she was a fucking nun.