Chapter Ten
Kieran: Is it true what they say?
Tate: Yes.
Kieran: You’re forcing Gia to marry you?
Tate: For the last fucking time, no one is forcing her to do anything. I offered her a deal. She took it.
Kieran: Why couldn’t you help her from the kindness of your heart?!
Tate: This is not a serious question. Next.
Kieran: You ghoul. Don’t bother inviting me to the wedding.
Tate: Suits me. The city hall is not big enough for your ego.
The rest of the week unfolded like a multivehicle car crash on a burning fucking bridge.
It started with Gia’s replacement, Rebecca. She was barely passable as a part-time PA. Now that Gia wasn’t there to clean up her mess, my schedule was in shambles.
My calendar was chaotic, my coffee tasted like sewer water and disappointment, the filing was disorganized, tasks took ages to be completed, and meetings went unrecorded.
Many errands were done poorly or forgotten altogether. Everything had to be explained five hundred times. And I had to patiently decline a blow job offer if I got her and her friend good tickets to Hamilton (“Before you brush up on your history, learn to use an Excel sheet”).
I craved my structure with Gia. Her razor-sharp punctuality. Her ability to predict in advance my schedule commitments, needs, and wants.
But not enough to pardon her from her fate of firing people for a living.
If I couldn’t kill her body, at least I’d kill her soul.
I peered on from my office with a scowl as Gia taught Rebecca the ropes with the patience of a saint and the cleavage of a nymph.
Yes, she was still getting back at me by wearing next to nothing. I had already fired three men who looked at her the wrong way.
One of them wasn’t even my employee.
Trying to teach Rebecca the craft of running a billionaire CEO’s life was akin to trying to teach a monkey how to perform open-heart surgery while blindfolded.
While Rebecca’s uselessness annoyed me, Gia’s elusiveness downright enraged me.
The only time I’d seen my future wife was when she came up to my floor from her new office in HR to help Rebecca extinguish the fires she’d started.
I was aware she was living in my penthouse.
I had surveillance cameras monitoring the main door.
But whenever she was home, she didn’t leave her room at all.
It infuriated me that this average, ordinary woman didn’t make peace with the idea of marrying a handsome fucking billionaire.
Sure, a murderer and an asshole too, but she didn’t know about all that.
Fine. She knew about the asshole part.
Hey, no one was perfect.
She could only avoid me for so long. We were scheduled to marry at city hall in two days, come hell or high water.
Rhyland and Row seemed to be giving me the cold shoulder over extorting an innocent woman into marriage. That was rich coming from an asshole chef who fucked his waitress in the kitchen after hours and a gigolo who decided to settle down only after sampling the entire female population of New York.
Tate: You are formally invited to our wedding.
Row: You’re fucking high if you think I’m going to stand there and encourage this charade.
Tate: This is foul. I gifted you an Andy Warhol original when you got married.
Row: Yes. Because it was to a willing woman. I didn’t hold a gun to her head.
Rhyland: I think you just unleashed an untapped kink for me…
Row: DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE.
Rhyland: I’ll come.
Row: The hell you will while pointing a firearm at my sister’s head.
Rhyland: I MEAN I’LL COME TO THE WEDDING.
Rhyland: (but now that you’ve mentioned it, I’ll ask her if she is game for the other thing.)
Row: Why?
Rhyland: Because I am an advocate for women’s rights and because my sex kinks are none of your business.
Row: No, dickwad, why are you going to the wedding?
Rhyland: Oh. We need to protect Gia at all costs. This wedding is happening whether we approve of it or not. We must monitor him.
Row: You’ve got a point.
Tate: We’ve got no wedding registry, but we’re partial to dressage Olympic horses, summer houses on the Amalfi Coast, and Amedeo Modigliani art pieces.
Rhyland: You should be happy if I gift you a $20 Amazon GC.
Row: You should be happy if I DON’T gift you a punch.
Last but not least, I received inconvenient news from the Ferrante family.
We were sitting at a round table in a discreet gentleman’s club in the bowels of Brooklyn, playing a high-stakes game of Caribbean poker.
And by high stakes, I mean Achilles just won a fifteen-year-old undocumented Italian girl. She was weeping in the corner of the room, clutching her wobbly knees to her chest.
“What do you mean, ‘ shit got messy’ ?” I ripped my gaze from my cards, fixing it on Achilles.
“What part of the sentence didn’t you understand?” Achilles rolled the tip of his lit cigarette between his fingers, eyes still fixed on his cards. “I can repeat it in Italian or Latin, but if you’re dumb, you’re dumb. Ain’t no cure for that.”
The sobbing intensified, grating on my nerves. A slew of teenagers lined the walls here for trade. All from Europe. All the spawns of people who betrayed the Camorra, were indebted to them, or both.
“I thought you said Boyle was unaccounted for. No family, no relatives.” My jaw tightened.
I got out of my first kill unscathed. Britain had railed for a few weeks, but the outrage died down when the media found out Boyle was, among other things, a mobster, a rapist, an ex-con, and a shit stain in human form.
“That part’s true. What we didn’t know was Boyle was the Callaghans’ cartel operation driver. He moved shipments around the East Coast,” Luca explained, palming a handful of chips and tossing them into the center of the green table. “I raise.”
“Who the fuck is Callaghan?” I squinted.
The weeping increased into incontrollable shrieks, and finally, Achilles turned his attention to the corner of the room. “ Basta !” he roared in Italian. Enough .
“No one wants to fuck your ass, least of all me. No. You’ll work the kitchen or the stables.
No harm will come to you unless you continue giving me a headache, in which case I’ll sell you to the Bratva.
They will make a rag doll out of you before selling all your internal organs on the black market. ”
That shut her up quickly. She bit into her arm, squeezing her eyes shut and forcing herself to stay quiet.
Achilles returned his attention to me. “Where were we?”
“Callaghan.” I knocked my whiskey back. “Who is he?”
“ They are the second largest Mafia organization in New York,” he provided, spitting his still lit cigarette into the ashtray.
He dragged a few towers of chips to the center of the table, matching his brother’s raise.
“Irish. Capable. Violent. They sent Boyle to England to cool off for a couple months after a few run-ins with the law. He was supposed to come back to oversee a large-scale drug trafficking route.”
“Well, that ain’t happening anymore,” I said dryly. “Why do you allow others to operate in your zip code?”
“Carved out a deal in the early 2000s, and everyone seems to benefit from it. We gave them the rough neighborhoods, so the NYPD can periodically arrest and prison some of their soldiers,” Luca explained.
“The DA has to hit a certain organized crime quota. Works for both the Irish and the Camorra. They get territory, we get peace of mind.”
“Sounds like they’re under your rule. Tell them to fuck off.”
“It’s a gray area. We stay out of their business unless they butt into ours. If you were a camorrista, we’d have more weight to throw. But you’re an outsider. Merely a client. And there’s another issue. Turns out the rest of your father’s murderers are also from the Irish Mob.”
“I see a big recruitment day in their near future.” I matched Achilles’s and Luca’s raise with my own chips. “Because I’m not stopping. They’ll all pay.”
“They know it’s you.” Luca dragged a rough palm over his stubble. “And they know we’re feeding you their names and addresses.”
“This a problem for you?” I put my cards down, covering them with my palm. We all had our sleeves rolled up to our elbows, since every single man at this table was a brazen cheater.
“No, asshole. It’s a problem for you .”
“The father, Tyrone, is levelheaded. Used to keep his soldiers on a short leash,” Luca explained around a cigarette in his mouth. “But his son, Tiernan, is running the show. He’s yet to find a war he didn’t want to take part in.”
Vello, who was also sitting at the table, tossed his cards to the center of the table. “Fold.”
He’d been studying his two sons, trying to gauge who showed more authority and leadership.
“The Irish have been trying to venture out of Hell’s Kitchen for years, and they need us content and unbothered.
Politics, after all, is the art of the possible.
You’re another story, though.” Achilles snatched a waitress who strutted in his periphery, cementing her into his lap with a slap to her ass.
“Tiernan would love nothing more than to add your skull to his collection.”
“We all have dreams and aspirations,” I drawled. “Underestimating your enemy is a great recipe for getting killed.”
Luca scanned me ruefully. “They’re a sizable organization. And they have connections. The daughter, Tierney, is friends with First Lady Francesca Keaton.”
“How does that give them an edge?” I pleated my brow.
“Tierney’s the type of social butterfly that makes shit happen, and Keaton is a sitting president. You could be blacklisted out of most places if she decides to be petty.”
“He won’t be blacklisted,” the brawny errand boy who gave Luca and Achilles the documents the other day said simply. Filippo was sitting next to Achilles, but he did not play. “They’ll try to kill him. It’ll give them street cred.”
“Agreed.” Achilles jerked his chin. “Offing a rich, powerful guy? Fucking jackpot. The news would be all over it.”