Epilogue The Crimes of Dionysus
Ronan
You’re up, boy. And remember: nobody gets the best of a Black. That’s a fuckin’ order.
I sat up in a rush, fifteen-hundred-thread-count sheets pooling at my waist and heart thumping like a hyperactive rabbit before all the blood rushed from my head.
One breath. Then two.
It took me five to remember where I was. My suite in Vegas, not a backyard in Southie. In a plush king-sized bed with a view of the Strip, not shoved out of a chair and into the ring with one of my brothers.
It was always the same fucking nightmare.
A brief memory from the family’s last days in Southie.
I was maybe five or six, watching my brothers punch the shit out of each other while my father and his cronies egged them on and placed bets.
After Owen’s two front teeth had literally been knocked out, the old man had shoved me into the center to fight Brendan next.
I tell you, being the Black family fuckup-slash-fixer would be a hell of a lot easier if my stupid brain wasn’t still scared of fighting a nine-year-old.
I usually woke by the first punch.
Usually.
Gradually, my heart slowed, my breath eased back to normal, and lucid thoughts returned.
The first was: Why does my mouth taste like New Orleans the day after Mardi Gras?
The second: Whose limb is that?
I squinted toward the rays of light breaking from the horizon that was trying to sell me a fucking sunrise calendar or something. Well, fuck you, sun. That shit hurt, especially after the night I had.
But a view is what you get when you keep a penthouse suite at the top of one of the Strip’s nicest casinos.
Nicest, mind you, but not the flashiest. I’m only eighty percent douchebag, the kind who knows the difference between a Patek and a Rolex.
Although in Vegas, there was a time and place for both.
People thought I spent so much time in Vegas because I was Ronan Black, professional disappointment and real-life Dionysus. The jester of the Black family. The unserious brother. The Black heir who couldn’t keep it in his pants if you stapled his zipper shut.
And look, they weren’t wrong. I lived like a Greek god if that god had access to bottle service, high-level hookers, and pharmaceutical-grade party supplies.
There was no better cover for the family fixer than getting wasted and making poor choices.
When you’re doing body shots off Instagram models and fucking Ms. Nevada, no one’s going to notice casual deals with mobsters or bribing politicians. Honestly, it was just efficient.
I turned to discover a body-shaped lump breathing (just barely) under the sheets. Every part of this person was covered by sateen except a pair of long, exquisitely shaped stems.
Well, hello there, legs. Nice to meet you.
I wished I could say I was surprised to find a stranger in my bed or that I knew who it actually was.
The truth was, I’d woken up too many times to count in this very room with two or three other partners looking like all of us had played Twister in our sleep.
My record was four, which, frankly, had been way too crowded.
You ever try to sleep with four people’s worth of body heat? It turns the bed into a barbecue pit. Zero out of ten. Do not recommend.
This partner didn’t have anything in common with a fiery pit of meat.
And, even more strangely, seemed to have a positive effect on my sleep.
Usually, I didn’t make it past four-thirty, but the bedside clock read six.
I’d also slept straight through the night.
No additional nightmares about that thing in Miami I never talked about.
No midnight spirals about Dad’s latest rant and accompanied threats to my bodily health.
Just solid, peaceful unconsciousness until The Nightly Showdown woke me for good.
It didn’t matter who I was with. I’d never escape that final punch.
I studied my companion in the growing light.
She was turned away from me, but the view from here was promising.
Pretty little thing. Curves that could cause a head-on collision.
Legs, of course, that belonged on a Rockette.
Gingerly, I lifted the sheet, and—Jesus Christ—that body deserved its own exhibition at the Met.
Behold, citizens of the world, The Ass of Wonders.
I really, really hoped I’d appreciated it properly last night. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember a fucking thing.
My partner rolled over in her sleep, giving me a view of velvety skin, a pair of prize-winning tits, and a face that flatlined my brain.
Holy fucking shit. The girl was a knockout.
Heart-shaped jaw, painted-on cheekbones, and a mouth that was partially open and begging for something to slide right in.
Even with sleep-mussed hair and probably my saliva somewhere on her person, she looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
The sexy ones, not the weird religious ones.
Although let’s be honest, even the religious ones were sexy. They were all perverts, just like me.
Christ, it had been a banger of a night, hadn’t it?
My memories were like Swiss cheese. I’d been celebrating after a high-stakes game where I’d won about two million—fine, it was a rounding error in my world, but winning was winning—and I’d been already pretty well-marinated when I’d stumbled into the casino’s club intending to celebrate my victory.
She was dancing with friends in the VIP. Bachelorette party, obviously. Vegas was full of packs of women pretending they didn’t come here specifically to make mistakes they’d never disclose to their therapist or their husbands.
This one had been different.
Rubbing my forehead, I remembered her writhing on the dance floor like some kind of sexy forest nymph, in a green dress winding around her body like a second skin. She was small, with light brown hair and green eyes—fuck, that’s right, those eyes the color of leaves or absinthe or money.
Things that you want. Maybe even things that are bad for you.
At that point, I’d been fully convinced the girl was a witch. Not that I had a problem with that. Double, double, toil and trouble—all the same to me with a body that supple.
We’d danced. Made out like teenagers (okay, eaten each other alive to a Frank Sinatra EDM remix). She tasted like champagne and bad decisions, my favorite combination. And then, we—
Nothing.
Blank.
My brain had decided to stop recording.
A real shame because based on the crime scene that was my bedroom—clothes everywhere, a cracked mirror, and a lamp lying in three pieces on the floor—my little witch and I had an excellent time together.
Maybe we could do it again. You know, for science. Or magic. Before she inevitably freaked out and ran away like they all did once they realized they’d fucked Ronan Black.
I was just about to wake her up when my phone buzzed like an angry hornet.
“Goddamn it,” I muttered, fully planning to silence it until I got a look.
Liza Kelly’s name ran like a ticker tape across the screen. CFO of Blackguard Holding, but more importantly, my best friend’s mother and the closest thing I had to a maternal figure, which was saying something because my actual mother was a piece of work.
You wouldn’t be sentimental either if the woman who birthed you took off three months later to “find herself” in an ashram for eighteen months before starting a yoga retreat center outside of Portland.
I carefully extracted myself from the bed, grabbed my boxers off the ground, and exited to the living room of the suite, closing the door behind me. Liza wouldn’t be calling at six in the morning unless someone was dead or about to be.
“This better be good,” I answered. “You’d better be telling me someone died or that you’ve sent a hooker for a threesome. Because there’s a Paris ten in my bed, so those are the only two reasons I’d want to hear your voice before coffee and a Viagra for good luck.”
“Ronan. We need to talk about yesterday.”
Yesterday. Fuck.
Otherwise known as the reason I’d flown out to Vegas for a high-stakes poker game where I was the only man out of eight not named Pete or Paulie. One where, as I took shots and these gangsters’ money, I made deft arrangements for them to get it back with some well-placed “fixing.”
I only knew some of the details. Brendan—the elder of my two snake-faced brothers—had made a spectacular mess with his sweetheart in Vermont, then had promptly called me to clean it up.
This meant following the only member of Ezra Huntington’s entourage to Vegas to stop him from getting my brother (and my family) into a world of trouble.
Fucking with the Black family was a terminal condition.
A fact I generally doused with enough alcohol to get over the moral complications of my job.
Brendan didn’t need to know all the details.
As the de facto head of the family business during our father’s medical absence, he couldn’t, for his own safety (and the safety of the company).
That was between me, some very scary men who liked large unmarked bills, and whatever patch of desert was left to swallow the remains of Huntington’s guy after they finished their “conversation.”
A conversation that was supposed to end last night with the cacti. Not with a friendly chat with Liza at the crack of fucking dawn.
“I’m listening.” I rubbed my face in the mirror near the door. I looked like shit. Hot shit, but still shit. Girls liked abs, so I put some time into them, but otherwise, the dark red hair, the jet-black eyes, and the fire-level cheekbones were all gifts from the almighty.
I smirked at my reflection. Maybe the siren in my bed would enjoy a wake-up call too.
“Brendan signed away half his shares to Huntington during the hostage situation,” Liza said. “The board repossessed the rest due to a morality clause, but not before Ezra’s father took the seat on the board. Your father forced Brendan to resign yesterday.”