Chapter 32
COLE
Iflick on the high beams, beating back twilight as the Mercedes hurtles down rural Delaware roads. My fingers clutch the steering wheel as if they can turn the car into a time machine.
Glancing in the rear-view mirror, I barely recognize the face staring back at me. My jaw is swollen. My belly feels like I’ve been trampled by a horse. A couple of my teeth are loose, but I don’t think Prince broke anything. The pain will get worse, though, after my adrenaline wears off.
I feel like someone has yanked the floor out from under me, and I’m careering wildly in space, flailing my arms and legs, trying to catch my balance. I’m falling down an endless well. I’m helpless, and I know the landing will destroy me.
I haven’t felt like this in years. Not since Shannon regularly turned my life upside down. Not since I served my time in juvie.
I came out a changed man. I mastered control. I traded in emotion and passion and chaos for absolute precision. For predictability. For a fortune.
I’m losing all of that now.
My eyes are back on the road, but I keep seeing Mr. A’s earnest expression as we sit knee-to-knee in his dining room. I hear his worried voice: Be careful, son, about who you do business with.
I wasn’t careful. I brought Tarasov into our lives—first by running Winter Reckoning, then by ignoring Megan’s pleas when she tried to get free of the asshole.
I’m not entirely sure what hold that bratva bastard has on Kate. She’s told me some of it—the kidnapping, the cinder-block cell where she and her sister were kept with the body of their nanny, the years of gang warfare after they were finally freed.
But there’s something more—something worse—that Kate has kept to herself. Something set her off at the zoo, and it certainly wasn’t Breagha. It wasn’t the caged animals. It wasn’t even the fucking game I ordered her to play, greasing the skids so Tarasov would take the Viktor drive.
Tarasov said something, did something to knock her so far off balance she still hadn’t recovered by this afternoon.
Fuck.
The wildness in my blood is how Kate feels every day. She’s constantly fighting a world she can’t control, a world that doesn’t value her steel-trap mind. She says things and does things she knows will destroy her, but she just can’t help herself.
I need to make things right with her, and I will, as soon as I can figure out the words to make her trust me again. But right now, right here, I have a tiny window of opportunity to keep from losing a substantial chunk of my fortune.
I thumb a button on my steering wheel and place a call to Braiden Kelly, first on his cell, then at the Philadelphia construction firm that bears his name.
He’s a freeport client, and he’s been in the Diamond Ring as long as I have.
If I can get him to buy everything in my gallery, it can all stay on the premises with no tax consequences.
I leave messages for him at both places, stressing he needs to call me back immediately.
With Kelly not around, I move on to the next contact in my phone.
Connor Boyle operates the biggest green energy company in the country when he isn’t busy running New York’s Irish mob.
I don’t have an office number for him, but I have his cell.
It rings until voicemail picks up. I leave a terse message for him to call me back as well.
I don’t know when I started associating with so many mobsters. Maybe something is broken about me, that I never stopped to think about how many of my business contacts flourish in organized crime.
Of course there’s something broken about me.
Shannon set me on the broken course before I could walk. And I’m naturally a high achiever.
I try Gage Rider next. Too late, I remember the Stanley Cup finals are going on. He doesn’t pick up, and I leave one more message.
Darkness has fallen. The car’s high beams create the illusion that I’m driving through a tunnel. I’m trapped beneath a mountain of stone, squeezed close on all sides.
I call Fiona Moran. I’m astonished when she picks up on the first ring.
“Cole,” she says.
“Fiona! Thank God.” This call requires all my attention. I ease my foot off the accelerator and guide the car onto the shoulder. Leaving the engine running, I say, “I know what I’m about to say sounds ridiculous—”
“Trap called,” she interrupts.
“What?”
“Trap Prince. He phoned about fifteen minutes ago.”
“What did he say?”
“That if he catches any client of the freeport doing business with you in any capacity whatsoever, he’ll terminate our accounts. If he hears a whisper of a single text, email, or phone conversation, he’s booting us from the entire operation.”
“Jesus,” I breathe, touching my forehead to the steering wheel.
I could call in my marker. I could demand the favor Fiona owes me—buy my freeport holdings, save me from crippling taxes.
But it wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair. She’d end up ruined too.
“What the hell did you do, Cole?”
“I fucked up everything,” I say.
“Well, that’s obvious.” She sighs, and I can picture her cocking a hip while she runs her fingers through her hair. “Make this right with Trap,” she says. “Do whatever you have to do.”
“There’s no making this right.”
“Then do what you have to do to survive.”
She ends the call before I can respond.
I sit by the side of the road for five full minutes. My heartbeat aches in every cell of my body. I wonder if I’ll be able to get out of the car once I get home.
I can’t call any other members of the Diamond Ring. There’s no one I can impose on to save my fortune. From here on out, the only thing left to do is mop up the mess.
I pull the Mercedes back onto the road. When I call Nilsson, he answers before I even hear a ring. “Sir?”
In the tersest language possible, I fill him in on what needs to happen. “Do whatever you have to do,” I say. “Take the jet if you need it. We’re sparing no expense. I’ll be home in two hours.”
“I understand,” he says. “And sir?”
“Yes?”
“Please drive carefully.”
I growl and push the pedal to the floor.