Chapter Forty-Seven #2
Jeremie assumed the seat in front of me. He looked as charming as a bucket of piss. What Sofia saw in him, I couldn’t tell. I guess he was good-looking, if you were into the whole unhinged-motherfucker-the-size-of-a-football-stadium vibe.
“You’re probably asking yourself what’s going on.”
“No, I don’t really care, unless Tierney’s involved.” I slid a cigarette out of a battered packet, lighting it. “But go ahead. People bother me with boring crap all the time.”
“Sangue Blu gunned down five of your soldiers in Naples last night.”
I was aware. In response, we’d set up this urgent meeting.
“Enlighten me as to how my shit is your business?” I exhaled a thick stream of smoke to the ceiling.
“It’s likely you and your brothers are going there in the near future to settle the score. It’ll leave your family exposed to retaliation.” He paused, waiting for me to put two and two together. I decided to play dumb.
“Leave Tierney’s security detail to me.”
“I’m talking about Sofia and Ciro. They need proper security.”
“And?” I was going to make him spell it out for me, so he could hear for himself the level of deranged he’d reached.
“And I’m the only one who’s fit for the job.”
Silence followed. I waited for him to realize the error of his ways, but apparently, he was too drunk on my brother’s wife’s pussy juices to understand the gravity of the situation.
He really was lucky I was still pissed with Luca for breaking up Tier and me when we were kids, or we’d be having an entirely different conversation right now.
One where I did the talking and he did the falling off a fucking cliff.
“Are you asking me to give you the green light to fuck my brother’s wife while he goes to war?” I stubbed my cigarette into an ashtray. The balls on this asshole.
His nostrils flared. “It’s not like that. I’ve never touched her.”
Chivalrous. Wasn’t expecting that little twist. Anyhow.
“We’re going to get rid of the entire Coppola clan,” I said. Not a done deal but an educated guess. “So your services, though philanthropical, aren’t needed.”
“They could already be on American soil, waiting for the green light to hurt you,” Jeremie drawled. “Every first-rank wife of the Camorra needs a bodyguard. I’ll be hers.”
That he’d lower himself to be the babysitter, the help, was enough to tell me everything I needed to know. Jeremie was a well-oiled killing machine, with combat and technological abilities that made him priceless to any organization.
“She is pregnant, Jeremie.”
“I know.”
“And you don’t care?”
He flashed me an oblique smile. “I need to stay in New York because of my own reasons. Guarding Sofia is something I can do well and easily. Win-win.”
“So you’ll be content if I assign you to do something else in New York that doesn’t involve Sofia Ferrante?”
“Yes,” he said flatly. But he’d paused. I heard it.
“Are you fucking her, Jeremie?”
“No.”
“Why did you delete the records from the CCTV footage in their bedroom?”
“Not because of that.”
For the first time since I’d met the Russian bastard, his lifeless eyes glinted with fire and ice. Alive.
I believed him, but if Jeremie was half as good a liar as he was a hacker, that made him a world-class bluffer.
Fuck. Fuck. If this baby wasn’t Luca’s, we were going to have a lot of fucking problems. I wasn’t going to let anything compromise the Camorra’s already less-than-ideal position in the Northeast. Even if I had to take care of the damn fetus myself.
“He’ll kill you if something happens between you two,” I warned. “Her, too.”
Jeremie looked unimpressed. “You’re overplaying your hand. Make a decision, Scarface.”
The only reason he didn’t have a bullet-shaped hole in his forehead was that, strangely, I believed he cared for Sofia. And as a man driven by obsession and deeply fucked-up love, I recognized the same flame of insanity in myself.
If Tierney had a husband… Well, let’s just say he wouldn’t die of old age.
Still, I couldn’t let Jeremie think it was okay to saunter into our territory and fuck our women. Our married women, at that. It sent a message that we’d gone soft, weak, and worst of all, prideless.
“Here’s what’s gonna happen.” I opened the drawer and retrieved my father’s old pistol, feeding bullets into it.
“You’re going to use the next sentence to convince me not to put three bullets in your fucking head for disrespecting a Ferrante and the Camorra, and I’m going to pretend to give it some thought, because apparently, I’m maturing into the kind of man my fiancée wants to marry.
” I raised the gun and pointed it at his forehead.
Bastard didn’t even flinch. “If you convince Luca to assign me as his wife’s bodyguard and extend my contract for six more months, the Bratva will give the Camorra everything east of Texas.”
“Six months? That’s all you need in New York?”
He nodded.
I arched an eyebrow. This was interesting.
Right now, we ruled the East Coast, which was the criminal powerhouse of America, but that left a lot of dead areas for the taking.
“You don’t have the authority to give me shit,” I drawled.
“Cleared it with the pakhan.” Not a muscle in his goddamn body moved. “Don’t believe me? Ask him.”
Now I didn’t know whether to punch his teeth in or take the bait. We could use more territory. If for no other reason than to put a buffer between us and the Bratva. We were still the largest crime organization in America, but Tiernan and Alex were gaining on us, fast.
What did Jeremie give to Alex in exchange for this solid? I had no idea, but it had to be big. The pakhan wanted his genius brother nearby.
“Luca doesn’t care,” Jeremie hedged, voice cold and flat. “See for yourself during the meeting. If he cares—if he so much as budges—let me know.”
“And you’ll back off?”
He gave me an incredulous look. “You and I, Achilles, we are not so different.”
Asking what he meant would go against my religious belief of not giving a fuck. But Jeremie being Jeremie, he still volunteered the information.
“When we want something, even God himself cannot stop us from getting it.”
I smirked. Life trying to win back Tierney was no picnic, but I had to hand it to Luca—he’d managed to put himself in an infinitely more screwed-up situation.
“I want weapons, too,” I said.
“That could be arranged.”
I snorted, shaking my head. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasu—”
Jeremie shot up from his seat, balling my shirt in his fist, his nose flat against mine. And there it was again. The adorable fucking blush. “Don’t finish that sentence if you want to see your so-called fiancée in a wedding dress.”
I laughed, pushing him off.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I drawled, just as I heard footsteps approaching down the hallway. “Now, get the hell out of here.”