Chapter 4
Rhys
Ares Zervas’s opulent office overlooks Wall Street. It smells like leather and cigar smoke with a trace of stale blood. I wonder if he gets laid in the same place where he lures his traitors. Eejits thinking they’ve scored a favor from the Greek king.
Only to have their throats slit by one of Ares’s lethal and unhinged guards. Or their gut carved open and left to bleed out on the carpet.
In a dark crisp suit, the head of the Greek Mafia leans back in his chair, a gold ring glinting as he taps a finger on his desk.
“I need someone killed,” he says, getting right to the point with the clipped precision of a man who doesn’t waste the air in his lungs.
Seated in a heavily upholstered chair across from his carved wooden desk, my jaw flexes at the idea of getting dragged into their darkness. I have enough of my own.
“Who?” I ask.
“Someone who thinks he can sell drugs and guns out of my club,” he says, his lips curling into a snarl.
“Why not take him out yourself, Zervas?” I ask him. “We know you’re quite lethal.”
With a wavy line of anger, he grits his teeth. “I don’t ask your cousin Griffin who should do the killing in your empire.” He leans in. “Or did you just get here?”
I assume that’s rhetorical. I’m sure he knows I arrived shortly after Trace started guarding Balor O’Rourke. Before Quinlan Empire was formed and Trace became Enforcer, I worked for Eoghan O’Rourke, protecting his wife, a lawyer who killed the Las Vegas Cosa Nostra underboss.
“Don’t you always keep at least seven guards around you?” I ask.
Ares’s protection force are all code-named after deadly sins.
“Guards ‘guard.’ That’s what they do,” Zervas says. “I need them more than ever since I signed a deal with the city to help build them a new UN campus.”
And forced his sister to marry Griffin Quinlan, who also has guards and plenty of hitmen.
Efficient. Devious.
“Is this man a regular at your club?” I sit back, assuming that if the guy is one, he might have assaulted a waitress, and that’ll make it easier to kill him. “Any patterns I can rely on? I can’t exactly sit in your club every night waiting for him to show up.”
“Got better things to do? Like your neighbor?” He smiles and leans back.
I see red as fiery as Fallon’s hair. “How do you know about—”
“I know everything about you, Quinlan.” His grin could get him on the cover of GQ, he’s that fucking handsome. “Let me be the bearer of bad news. It’s all your family talks about behind your back. Fuck the woman already.”
The image of Fallon’s eyes and how she’d look in my bed, naked and writhing beneath me, steals my focus. The amber light of the hallway that afternoon last week stopped hiding her beauty from me.
Hair mussed, like she ran her hands through it a hundred times. Dirt under her fingernails and smudges of mud on one cheek. Most women would shriek to be seen that way. She beamed without a trace of vanity, and I really fucking loved that.
I should’ve walked away. Should’ve brushed past her without a word. But her voice had that sing-song lilt, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Snagged my heart like a hook.
Sitting here, listening to Ares Zervas give me love life advice sounds like nails on a chalkboard. I only want Fallon’s sweet voice echoing in my brain, owning whatever vacant space is left over after my work.
“Because, unlike this man you want iced,” I say to get out of my head and answer why I haven’t banged a sweet innocent, “I have honor, and I respect a woman’s boundaries.”
“When a woman is worth it, you’ll do anything, trust me,” he says this with a visceral tone that gives me chills. “Now, can you help me with my problem?”
“Got a name? And did you run his credit card from your club’s bar bill?”
“It’s a fake identity. The card was real enough for me to get paid for my liquor, but that was it.” Ares narrows his gaze. “But I smell Bratva. Their fingerprints aren’t subtle.”
My jaw tightens. The Bratva aren’t sloppy enough to send one guy to a rival club to deal guns and drugs, not usually. This is a deliberate move against the Greeks. Or some kind of setup.
“It could also be Albanian rogues,” he adds.
I push the chair behind me and stand up. “The Albanians are under Raina and her father’s control. Raina Quinlan.”
“Do not mistake Valdrin Sokolov’s quiet compliance for peace, lad,” Ares mocks me.
I’d watched Connor fall for Raina and then go on to serve as her confidant. With his help, she had the guts to take out the previous leadership of the Albanian Brotherhood.
“That’s exactly what it is.” I grit my teeth, personally offended by the mistrust of someone with our family name.
Yet, while I say this, I’m not one hundred percent sure if the Albanians have any dealings with the Volkov Bratva.
I don’t bother asking any more questions. I’m a hammer who slams nails. I do what’s asked of me. A hit for the empire doesn’t get my pulse moving. But there is something personal and dark behind this request.
“Where am I doing this?”
“The back room of my club works for getting rid of problems.” Ares stands up. “I’ll watch him, send him women to keep him company, and to keep him coming back. Gives you time to clear your schedule.”
I don’t schedule hits on my goddamn phone’s calendar, even though it’s secure. My role as an assassin requires surveillance, patience, and waiting for the moment a marked soul makes himself unavoidable to my choice of death.
When I’m not ending someone, I’m with Connor in his torture tunnel or patrolling the streets at night with Trace.
“I’ll need to bring my trackers.” Blade and Jett are always up to watch a bloodbath.
“I’d rather this stay between you and me, Quinlan.” Zervas strolls to a credenza. “I will make it worth your while.”
“We’re family, Ares.” I stand up as well. “Families do each other favors. And don’t keep secrets.”
His cheek twitches. “I’d rather write a check.”
“Am I just dragging him into your back room and shooting him in the head?”
“You can have a little more fun than that.”
“I don’t do this for fucking fun,” I bark.
“Congratulations. The first assassin with a conscience.” Ares twirls an expensive pen in his long fingers. “Just eliminate the prick cleanly,” he adds.
“That happens to be my specialty.”
As I open the door to leave, Ares’s phone vibrates, and he glances at the screen. Muttering something sharp in Greek, he marches to the desk outside his office, where a beautiful blonde sits. She’s utter perfection. How does Ares resist such a delicious temptation?
Hmmm.
I bet he doesn’t control himself around her.
Waltzing away, I hear him bark at the woman. “Find my brother Atlas. Tell him to call Black and settle this. That’s an order, or they’ll both be sorry.”
Black…
I wonder who he means. Black isn’t a deadly sin, so not one of his guards. Still, the name twitches something in my brain.
For some reason, concerns of a new war rattle me, like I have something to lose.
Fallon.
My hot-as-fuck neighbor, who seems to be under the delusion that she’s my girlfriend. Not in a clawing, clingy, pestering way.
There’s something off with her. I’m not a fucking psychiatrist and don’t know the clinical word for whatever has made her honestly believe she and I are dating. I don’t care, it just sharpens my concern for her.
Whenever I see that smile, I know she’s functioning. Even if it’s none of my business.
God, the memory of her voice in the hallway drags through me again. That voice doesn’t belong in my head. It’s too bright. Too happy. She lives in some parallel cheerful world with plants and dirt.
I shove away thoughts of her. Remind myself I can’t get involved with anyone.
Can’t let myself go down that road, because obsessing over women runs in my veins.
Trace with Shea, Shane with Lennox, and Connor with Raina.
And my cousin Ewan, who defied his mob boss at the time, the Irish king of Astoria, and married the woman he went to Ireland to kidnap for him.
The fact that Darcy is Ewan’s half-brother’s daughter is another level.
No, I can’t afford to let anyone get close to me.
Not Fallon. Not now.