7. Elio
Elio
I ’ve never been one for sleeping in. Never really saw the point.
Too much shit to do, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, yadda yadda.
Besides, the more I sleep, the more chance I have of dreaming, and since my dreams often resemble something akin to one of those medieval paintings of Hell, I like to try to avoid that when I can.
But here? With Deirdre in my bed? It’s fucking paradise.
I don’t want to rouse myself. I just snuggle closer, breathing in the sweet scent of her hair, letting the strands tickle my nose.
At some point during the night she’s rolled over, and I’m no longer spooning her from behind but facing her head-on.
Her slender leg is slung over my hips, her crotch pressed against my rapidly hardening cock as she dozes.
I crack my eyes open, almost as if to make sure this shit is actually real.
She’s so damn pretty. Her expression is all relaxed and innocent in sleep, soft little breaths puffing in and out, her long lashes casting morning shadows on her freckled cheeks.
Her hair is dry now, and honestly it dried kind of fucking wacky, all kinky and tangled, spread all over the pillow.
I brush a stray strand away from her face and grin at the way her nose wrinkles up in response to my touch.
Yup. Paradise.
I’ve stayed in bed so long that Rosa comes barging into the room with nary a fucking knock, no doubt assuming I’m already gone by now. Because usually, I am.
She stops short, toting her cart behind her laden with cleaning products and a tray of food for Deirdre’s breakfast.
“Oh! Signore Titone! You’re still here.”
That’s about as much of an apology as I’m going to get from that stubborn woman, I guess.
“Not so loud,” I growl at Rosa, carefully pulling myself out of the blissful little nest I’ve been cocooned in with my Songbird until now. When I pull away, Deirdre gives a moan of complaint in her sleep that makes my cock and my heart pound in painful tandem.
She wiggles a bit, scooting forward until she’s occupying the warm place I left behind. She grabs onto my pillow, hugging it possessively and burying her face in it before giving a soft snore and then falling back into a deeper sleep.
Well. I’m pretty sure that’s the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. It’s spooky, goddamn near unnatural, that someone can be that adorable while simultaneously so fucking beautiful it makes me feel like I’m bleeding somewhere inside.
I grab my pants from where I’ve left them on the floor last night, yanking them up and pulling the belt tight before I speak to Rosa again. She hasn’t moved from her spot just inside the doorway. Her eyes are wrinkled, narrowed, as they swing between Deirdre in the bed and me standing beside it.
She’s never seen Deirdre in my bed.
She’s never seen any woman in my bed because it does not fucking happen.
“This is where Deirdre will be sleeping from now on,” I tell Rosa in as hushed a tone as I can manage. My eyes dart down to Deirdre, but she’s still fast asleep, hugging my pillow and kind of making me want to die while she does it.
Rosa’s grey brows twitch upward in surprise, but she nods in acknowledgement all the same.
“And I expect you and everyone else to call her Ma’am, Mistress, or Mrs. Titone when you address her. Actually, scratch that. Just Mrs. Titone. Always Mrs. Titone.”
Rosa doesn’t recover from her surprise as quickly this time.
She openly gawks at me. I hold her gaze steadily, just fucking daring her to say something about it.
She’s one brave old lady, but even she knows not to put her foot entirely in it, so she swallows whatever questions she so obviously has and simply says, “ Congratulazioni. ”
“ Grazie, ” I tell her. “The wedding hasn’t happened yet, but preparations will begin immediately, so get ready for that. I’ll get Valentina on board for all the nitty gritty stuff.”
Deirdre gives a snort, as if even in her sleep she has to reject the idea.
“You can put her food there. Don’t start cleaning until she wakes up,” I tell Rosa, jerking my chin towards the bedside table nearest Deirdre as I scoop up yesterday’s shirt and put it back on.
I’ll shower and get properly dressed later.
Right now I’ve got something important I need to do.
In fact, if it wasn’t so important, I wouldn’t be leaving her side for it.
But I do reluctantly, heading past Robbie at his station on the stairs and going to my office on the first floor. I’m not expecting to see anybody there, but Curse is outside the door, and unlike me he looks freshly showered.
“What is it?” I ask as I open the door into my office. He follows and shuts it behind me.
“I texted you.”
I don’t think I looked at my phone once last night. Too preoccupied with getting my Songbird settled.
And then fucking her.
It’s still in my back pocket from yesterday so I pull it out. There are two unread messages from Curse.
“You gonna tell me what they say or do I have to read them in front of you?” I ask, ignoring the text notifications in favour of flipping over to my security camera app so I can see what Deirdre’s doing. She’s still asleep, and I watch her unmoving form on the screen as Curse responds.
“Last night’s message isn’t much,” he says.
“Just letting you know that Enzo and I took the bodies to Darragh’s warehouse like you wanted.
The one from this morning is more important.
” He raises his hands, as if to crack his knuckles, a habit of his, but he can’t because there’s something in his hand. A smooth, white envelope.
“What’s that?” I ask, seating myself at the leather chair behind my desk and putting down my phone.
“This is what the second text was about. It came this morning via messenger. They left it at the security booth at the gate. I haven’t opened it yet. I brought it straight here. But based on the writing on the front of the envelope I’ve gotta assume it’s from Darragh.”
I straighten up, reaching for the envelope which Curse hands over. There’s not much on the front of the envelope. It just says, A chara .
“What the fuck is a chara?” I ask Curse.
“I looked it up. Apparently, it’s Irish for, ‘My friend.’ It’s a common way to start a letter.”
Well, if it’s Irish, that explains why he thought it came from Darragh, then.
Especially if he found the bodies of his soldiers and is sending us back some kind of message.
Although the whole “my friend” thing makes about zero sense.
I rip open the envelope, scanning the contents of the paper inside.
It doesn’t take long. There’s only one line of text, and even though it’s in English this time, it makes even less sense than the outside of the envelope. I read it out loud so that Curse can hear and maybe provide me some kind of clue about what Darragh might be on about.
“ Why can you never iron a shamrock? ”
“Uh. Don’t know. Never thought about it.
It would probably just melt or disintegrate or something,” Curse says.
He’s looking at me kind of oddly, like I’m the insane one instead of dipshit Darragh sending me this mumbo jumbo.
Curse eyes my dishevelled hair, my unshaven jaw, the wrinkles in my shirt, and frowns.
“Don’t give me that fucking look. That’s what the letter says,” I explain, flashing the paper at him. He leans over my desk to peer at it with dark, long-lashed eyes. He really did get all of Mamma’s good lucks. She had eyes like that too.
“Oh. Huh.” He straightens back up, lifting his hands and successfully cracking his tattooed knuckles this time. The motion makes every letter of our mamma’s name flex across his skin.
I blink, realizing for the first time that both Deirdre and I had mothers with names that start with F. Fiona and Florencia.
A sign if I ever saw one.
“Sounds like a riddle.”
I glance at the paper again and nod, agreeing with him. Then I throw the paper down on my desk in annoyance.
“See, this is why people call him Mad Darragh. Because he’s always doing weird fucking shit like this.”
Well, that and the fact that he once made another man eat his own severed balls.
And not even right after cutting them off, either.
It’s not like he sliced them off and then told the poor shmuck to open wide, because honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the guys working for me had done some shit like that.
It’s not out of the realm of normalcy in our fucked-up world.
But that’s not what Darragh did. He left the guy there bleeding to go cook him a whole-ass meal.
Then he brought it back piping hot, letting the guy think he might actually live, like the stew was a kind of olive branch.
Except it was soupe aux testicules . Or however the fuck you’d say that in Irish.
Bon appétit.
“Sending another boss a riddle instead of a real man-to-man conversation, or a proper business meeting. The fuck is this shit?” I grumble to myself as I spin my chair over to my computer. I open a search engine and type in the words of the riddle.
Thankfully, the answer pops up right away, which means at least it’s a real riddle with a solution out there somewhere instead of some nonsensical bullshit pulled out of the murk of Darragh’s brain.
My brother and I both stare at the riddle’s answer on the screen.
Because you shouldn’t press your luck.
“What do you think it means?” Curse asks.
“Fuck if I know,” I reply, rubbing the scarred side of my jaw viciously. I’ve attended a few university classes recently with Deirdre, but none of them were in literature or philosophy. Or psychology, which is probably more applicable in this situation anyway.
I lean back in my chair, drumming my fingers hard against the arms.
At first glance, an obvious interpretation is that Darragh is telling me not to press my luck. Which is… fucking absurd. I’ve got more territory than him, more men, more money, more firepower. I’m not the kind of man you send threats to and live.
But then there’s that address of A chara .
My friend. Is that sarcasm? Or some kind of peace offering?
Maybe he’s calling me his friend and admitting in some roundabout way that he knows he pressed his luck, and plans to back off now?
Having three bodies dumped at your door can make you look at your mistakes with fresh eyes, that’s for fucking sure.
I give up on trying to figure it out. Having me spin my wheels and stew over this nonsense would probably make Darragh’s dick hard if he knew about it, and I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.
Instead, I’m going to bring him a letter of my own.
Hand-fucking-delivered.
“We’re gonna send Darragh a message,” I tell Curse, and my loyal younger brother doesn’t even bat an eye.
“Guns? Bombs? How many men you want?” he asks, already making plans.
“Nope. None of that. Just a letter. Paper. That’s it.”
His brow furrows.
“What, you want anthrax in it or something?”
“Literally just a letter. No assassination shit.”
Curse crosses his arms, nodding slowly, digesting.
“Alright. So what do you want it to say? You gonna send him back another riddle?”
“No,” I say, a grin tugging at my mouth. “My engagement announcement.”