Chapter 2
JONATHAN
The annual Valentine’s Day auction wasn’t my idea of a good time, but at least the event served damn good whiskey.
I’d need the liquor if I wanted to hang around this crowd for very long. I’d been born into mafia royalty, and though I was able to play it cool in business meetings and high-stakes standoffs, that didn’t mean this cesspool of criminality and greed was palatable to swim in.
My two colleagues—friends, if I was honest—were the only ones in the room I wouldn’t flay one thin skin layer at a time if given the chance. Alexei Antonov on my right, Devin Lay at my left, and as far as the eye could see nothing but dirtbags.
There was Derek Pratt, the drug kingpin who prayed on the vulnerable with no remorse despite the already-immense depths of his pockets, sitting a table over in a flashy velvet suit, a younger woman on each of his arms.
The man who simply went by Jagger who made a living as a high-value hitman for those who were too cowardly to spill enemy blood themselves.
One of my father’s rivals, a shady man-about-town who played every side of the organized crime game, switching alliances as easily as he changed his expensive Italian leather shoes, gave me a nod and a tip of his own tumbler of Scotch when I met his cold eyes across the way.
I nodded back, swigging my drink extra deeply to combat the feelings of disgust.
No one could say I was a moral man, but loyalty was a value I’d always uphold. My allegiance to my family, the illustrious Buteras, couldn’t be bought for any amount of money.
Tonight, it was a cool three mil on the line.
“What was the lot number again?” Devin asked me from the side of his mouth, careful not to let anyone around us hear. We were in a den of vipers.
Except we were vipers too, of course.
“Zero-six-nine-three,” I reminded him.
“And we have no idea what the goddamn thing is,” Alex said.
It was decidedly not a question, but another of his simple, cool complaints.
His clean-shaven jaw was set hard as marble, which anyone else who knew him would think was business as usual for the stoic, seemingly emotionless man.
I knew him well enough by now, though, that I could see the added edge to it. The extra rigidity in his posture.
Alex didn’t like the unexpected. He wasn’t one for surprises.
“Does it matter? Pops needs it. We’ll get it.” Hell, we had even been encouraged to share our mystery winnings—all three of us. I had no idea what that could mean. Were we supposed to share custody of some stolen artifact? Switch it between our respective homes every other weekend?
“Are you sure he didn’t give you any kind of indication why this…package is so important?” Devin asked, though it could have been any of us.
Even though I was the heir apparent, Pops didn’t share more information with me than he did with either of the men by my side.
Though Devin sometimes rebelled enough that he could be seen as my father’s least-favorite pseudo-son, the three of us had earned our high positions in the family.
“Just the importance of it,” I assured him. “And I know it’s part of the…overall power play.”
Dear Old Dad was in the middle of the biggest power struggle of his lengthy, legendary career.
As the don of our territory, Anthony Butera was always dealing with interlopers.
“That’s the thing about power, Jonny,” he’d always say to me, a pricey smuggled cigar perched between his lips under a salt-and-pepper mustache, “every jamoke with a taste for it thinks he’s got the stones to handle it. Very, very few of them truly can.”
But if anyone besides my father was equipped to run the well-oiled machine of the underground, Robert Ferrara would be the one.
The ruthless bastard had been making grabs at Butera territory and clients for ages.
Though he still wasn’t as lauded as my dad, he had his own well-established circle of thugs and plenty of money to show for all of his efforts.
Things were heating up with every passing second.
It was a matter of time before it all boiled over.
“Must be something pretty valuable. Boss doesn’t usually meddle with something so…ostentatious.” Devin’s street smarts were legendary, which was what got him mixed up with the family in the first place. This assessment was appropriately astute.
A lanky older man started to ease past our table, and I recognized his receding hairline and greasy aura right away.
Yusef Black, a notorious weasel who always slipped away when the Buteras wanted to pin him to the wall.
He’d last been on the line for endangering one of the girls who worked the street nearest to one of the main Butera headquarters.
Uma made a lot of money on her back, but she helped us out with the occasional bit of information, too.
Yusef, after soliciting her services, had left poor Uma stranded two hours out of town, her phone dead, at a rest stop where other working girls had been assaulted one too many times.
She was damn resourceful in finding her way back, and her experience that particular evening told us all we needed to know about Yusef.
Principles mattered, even to those of us the rest of the world would consider unprincipled, and one of our rules: we didn’t fuck with women.
“Worth showing up if just for the PR of it,” I grumbled to Devin, clenching my jaw as I lifted my glass again. Just as my disdain for Yusef was drifting away on another swig of barrel-aged fire, the most despicable motherfucker in this city rolled his way up to Alex’s side.
“Ernie,” I greeted, though I could only really see the top of his liverspotted bald head from my side of the table, since he was in a wheelchair.
Ernesto Simmons was an even lower piece of scum on the pile than Yusef Black as far as I was concerned.
One of the richest men in the country, with far more financial resources than moral ones, his near-sociopathic treatment of his three ex-wives was infamous.
The last two had died under mysterious circumstances.
Just his presence made me feel like I needed a long, hot shower.
“Hello, fellas,” Ernie said, his gravelly voice sending a shiver of disgust through me. “Jonathan. I’m surprised to see you here.”
“I’m not shocked to see you,” I shot back. “Seems like exactly the kind of flashy show you enjoy. When you’re not trying to hide things we all already know about, anyway.”
His wrinkled face went stony. “I’ll have you know I’m here on an invitation. A request from a very important man. Your father knows him. Fears him, I think.”
“You’re welcome to think that,” came Alex’s icy voice. “We all know who’s really running scared.”
There was no doubt in my mind the man he was talking about was Ferrara, which only added an additional wrinkle to this interaction.
If Ernie was aligned with Ferrara now, the beast had just grown an extra head.
And what did my father’s nemesis want with this stupid auction, anyway?
What reason did he have to be invested in Ernie’s presence here?
“Good luck in the bidding, gentlemen. You’ll need it.”
“Good luck surviving until the end of the night,” Devin grumbled quietly, and Alex gave a sardonic snort.
We didn’t have long to wait before the auction got started. Stolen goods, flashy acquisitions were up for grabs, and huge stacks of cash were earmarked for them with the flick of a wrist and the smack of the auctioneer’s gavel.
I dropped a pretty penny on an original sketch by an Italian master just to keep up the pretense that we were here for fun and not on any specific mission, and things were going smoothly despite the rising anticipation for our specific lot number to come on the docket.
“Last up for tonight, but certainly not least,” the clouds parted as the Auctioneer showboated, “we’ve got our most exclusive treasure on the docket, item 0693.”
I sat up a little straighter as the crowd cheered.
This was our target. Fucking finally. I readied myself for the bidding, guessing from the sheer excitement of the surrounding hoard that the competition would be fierce.
Just as I was starting to think nothing was worth all this hype, she walked out.
I hadn’t expected the last auction item of the night to be a woman. Some stolen artifact, maybe, or the unknown original of a painting by an artist whose other works were in places like Paris and New York City.
But it was clear even before I saw the numbered sign around her neck that we weren’t here for something as petty as a priceless object.
Our intended acquisition was lithe and elegantly curved, her body poured into a dress that stunned me, made my mouth turn dry—deep blue silk-satin something that glided over her skin like the cool ebb of the tide, decked out in jewels that only made her look like the priceless diamond she clearly was.
The girl’s eyes narrowed, a hand coming up to block the bright lights from her view.
I could tell instantly that the wobble in her step was largely due to nerves, even if the heels she was wearing must not have helped matters.
Her face, lovely and open and sweet enough that I could practically taste it all the way back in the crowd, was a portrait of innocence that didn’t belong here.
This wasn’t a safe place for the innocent.
It wasn’t even a safe place for someone like me.
“Some lucky bidder will get the right to the greatest pleasure a man can experience,” the Auctioneer’s voice rang out through the speaker system. “being the first man to ever fuck a sweet young thing.”
This time, the crowd was near-feral, the volume of their roars practically seismic.
“Fucking hell,” I heard Devin swear, and Alex and I exchanged a look that shared in Dev’s sentiment. My first thought, a hope more than a real possibility, was that there was some kind of mistake.
But the more I thought back over my father’s instructions, the more this started to make sense.
His insistence that we’d be knocking Ferrara down a peg.