Two
T his wedding was tacky. From the sickeningly bright flowers to the bride currently being eaten alive by her dress.
I always thought Alessandro Amante had more style than this, but apparently the patriarch of the Italian mafia didn’t have a decorative bone in his body.
“I don’t owe you, nor your family any debt, Edison Keane,” Alessandro spat as several of the men who’d been guarding the doors drew their guns and pointed them in our direction.
A woman standing close to me squealed and dropped down into the pew in a faint, probably afraid she was about to get hit in the crossfire.
There was no pleasure to be had in the death of a civilian, but if I didn’t get what I came for, then I was going to rain hell on this entire damn place.
“That is up for debate, Amante, but alas, it isn’t you I’m here for.” Turning the muzzle of my gun, I pointed it at Ethan Chandler.
His wife paled and ducked behind her son as she turned as bright red as her hair.
“Edison,” the mayor of the city greeted me, offering me one of his plastic smiles. “I was just meaning to call you back.”
Our earlier conversation had ended with him hanging up on me, setting into motion the plan we’d come up with as soon as we learned the wedding would be taking place.
“Funny because you told me to go and fuck myself not even an hour ago,” I told him dryly, watching as the man flinched.
Alessandro’s green eyes ping-ponged between the two of us and I could practically see the man making calculations in his head before he spoke again. “Edison Keane, I don’t know what business you have with my future in-laws, but could it not have waited after the wedding? I didn’t realize that the Irish were so crass as to interrupt a sacred ceremony such as this.”
My lips pulled up into a smirk, making the man’s faux-friendly smile drop.
He really had no idea what I was talking about.
Ethan Chandler was a weasel, but damn did he know how to keep a secret.
Taking another step forward, I heard the sound of several safeties being flipped off echo off of the stone walls of the cathedral.
I ignored them. They wouldn’t risk shooting me. Not if they wanted to avoid a war. The last one had been in the seventies before I was born, but it had taken out almost an entire generation of young men. Young men that Alessandro Amante knew personally. The patriarch of the Amante family lifted his hand in the air, effectively stopping his men from putting a bullet in me.
Chandler’s eyes practically popped out of his head as I came closer and it looked like he was about to tuck tail and run like the scared little rabbit he was.
“Ethan.” My voice was soft as I spoke, offering him a genial smile. “Do you want to tell them, or should I?”
“What do you mean? T-there’s nothing to tell,” Chandler managed to stutter.
A heavy sigh left me.
“Fine. The hard way it is.” I turned to face the rest of the congregation again, tapping on the barrel of my pistol with one of my rings, waiting until all eyes were on me. Like clockwork, Rhodes slipped into the crowd and disappeared to complete his next task.
“Alessandro, what did he offer you for his daughter? Political power? Looking the other way when your guys get up to shit? His ear if he somehow manages to make it into the governor’s seat?” I listed off all of the promises that Ethan Chandler had given me when he visited my office in the city six months ago.
Most people thought that what my people did for a living was awful and immoral, but watching that man shop out his twenty-two-year-old daughter to the highest bidder had to be one of the worst things I’d ever seen.
Even the older generation of men in my family, who I by no means got along with, at least pretended to care about their children as they fiddled with the strings of their lives. The Keane family took care of their own—loyalty first—and this little rat wouldn’t know loyalty if it bit him in the ass.
“He promised me all of that too, and in return I gave him a blank check for all of his lovely political aspirations.”
Alessandro’s face shifted as I spoke from shock to a quiet, thunderous rage as he wheeled around to look across the aisle at Chandler.
“And I paid it—and paid it first, I believe. So, I’m here to re-collect my ten million, then I’ll get out of your hair. I’m sure the happy pack can’t wait to get back to their nuptials.”
I turned to look at the bride for the first time and met a pair of shocked gray eyes.
Something about them was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where, but I didn’t have time to focus on that.
Underneath the pile of tulle and ridiculous veil, I was sure she was pretty, though whoever dressed her should have been drawn and quartered because she looked like a bridal shop that had exploded all over her.
A curl of deep auburn hair peeked up from underneath the white material and as we looked at each other, the massive bouquet she’d been clutching for dear life slipped from her fingers and dropped to the ground.
“So, Ethan, what’ll it be?” I slanted a glance at the man who was now profusely sweating in his tuxedo.
Chandler’s next swallow was heavy, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down before he answered. “I can’t possibly pay that right now.”
“Really?” I wasn’t overly surprised. I figured as much seeing that the man had been ramping up his next campaign over the past couple of months. Regardless of my support, I had a feeling the weasel would be our new governor come next year. “Then I guess I’ll be taking what’s mine, Rhodes?”
My second-in-command seemed to materialize behind the priest, side stepping him and hauling the bride over his shoulder, causing the girl to squeak and try to struggle against him.
The pack she was supposed to be marrying grabbed for her but Rhodes danced out of their reach, pulling out his gold pistol with his free hand and pointing it at their leader. Elio wasn’t the worst person I’d ever met from the Amante crime family, and I’d known them since they were little boys, but right now he was getting in the way of the thing I’d paid for.
I half-expected them to whip their own guns out and it took me an extra beat to realize that they’d walked into the church unstrapped, the idiots.
“I don’t know how you think the two of you are going to get out of here when you’ve got about twenty guns pointed at your heads,” Elio hissed his eyes shifting away from his bride-to-be to the woman standing next to Alessandro.
I recognized her almost immediately even though she rarely appeared at public functions. Luscinia Amante, the shame of the Italian mafia. A deaf beta that was ignored up until the death of Alessandro Amante Jr. a few years ago. My sources told me that everyone in the Amante family disliked her, though, with the way Elio was looking at her, I wasn’t sure how accurate that information was.
Turning to Elio again, I shot the man a nasty smirk and laughed. “Do you really think I, the head of the Keane family, would walk into something like this by myself? Were you born yesterday?”
At my words, heads popped up amongst the wedding guests and suddenly there was an Irish gun for each of the Italians, effectively evening out the fight.
“Take her out to the car,” I told Rhodes, my ringed fingers continuing to tap on my gun.
Alessandro looked as if he was about to explode, his face turning a ruddy reddish-purple color.
“If you can get me my money, then you can have the omega back,” I lied, grinning at the older man before turning to offer Chandler a cheeky bow. “And Ethan, I do hope this was all worth it.”
Turning, I walked back down the aisle, following my second-in-command as he struggled to keep the wriggling omega from falling on her ass.
“Vote for Ethan Chandler,” my voice boomed off of the cavernous rafters of the cathedral. “He’s just dying to be your governor.”
“You have such a fucking flair for the dramatics,” Rhodes told me as we settled into the sleek black car that would take us back to the Keane estate. The car ride would take twenty minutes or so as the mansion sat on the outer fringes of the city.
I shrugged, my eyes going to the omega that was currently drowning in white tulle in her seat across from me.
She’d stopped struggling as soon as her butt hit the seat and was now staring out the car window, her arms crossed over her chest.
It surprised me. I’d assumed that she’d have started crying by now, but her face was completely impassive, going against what I typically thought of when I thought about omegas.
My first impression of her hadn’t been good—by all accounts she was reluctantly getting married—and yet she meekly walked down the aisle and resigned herself to that fate. Not an ounce of rebellion in her.
And yet, as soon as we were in an enclosed space and her sweet strawberry scent filled my nose as she glared out the window? It was clear that the seemingly resigned omega had at least a little bit of fire in her. It aroused the alpha instincts that I rarely ever gave into and promptly shoved back down.
This is all business, I reminded myself.
“I think our line of work should come with at least some theatrics. Bravado keeps people alive.” My mouth watered as I spoke, my eyes glued to the omega as she continued to look anywhere but at us. “Omega.”
Her spine stiffened a bit, her brightly painted lips opening for a moment before closing into a thin line as she continued to look out the window.
“Omega,” I repeated, more firmly this time.
There was another beat before she turned her gray-eyed gaze to me, silver fire alight as she glowered at me. “I have a name you know.”
“Watch it,” Rhodes warned, his voice low. I put a hand on his arm to stop him from getting into it with her the way I knew he wanted to. Rhodes was born to argue, but I had a feeling that would get us nowhere fast with this woman.
“Apologies, Peregrine—” I began but she cut me off again.
“Perrie.”
“Perrie,” I amended, sucking in a deep, calming breath before continuing. “I apologize for the unceremonious, ah, upheaval of your wedding day. I’m sure you understand my reasoning.”
“Because you bought me?” she asked with a scoff, rolling her eyes.
“Because I bought you first, pet,” I corrected, watching her shoulders stiffen at the endearment.
She opened her mouth, probably to tear into me, but then her gaze shifted over to Rhodes again and she seemed to think better of it and sank further into her seat without saying anything else.
Only a smart girl would keep her mouth shut when it came to Rhodes McCreary. I wasn’t sure if it was her instincts telling her not to mess with my second or if she could recognize that he was dangerous, but it seemed that moment of fire had dimmed completely out of a sense of self preservation.
“So, what’s your plan? Kidnap me and imprison me until my father pays you the ten million dollars? Because let me tell you that’s not going to happen any time soon.”
I knew as much. Ethan Chandler may have been a conservative politician thanks to the help of various mob ties in the city, but the man had a way of flushing money down the toilet almost as soon as it was deposited into his accounts.
He’d been juggling the Italians, the Russians, the Japanese, and the Irish for over twenty years. The only person who didn’t fuck with him was Jifein Cheng and the Chinese which probably made her the smartest of us.
Forty years ago his father, Marcus Chandler, had done the same but by all accounts the elder Chandler had a good head on his shoulders. One that his son hadn’t seemed to have inherited. He never double-crossed on deals and he always fulfilled his promises.
Folding my hands in my lap, I offered her what I hoped was an unthreatening smile. “You will not be a prisoner at my estate, Perrie, you will be a guest, and eventually, you will be my wife.”
I needed an omega to solidify my place at the head of the Keane family. The Irish were a superstitious lot and my people, as Americanized as they were, hadn’t been able to shake that in the nearly one hundred and fifty years since they came to the new world by boat.
But it couldn’t be just any omega. I needed one that had no ties to other mafia families—I wouldn’t make that mistake again—but also one that understood the lifestyle. Not only that, I needed a woman that wouldn’t let the older generation of my family control her.
The Chandler family had been on the edges of the seedy underbelly of the city since its conception.
That made Perrie Chandler the perfect candidate. Willing or not.
And judging by the frown she was giving me, I was willing to bet it was the latter.
In the grand scheme of things, her approval didn’t matter. I’d gotten what I’d come for and she would eventually fall in line. I was Edison Keane and I was used to getting my way.
Right on cue, the car turned into the long drive of the Keane Estate, the armed guards standing at the electric gate nodding as we passed.
“Welcome to your new home,” I told her, ignoring her grimace.
I had my omega and now I just needed to figure out how to get her to cooperate with me and soon as the date of our own impending nuptials was fast approaching.