Six
“ W hy is a meal three times a day required?” Perrie asked from her seat across from me, her arms crossed stiffly over her chest.
I was already regretting my earlier words as we entered the second hour of our contract negotiation.
Offering it on a whim had been a shit idea, but I figured that she would agree to most of my requirements easily.
How wrong I’d been.
Turns out, the meek daughter of the city’s mayor was actually as stubborn as a mule—a very pretty mule, but a mule nonetheless.
We’d managed to get through most of Perrie’s items of negotiation: she wanted to wear the clothing of her choice, keep all of her hobbies, see her brother, and have autonomy over her own body.
All things that were easy to agree to—though bringing her little brother here to see her would be a huge fucking headache as Ethan Chandler was still blowing up my phone demanding that I return Perrie to Amante.
It seemed that the man had decided to throw all of his bets behind Alessandro in hopes that he would protect him from my ire. It made me curious just how much the Italian mafioso had paid for the omega sitting in front of me.
Seeing her now, I knew I would have given more than the ten million I initially paid.
Perrie was dressed simply in a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt, but that did little to hide the delicate beauty that had been egregiously covered by her wedding makeup yesterday.
Her deep red hair was pulled out of her face with a little plastic claw clip, showing off her high cheekbones and heart-shaped face, her plump little lips twisting into an even deeper frown while she waited for me to answer her question.
I’d reread her file this morning and knew where that nagging sense of familiarity from the wedding came from—apparently she’d been treated by Eli. I had a hazy memory of a skinny bald teenager who we’d caught eavesdropping the night that a woman decided to put a couple of bullets in me.
“How else are we supposed to get to know each other as man and wife if we don’t spend any time together?” I didn’t add that she was going to be required to go to public functions with me. I’d get to that later when she finally agreed to eat a meal with me.
“But three times a day seems like overkill. Wouldn’t dinner every day suffice?” Perrie argued, her expression pinched.
Rhodes, who had been hovering faithfully behind me for the past two hours, exhaled a silent laugh that no one but me would have been able to hear.
He was having the time of his fucking life listening to me try and negotiate with a woman who was surprisingly steadfast in her wants and needs.
“It almost sounds like you don’t want to be around me at all.” My voice was dry as I watched as her expression shifted into something unreadable, her gray eyes shuttering as she looked away from me.
What she couldn’t hide, however, was her scent. If she truly didn’t like me, her fresh strawberry scent would have erred on the side of sour—the way it had been yesterday when she was walking down the aisle as if she was walking to her execution rather than her marriage.
But instead, her strawberry scent seemed to bloom and fill my office. It was so that even Rhodes made a gurgling noise from behind me as the scent reached him.
“Look,” I said, leaning forward so she could see my expression clearly. “I intend for this marriage to be just that: a marriage. That includes, eventually, sex and other intimate situations. If you can’t even have a few meals with me, I’m afraid you are going to be in for a very long, and uncomfortable marriage.”
Perrie’s cheeks flushed red and confirmed that she was probably untouched. The thought filled me with a sense of anticipation, my inner alpha purring with pleasure at the idea of being the first person to ever claim the omega in front of me.
“But I don’t love you.” Perrie’s voice was tiny as she spoke and a tiny thread of guilt filled me. One that I promptly shoved right back down. I didn’t have time to feel guilty.
“Not every marriage needs love,” I told her, my mind going to my own parents. They couldn’t stand to be in the same room as each other most of the time—but neither of them had picked each other.
My grandfather had chosen my mother from one of the branch families and my father had never forgiven him for it. Especially after he made my father continue the marriage after my mother’s abduction and she was barely a wife.
I wanted more than that, though the jury was still out on romance and love. Love had been the most common denominator when it came to my men being killed or breaking their oath to me.
It made you distracted, and weak. But there was no reason that Perrie couldn’t be a friend and a partner.
Perrie’s gaze fell to her lap and I realized that my words had been the exact wrong thing to say. “Were you expecting to love that other pack?”
My question was soft, but held a note of incredulousness that I couldn’t quite quell.
“No,” she said with a shake of her head. “I guess I wasn’t.”
She sighed and there was thirty seconds of silence before she finally let her arms relax. “How about two meals a day.”
Apparently, she was back in negotiation mode.
“Fine, but I get your first heat then.”
Perrie blinked. “Those two things aren’t nearly on the same level.”
“I think one meal to yourself every day until your heat adds up to a commensurate value,” I shot back.
“But I thought you said you wouldn’t touch me unless I wanted you to?” Her frown deepened as confusion filled her face.
Failing to hide my smirk, I shrugged one shoulder. “Who says you’re not going to want me to touch you by the time your heat gets here?”
Gray eyes widened and that damned strawberry scent filled the room with even more fervor than before.
“Christ,” Rhodes muttered from behind me as I heard him take in a sharp inhale of it.
The potency of it made my head spin and the urge to launch myself across the couch and chase the scent to its source very nearly took me over.
“Pet, you’re going to have to learn how to tamp down on that scent of yours or else there isn’t a contract in the world that can protect you,” I said through gritted teeth, turning and snatching the can of coffee grounds that I kept on the side table and shoved it under my nose, letting the scent cleanse my palette and save me from making a fool of myself.
I always kept it here for when emotions ran high and designation pheromones tried to get in the way of my dealings. Even if we did occasionally shoot at each other, no one wanted an all-out alpha brawl.
I wanted to pass the can back to Rhodes too, but I knew the alpha would be too stubborn to accept it. No, my second preferred to keep a white-knuckled grip on his control and refused to let himself appear weak.
That was going to have to change if he was going to become a pack with me and the omega in front of us.
He hadn’t agreed to it yet and the incredulous look he’d shot me last night told me that I had my work cut out for me. But if my selfish father had taught me one thing it was this: Keanes got what they wanted. Always.
And I wanted Perrie and I wanted Rhodes.
“S-sorry,” Perrie stuttered, all of her earlier bravado gone as she seemed to be trying to collect herself. “It’s still new and I don’t even realize I’m doing it half of the time.”
I frowned at that. Everything I read in her file about her sickness told me that she’d been given a clean bill of health, so why was she struggling with her designation so much now?
“Didn’t you go through the state mandated training at the omega center when your designation revealed itself?”
The government required all alphas and omegas to go through a six week training so as not to cause chaos when we were out in society. Omegas were taught how to control their often volatile emotions and make sure their scents didn’t drive any random passing alpha wild, and alphas were taught the same—though alphas got more of a ‘if you fuck up there is a life prison sentence waiting for you’ discussion rather than the slap on the wrist most omegas got.
Even Rhodes and I had to do a version of it, albeit a private one taught by a crotchety old alpha that read the textbook in the most monotone voice imaginable, but we’d completed it when we were sixteen.
Perrie’s cheeks filled with color, and much to my surprise, she shook her head. “My designation revealed itself a year before I was diagnosed and my parents never enrolled me once I was finished with treatment…”
I cursed inwardly as the mental task-list that I’d been keeping grew a little bit bigger as I realized she would need a teacher and a tight-lipped one at that.
“That’s illegal. All omegas are supposed to get the training within a year of their designation,” Rhodes cut in and I turned to find his jaw tense with anger.
“Is it really that surprising?” Perrie asked, some of her earlier fire returning again. “Also, isn’t illegal sort of your bread and butter? An omega not going through the system isn’t really that surprising when you buy and sell us for profit.”
“We don’t deal in the skin trade,” Rhodes bit out. “I think you’ve got us mistaken for the Russians.”
One slender red brow lifted as Perrie delivered a line that was so devastating that it even took my breath away. “Well, you bought me didn’t you? Don’t you think that high horse you’re sitting on is looking a little bit like a miniature pony at this point?”
Despite the jab, I very nearly laughed at the absolutely flummoxed expression on Rhodes’ face as he opened and closed his mouth like a fish, trying to come up with any response to shoot back at the omega.
I needed to get this negotiation back on track or else it was about to turn into verbal fisticuffs between my future wife and my second-in-command. These two would need a lot of careful cajoling to come together and my head ached as I tried to figure out how to get them to get along.
“Okay, let’s reel it back in you two. We can refine the details of the contract later on, but I think this will do for now. Do you have any other questions for me?”
Perrie continued to glare at Rhodes for another beat before those gray eyes slid over to me and her expression slackened from anger into one of anxious curiosity.
“Yeah, um, how old are you exactly?”
“Your expression was priceless,” Rhodes teased as we sat in the car heading to the meeting with Amante that he’d been hounding me for since we left the church yesterday.
I wanted to put it off longer until Perrie really settled into the idea of becoming my wife and omega, but now the man was getting the other families involved and I was worried that he was going to sow enough discord that the other three families would start a war over a perceived territory dispute.
The only problem was said territory was a twenty-two-year old woman who had made an audible gasp when I told her I was thirty-seven-years old.
“Last time I checked, you’re also nearing forty,” I reminded him tartly, glancing down at my phone and reading the text from Oona. Apparently, she’d finally managed to get Perrie to eat something for the first time in nearly forty-eight hours. That was a win at the very least.
Even as we argued the details of her contract, the omega’s stomach had been growling like she was keeping one very pissed off alpha in it.
Perrie hadn’t seemed too put off by the fifteen year age difference between us, even if her brows had shot straight up when I told her. I’d had almost six months to get over my reticence, but I was worried she would outright refuse and decide Pack Ricci was a better option being that the four of them were between twenty-eight and thirty.
But after digesting the information, the woman gave me a little shrug and moved on to continuing her earlier argument about meal times. We’d finally settled on two meals a day of my choice amongst other things. In another life, Peregrine Chandler would have probably made a hard-ass defense attorney with her ability to bull-headedly argue her case until she was victorious.
Rhodes shrugged. “And I’m not the one marrying her.”
Not yet at least, I said to myself silently as I responded to Oona’s text, asking her to keep a basket of snacks in Perrie’s room. I’d noticed it yesterday, but seeing her in a pair of form-fitting jeans and t-shirt confirmed that the omega was far too skinny.
It had been six months since she was last in the hospital, so it stood to reason that she should have rounded out a bit, but her collar bones still stuck out just a bit and her cheeks were hollowed when some of her earlier pictures showed them to be softly rounded, like the women in renaissance paintings.
I hardly knew the woman, but seeing her like that nagged at some deeper nurturing instinct that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge yet.
“We’re two minutes out,” Sullivan, my usual driver, called as he turned into the parking garage of City Hall.
If the righteous, upstanding citizens of the city knew what sorts of meetings actually happened here, they would lose their minds.
Sullivan parked and we waited for the all-clear from my security team before stepping out.
Despite it being a late-summer evening, a chill crept through the underground parking structure as one team stepped onto the elevator and went up first, radioing down when it was my turn to take the elevator to the fifth floor where the mayor’s office was.
It was probably overkill to bring a fifteen-man security team with me for a simple meeting like this, but I knew the other four heads would be doing the same and it was all just a silly game of ‘my guns are just as good and shiny as yours, so don’t fuck with me.’
“You’re good to go in,” Callum informed me as soon as I stepped off of the elevator. “But just note that they’re all already in there.”
Irritation filled me at being the last to arrive. One glance at my watch told me that I was exactly on time for the meeting.
That just meant that they’d all coordinated an earlier start time without me, trying to herd me and make me feel like I’d lost control of the situation.
“Do you have everything we’ll need?” I asked Rhodes as we waited for Callum to open the double doors that led into Ethan Chandler’s office.
Rhodes shot me a solemn nod, his dark eyes darting around and taking in everything around us. His lighthearted mood from the car was gone and he’d settled completely into his role as my second, gauging the various risks that were being presented to me on a silver platter right now.
Callum pulled the doors open and I stepped inside. Sucking in a deep, steadying breath I plastered a neutral smile on my face and greeted the people inside. “Gentlemen and lady, it seems as if I’m a little bit late to the party. I do apologize.”
The large office was packed full of security lining the walls around the circular conference table where most of our brokerings had happened over the past two hundred years of criminal activity in the city.
There was a place for all five of us and an additional one for the mayor that was supposed to be the neutral party to settle our disagreements. I searched each face critically as it turned in my direction, trying to see where each person stood when it came to our impending topic of discussion.
Amante was a bastard who kept a ham-fisted grip on the drug trade going in and out of the city, beating out whatever cartels tried to sell, but he was also the easiest of the bunch to read. The older man was clearly still pissed about my crashing his little wedding ceremony yesterday, his eyes sparkling with barely repressed anger as he shot me a smirk.
I ignored him. Amante was the least of my worries right now.
Directly next to him was Ethan Chandler who was shaking like a terrified chihuahua as he glanced between me and who I surmised he’d chosen to be the master of his leash.
On Amante’s other side sat Jifein Cheng, the head of the Chinese Triad and the only female family head in our little quorum. She was an elegant older woman with nearly gray hair and an air of superiority about her. Cheng also tended to side with Amante on most things as their relationship was more symbiotic than the rest of us—the Triads controlled the city ports and Amante’s drugs came through those ports.
If Amante wanted Perrie back, then Jifein Cheng would be his biggest defender. But she also thought Chandler was a fucking idiot, so that was a point in my favor.
Next to her sat Shuuhei Saito, the only member of the group that was close to me in age. Saito had come into power of the Yakuza at the same time I rose within the Keane family. Money laundering and nightclubs were his game, not the flashiest out of all of us, but it solidified his place as a voting member of our tenuous alliance.
I could get Shuuhei to agree to almost anything thanks to a maybe misplaced sense of camaraderie that had grown between us over the past few years.
The last member of the five families was Vladimir Volkov and he looked over at me last, his too-bright blue eyes taking me in cooly before his gaze slanted away from me again.
Volkov was always the wild card of our meetings. No one was even sure exactly what the Russians got up to and anyone who pried tended to end up dead.
I knew they dealt in flesh—something that made me a little bit queasy to think about. They also provided the girls that the rest of us utilized to blow off steam and I hadn’t forgotten the woman who’d managed to fire off two rounds at me in my own home.
Yulia had been the softest of Volkov’s working women before she’d married and was widowed by one of my own men, but it still made me realize that trusting any of these people too much was a recipe for a quick death.
Volkov pretended as if nothing mattered, not these meetings, nor the inner workings of our city. But if my sneaking suspicions were correct, the man was far more dangerous than he looked.
“Oh dear,” Amante said, glancing at his watch as I sat down in my seat and we finally reached the majority needed to actually hold this meeting. “Did I tell you the wrong time to show up? Apologies, Keane, I’ve been a little frazzled as I’m sure you can imagine.”
I ignored the jab, feigning ignorance. “I have no clue what you mean.”
Amante didn’t take the bait, but fortunately Ethan Chandler wasn’t as smart. It seemed his daughter’s intelligence wasn’t a genetic trait after all because the man slammed his fists on the table and pointed at me. “You stole my daughter, my baby!”
No one reacted to his little outburst. Despite his shaking voice and teary eyes, we could all see his act from a mile away. Chandler didn’t give a shit about his daughter or else he wouldn’t have sold her in the first place.
“You must realize that interrupting a wedding and stealing the bride does have consequences, Edison,” Amante said, using my first name to patronize me.
Unruffled, I held a hand up and Rhodes supplied the files that I’d brought along with me. I’d made enough copies of everything for everyone to get one. “I have a contract signed by one Ethan Chandler that upon my very generous donation to his gubernatorial election campaign, that I would be offered the hand of his omega daughter once her doctors cleared her.”
The documents were signed and dated over six months ago and notarized on that same day. Chandler had come to me begging for a handout and he’d been the one to offer Perrie to me, not the other way around.
Cheng’s dark eyes skimmed the document. “This would never hold up in court as the United States Government doesn’t acknowledge betrothals, Keane.”
“It’s not the government that is making this decision. Do you have a similar contract, Alessandro?” I asked, using Amante’s same tactic.
Amante, who had also been reading the contract, glanced over at Chandler like he was a bug that he wished to squash. “I do.”
Holding my hands up in a genial gesture I offered him my best smile. “Then by all means, let’s see it. If yours is dated earlier than mine, then I will drop this and bring the omega back to you and you can marry her off to those weird little sons-in-law of yours—oh, wait—I guess they can’t really be considered that anymore can they?”
Amante’s grip on the paper tightened, crumpling it.
“You do have a contract, don’t you?” Saito asked, clearly hopping onto my side as he lifted a dark brow at the Italian mafioso.
One of Amante’s men stepped forward with a similar file folder and handed it to him. He passed it to Chandler first, who swallowed visibly as he handed it to Volkov who barely even looked at the thing before it got to me.
Amante’s contract was signed almost a month after mine.
“What do these contracts even matter? She is a better fit for my boys age-wise at least, what young girl wants to be tethered to a man fifteen years older than her?” Amante huffed, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Alessandro, if I recall correctly, you and your late wife had a nearly twenty year age difference and she was one of ours.” Volkov’s thickly accented words were the first he’d spoken since I’d entered the room.
Trying not to show my shock over his sudden interjection, I schooled my expression and nodded. “Besides, Perrie and I have already reached an understanding and I have her consent, can you really say the same?”
Amante’s face began to turn purple as he glanced between me and Ethan Chandler who looked about two seconds from bolting from the room entirely.
“And what if she ends up the same way that all of the women in your family seem to end up? Half-crazy and stuck in a tower like some tragic fairytale princess?”
The Italian’s words hit like a brick and I reeled back in my seat as if he’d thrown a physical punch at me. Even the rest of the people in the room stiffened with shock as they all wheeled to face the man.
Any mention of Aine Keane was a taboo and all five heads knew it. My mother had been the living victim of the last turf war when the Serbians had kidnapped her and done unspeakable things because my father refused to sell them guns. While the Keane family wasn’t the only source of weapons in the city, we specialized in making the kinds of guns that would be completely untraceable to the authorities.
After the abduction and torture of my mother, the Serbians had been wiped out completely and six families became five. At this moment, looking at Amante, I was half-tempted to try and make it four.
“If you ever hope to purchase another Keane weapon,” I told him slowly, my voice low as I tried to contain my anger. “Then you have better shut your fucking mouth and never mention my mother again.”
Tension hung heavy in the air as Amante seemed to realize the faux pas that even the other three heads wouldn’t forgive him for. There was a largely unspoken rule that the women and children of the families were off-limits when it came to our disputes.
Honor among criminals was rare, but to keep this alliance together it was required on some level.
Pushing my chair back, I stood, gathering my file folder and handing it to Rhodes. “This meeting has been… ah… eventful to say the least. I’d invite you to my wedding, but I’m more of a private affair sort of man. Have a fantastic day.”
Turning on my heel I swept out of the office, my men falling into step behind me as I went.
“Are you all right?” Rhodes asked once we’d gotten on the elevator again.
I didn’t answer, the storm cloud that always seemed to form over my head at the mention of my mother was too thick for me to even form a response to his well-meaning question.
Perrie isn’t my mother, I had to remind myself as we drove back to the mansion. Not everyone is as breakable as she was.