Seventeen
“ T hanks for letting me know, I’ll handle it just as soon as I’m done here,” I told Rhodes and hung up my phone, gripping it tightly in my fist as I tried to get a hold on my emotions.
Anger coursed through me that had nothing to do with the man who was sitting across the table from me. Shuuhei Saito had been a hard man to track down for the last week and made it to where I only returned home to change and put my head down for a few minutes before heading back out again.
We were currently sitting in a small, run-down diner that served as one of our neutral meeting grounds outside of City Hall.
Perrie’s scans had thankfully come back all clear and my omega was healthy. Unfortunately that knowledge came with a reminder that Ethan Chandler was, and would always be, a weak-willed bastard who reneged on his promises. Even if that promise was to his own fucking daughter.
“Problem?” Shuuhei asked as he slowly stirred sugar into his cup of coffee, willfully oblivious to my men glaring at him from over my shoulder. His own men, dressed in their bright and colorful suits—a trademark of the Saito Yakuza—were also starting to get twitchy while they waited for us to get down to business.
I took a sip of my own coffee and tried not to grimace. Sally, the owner of this diner, may have been a scary ass woman with a cigarette perpetually perched in between her cherry-red lips, but even after twenty years her coffee still hadn’t improved much.
“Nothing more than the usual shit,” I told him offhandedly, not wanting to give away my frustrations that had been building over the last two weeks since my interrupted wedding night. “So tell me, Saito, what have you been up to?”
It was phrased like we were two friends catching up, but Shuuhei knew that I wouldn’t have arranged a meeting like this unless I had a really good reason and I had really good fucking reason.
Two weeks ago, after a brawl broke out at my wedding, I received news that our biggest shipment of the year so far had been intercepted and my men had been ambushed.
Fifteen casualties and the weapons were gone. The only thing left behind? The body of one of Shuuhei Saito’s men. One that I recognized from our last all family meeting the day Alessandro Amante tried to protest my marrying Perrie.
My knee-jerk reaction—if I ever gave into those—would have been to get revenge for the young men who had died leaving their wives, children, and other family members behind for some fucking guns.
But then I took a step back and viewed the scene as a whole. I was no expert on crime scenes, but even to me the scene that had been set forth on a backroad upstate had been too perfect. Almost theatrical.
And at the center of the dead bodies of my men was Shuuhei’s man who had been posed, almost like he was a flag exclaiming: ‘The Japanese did it!’
“The same as always. You know how it goes.” Shuuhei’s voice was flat, all of the friendly inflection from earlier gone as his dark eyes narrowed at me. “Now are you going to tell me why you’ve really called me here, Edison? Last I checked, we’re not the type of friends to get a casual brunch on a Friday afternoon.”
It was a risk to let him know I was onto him if he had been the one who’d ambushed my men and stolen my shipment… but as I stared at him my instincts, which had never steered me wrong before, were telling me to trust him.
“One of my shipments was ambushed two weeks ago and this,” I gestured for my men to bring the little gift that I’d brought for him, “Was left at the scene.”
We’d kept the body of Shuuhei’s man on ice, and while pulling him out in the late summer was probably not a good idea, I’d always had a flair for the dramatic.
They deposited the long black body bag on the ground next to our table and Collum, the man who usually took over for Rhodes when he couldn’t be with me pulled the zipper down to reveal the grayed face of the man who had been the bane of my existence for the past two weeks.
“Haruto!” One of the men behind Shuuhei gasped, only to be silenced by the guy standing next to him.
“Oh, so you recognize him? Good that makes this so much easier.” Reading my chin on my palms, I waited for Shuuhei to react to the body next to us.
The head of the Saito family stared down at the still face of his man, his own expression neutral despite the storm raging in his dark eyes. “What did you do to him?”
“Me?” I asked, surprised. “I did nothing, though I’m still not sure if one of my own men who were gunned down had something to do with it. See, I found good old—Haruto—was it? Yes, Haruto. I found Haruto here at the center of a sea of my own men’s bodies and my weapons shipment completely gone.”
Shuuhei seemed to finally be connecting the dots, his gaze darting in between Haruto and me like a ping pong ball. “And you think I had something to do with it.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, all signs point to it being a job done by the Japanese, which is strange because I thought we were allies.”
“We are allies,” Shuuhei insisted and I watched as the men behind him started to get a little bit twitchy, their hands shifting to their barely concealed weapons.
“Really, then why are your men looking as if they want to put a few more bullet holes in me and my guys?” I nodded at the men who shifted guiltily on their feet as Shuuhei whirled around to look at them, barking orders in Japanese.
I didn’t understand what was said—Japanese was one of the languages I could never truly grasp when I was being tutored as a young boy—but it was clear he was arguing with them and they were arguing back.
Then, they filed out of the diner except for one man, the one who had been arguing with Shuuhei the most. He remained standing right behind his boss, eyeing me like I was the devil coming to take him away.
“You didn’t need to send them out,” I told him, fiddling with one of the rings on my fingers.
Shuuhei leaned forward, his expression serious. “My men did not do this to yours, I swear it. Haruto has been missing for a month now. We just figured he’d run off with one of his women. My family has been set up.”
I’d figured out as much before this meeting with Shuuhei. But now I had him right where I needed him to be. “Then prove it. Find out who killed your man, and inevitably it will lead me to who killed mine.”
Shuuhei glanced down at Haruto again, the tendon in his jaw twitching as he clenched it. “Deal. Can I take him with me? His mother deserves to be able to bury him.”
I nodded my approval and Shuuhei gestured to the man behind him. The guy ducked outside, returning with two others to carry the body out as Shuuhei himself slid free from the booth and turned to leave.
“Saito,” I called after him, making him pause. “Find out who did this or I will assume that it was you, and while I want to avoid a war at all costs, I will avenge the fifteen men of mine that were taken from this world far too soon and you are at the top of my list.”
Shuuhei nodded solemnly, swallowing hard before he turned to leave, the golden threads of his embroidered suit jacket catching on the bright afternoon light outside as his men closed rank around him.
We waited for them to clear out completely before Collum leaned down next to my ear. “Should we head back to the estate now, Mr. Keane?”
“No,” I said, standing up from the booth and straightening my suit. “There’s one more stop I have to make.”
Ethan Chandler’s screams were still ringing in my ears as I sat in my study for the first time in weeks, sipping on two fingers of whiskey and trying to put all of my raging thoughts into order.
He’d been home and was, of course, holding a dinner with potential donors when I arrived.
When he’d refused to speak to me in another room, I’d put his face into a very hot bowl of soup right in front of said investors. I didn’t give a shit whether I embarrassed him or not. The man deserved it after yanking his daughter’s health insurance away the way he had.
I’d first made a deal with Chandler in order to secure political clout when the man eventually ran for governor of the state. One thing my father had always reiterated to me in between long-winded lessons was that it was always beneficial to have enough allies with everyday legitimacy in your pocket in case you needed to get out of a tight space.
It had made total sense on all fronts to marry Peregrine Chandler. She was what I was looking for in a wife: younger, removed from the traditions of the Keane family, an omega and a fertile one at that, and she came with the political backing of her increasingly powerful father.
Never did I stop long enough to really consider what I was signing up for and today when Rhodes called me to tell me that Chandler had pulled her insurance had been enough for me not to care about Chandler’s fucking support even if he became the president of the whole damn country.
I would find another politician to support, and if I had anything to do with it, I was going to end Chandler’s political career in the process.
I’d just add it onto my never ending to-do list, right under finding out who the fuck was messing with my business if it wasn’t the Japanese.
My money was on Alessandro Amante.
The man was still pissed that I’d stolen his bride right out from under his chosen pack’s noses. It made the most sense for him to be the one fucking with me and my bottom line now.
Or at least it did on paper.
As I sat staring out into the garden, mulling over the events of the past two weeks, the pieces just weren’t fitting together the way they usually did when I puzzled my way through a problem.
It was what had helped me survive years in this estate while my mother was cloistered away in the tower and my father pushed me harder than any child ever should have been pushed. I could look at a problem in my mind and twist and turn it over like a mental Rubik’s cube until everything was seamless and I had a solution.
But try as I might, even blaming Alessandro Amante wasn’t a smooth solution. Amante, while not being my favorite of the leaders of the five families, had been around the longest. He’d also been the one, after the Irish, to lose the most in the last war.
He wouldn’t risk it all for one omega, would he?
The other two: Jifein Cheng and Vladimir Volkov were also not ones to rock the proverbial boat and mess with the relative peace the city had experienced for the past almost forty years.
Or would they?
The more I tried to think about it the more baffled I became. What if it wasn’t any of the five families but someone else entirely?
The Columbians in the South had been trying to stake their claim on Shuuhei’s drug market for years, so it would maybe make sense that they were trying to get me to do their dirty work of annihilating him so they could take over. Not to mention there had been an increase in the more rugged MCs in the North wanting a bit of what made our city so lucrative.
As I continued to try and parse my way to some kind of reason for all of this, someone knocked on the door.
“Sir,” Oona’s voice came through the thick wood. “It’s dinner time, would you like me to bring it to you here?”
“No,” I called, putting my barely touched glass of whiskey down on the desk. “I’ll take it in the dining room with my wife.”
There was a long pause before, “All right, I’ll set you a place.”
The way she said it was odd, but I pushed it away thinking I was just tired. It had been so long since I’d slept in my own bed or slept much of all for that matter, and I couldn’t help the strange feeling of anticipation at seeing Rhodes and Perrie again.
Truthfully, I’d never been away from Rhodes longer than a day or two, so two weeks without him had been a test of willpower that had only won out because I knew he was right where he needed to be: next to my wife.
I greeted the security at the door of the dining room with a smile and waited for them to open the doors before sweeping into the dining room to greet the two people inside.
“You’re back early,” Rhodes commented as I settled into my seat, his dark eyes warm as Oona set a plate of food down in front of me. “I thought you’d be busy all night with that last thing we talked about.”
“Well, I only stayed for the first course, and let me tell you, the soup there has nothing on Oona’s.” As if to punctuate my words, I took a sip of the homemade minestrone that Oona was famous for, relishing in the taste of home as I settled in for a nice night of conversation with the two people who I’d missed more than I would ever admit out loud.
“But it’s handled?” Rhodes asked around his own mouthful of soup.
I shot him a venomous grin, hoping he would get my message without me needing to spell it out for him, and when his dark eyes lit up with glee I knew he understood what my expression meant.
Turning, I finally faced Perrie for the first time in two weeks. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been flushed and writhing against me, practically begging for me to fuck her.
And now?
She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt with the logo of the local university on it, a fork in one hand and her camera in the other as she seemed to be flipping through the photographs she’d taken for class.
Perrie also hadn’t looked up at me once since I’d come into the dining room.
“How have classes been, pet?” I asked, prodding her for some kind of acknowledgement.
But Perrie didn’t look up.
“Fine,” she muttered, ladling a spoonful of soup into her mouth, her gray eyes still on her camera screen.
I looked over at Rhodes who shrugged, though he seemed to be enjoying his damned self watching me fail to speak with my wife because there was a ghost of a shit-eating grin on his face.
“Why don’t you put the camera down so we can have a normal dinner conversation like always?” I tried again.
Perrie looked like she wanted to roll her eyes, but instead she shut the camera down and put it aside, her eyes meeting mine. I found them to be exceedingly cold, the gray turning into silver ice as she looked at me.
“And what do you propose we talk about?” Perrie asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
I floundered for a moment, trying to figure out exactly where I’d gone wrong when, up until this point, I thought my marriage was going along swimmingly compared to how I thought it would be.
“I don’t know, maybe you can tell me about your first few weeks of classes? Or your doctor’s appointment today? It’s been two weeks, pet.”
This time I actually did get an eye roll. “Why would I tell you that when Rhodes seems to have been doing a bang up job rehashing my every move to you while you were who knows where.”
“I was working—” I started, surprised at the flash of anger in her gray eyes. I was also trying my hardest not to smile because despite my omega’s tart mood, her temper was adorable. Though, I was sure pointing that out would definitely not win me any points in this situation. “Are you really angry with me?”
I wasn’t sure why, but the prospect of it made me a little bit excited.
“ No ,” Perrie insisted, looking away from me, her eyes darting to look out of the dining room windows and at the dim garden beyond. “Why would I be angry at you? Our marriage is just a contract after all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed as I’ve had a long day.”
With her chin held high, Perrie grabbed her camera and swept out of the room before the second course had even been served.
Sighing, I turned to Oona who was standing in the doorway to the kitchen with a cart of plates of beef tenderloin and a sympathetic expression. “Will you bring a plate to my wife? It seems she’s going to finish dinner in her room.”
“Of course, sir,” Oona said with a shake of her head as she placed our meals in front of us before leaving to drop Perrie’s food off to her.
Silence hung heavy in the dining room as I slowly and methodically cut into my meat, barely even tasting it as I thought about my angry omega.
I was also doing my best to ignore Rhodes’ penetrating gaze, but once I was halfway through my meal it became too much and I finally dropped my utensils onto the porcelain with a loud clatter and glared at him. “What?”
“Nothing,” Rhodes hurried to say as he took a sip of his wine. “It’s just… I’ve never known you to be such a big idiot.”
“Watch it, McCreary, or you’ll pay for it later,” I growled, my shoulders stiffening with the insult.
Rhodes’ cheeks flushed a little bit, telling me that my threat was definitely not perceived as such, and if Perrie wasn’t pissed at me, I definitely would have dragged my second right up to my bedroom and shown him just how much I missed having him next to me.
But then Perrie’s angry eyes flashed in my head again and that cooled my ardor like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over my head.
“Aren’t you going to go after her and do what alphas do best?” Rhodes asked, clearing his throat.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I shot Rhodes a look of incredulity. Because why was my stoic alpha, the one who didn’t want a pack and certainly didn’t want to share my omega, commenting on my handling of my wife. “And what do alphas do best, Rhodes?”
“Soothe their omegas, boss.” Rhodes stood up and gave my shoulder a pat. “It’s good to have you back, I missed you.”
Then he left me all by myself with my half-eaten dinner and far too complicated feelings for how exhausted I felt.
Perrie was my wife, sure, but she also knew what I did for a living. It was never going to be a normal marriage.
But does that mean you don’t need to talk to her when you’re away on business? A nasty little voice whispered in my head as I stared at the aged-mahogany table that had been in my family for generations.
I ignored it. I hadn’t called Perrie because I wasn’t sure what to tell her. How was I supposed to explain all of the bloody shit I’d had a hand in for the past two weeks? She wasn’t used to this life and I’d seen the way her eyes had widened at the reception dinner when I’d missed a spot of blood on my ring.
No, it was better for her not to know anything at all.
I was back now and Perrie would have to get over her tantrum eventually. She was a grown woman, and from what I could tell, looked at everything with a level of logic that far surpassed her age.
I’d try again in the morning once I’d gotten a full night of sleep and hoped that cooler heads would prevail over a plate of scrambled eggs.