His Forced Irish Mafia Bride (O’Connor Mafia #1)

Chapter One — Elena

Las Vegas never slept. That was the first thing I’d learned when I arrived here years ago. The thrilling and glamorous city operated on a relentless frequency, humming day and night with the same electric indifference. The Strip never dimmed; the casinos were never empty.

There were times when I found comfort in all the buzz, lights, and constant movement. There were even times when it excited me. Times when it made me feel like all this color and vibrancy couldn’t surround a life that was doomed to gloom. But tonight, I just wanted to disappear into all that buzz.

I shouldered through the exterior door and stepped into the alley behind the club where I worked. The night air carried the faint sweetness of a spilled cocktail from somewhere down the block. Adjusting the strap of my bag, I started walking.

I got about twenty feet before I felt the prickling at the back of my neck. The particular awareness of eyes on me, and certainly not the admiring type. Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d felt it; it had become a sad norm. And I’d learned to trust it the hard way.

Instead of stopping to look over my shoulder like a normal person would, I kept my pace even, my chin up, and kept walking.

Not that I was remotely more courageous than a normal person, just that I’d rather not put my mind on the kind of not-so-unfamiliar danger I was in.

So my mind sifted through the recent memories and settled on my conversation with Sofia over an hour ago when she’d found me hunched over my phone in the dressing room.

“Lena,” her voice had cut through the noise of blow dryers and overlapping conversation.

She had appeared in the mirror behind me, already half out of her cocktail uniform, sharp eyeliner and red lips still flawless at the end of a six-hour shift. She always looked like that—like she’d stepped out of an advertisement and wandered into real life by accident.

“You’re doing the thing with your face again.”

“I don’t have a thing.”

“You absolutely have a thing. Your eyes go all—” She made a pinching gesture near her temples. “Tight. Like you’re trying to hold your skull together from the inside.”

I put my phone face-down on the vanity.

“Do you always have to use those weird descriptions?” I questioned, sighing playfully. “I’m fine.”

Sofia dropped into the empty chair beside me and crossed her legs. “You got another message, didn’t you?”

It sounded like a question but I knew better than to think she was asking me an actual question.

I simply blinked.

“How much now?” she asked quietly.

Double.

“Well… more,” I answered, chuckling in attempt to sound not-so-bothered.

She sighed deeply like she often did whenever she was trying to choose her words carefully.

“Lena.”

“No, I’m fine,” I cut in without missing a beat. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

“These people might not want to back off, eventually. Maybe this is time to involve—”

“There’s no one to go to.” I turned back to the mirror. Up close, my stage makeup looked grotesque to me—the false lashes, the heavy contour, the overdrawn lips. “I signed documents. Everything they did was technically legal. There’s nothing a cop can do about a legal loan, Sofia.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she suggested, “You shouldn’t walk home alone tonight.”

“They just need to think I’m scared of them. You know, for their badass ego,” I said, raising a brow as a small smile crossed my face. “They aren’t going to do anything to me. I’m their moneybag, after all.”

Sofia watched me in the mirror for a long moment, and I could see the argument forming behind her eyes.

“Text me the second you walk through your door,” she finally said.

“Yes, mom.”

“Nothing is funny.”

Well, Sofia was right, wasn’t she?

As I tried to disappear into the crowd, my phone buzzed. I thought about keeping my pace and ignoring the phone until I got home. But I looked anyway.

It was a text that read:

End of week. Last warning. You know what happens next.

I slipped the phone back into my pocket.

And that was when someone grabbed my left arm.

I was stopped so fast I nearly stumbled.

He was broad-shouldered and unhurried, dressed in a dark jacket that did nothing to hide the particular kind of stillness that came with men who had done this many times before.

Behind me, I heard the second set of footsteps close the distance.

“Elena.” The man in front of me said my name the way people said the names of things they owned. Flat. Possessive. “You’ve been avoiding our calls.”

“I’ve been working.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. I was acutely aware of the second man at my back now, close enough that I could hear him breathe. “I’ll have something by the weekend—”

“The debt has doubled.” He said it conversationally. As though we were discussing the weather. “You understand what that means, yes? Every week you run, it doubles again. At some point, there is no number you can reach.”

I couldn’t exactly say why I half-rolled my eyes but I did.

He smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Here is the thing, Lenochka (Little Lena). Petrov might not be so interested in the number.” He tilted his head toward me slightly, and something in his expression shifted— a casual cruelty surfacing beneath the pleasantry.

“But there are other ways to settle what you owe. No one said you couldn’t work it off on other ways. You’re a pretty girl.”

I’d be lying if I said such dirty proposition was entirely new to me.

I was a showgirl, after all. Men, both drunk and sober, had made all sorts of stupid suggestions to me in that regard.

But did that make me feel any less cheap?

Absolutely not. Especially considering the fact that it was coming from these rascals.

“No,” I spat, utterly disgusted. The word came out sharp and shaking. I took a step back and collided with the second man, who grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise.

“Easy,” the second one said close to my ear. “Nobody wants trouble.”

I didn’t think. I scratched. I twisted, dragged my nails down the back of his hand, felt him hiss and tighten his grip, and I shoved with everything I had.

It bought me about three feet and a second of confusion before the first man caught my other wrist and yanked me sideways, and then we were at the mouth of the alley.

I screamed. Not for anyone in particular, it was just instinctive noise tearing out of my throat.

The first man swore and clamped a hand over my mouth.

My bag hit the pavement. I bit down on his palm and he jerked back, and I got one free swing that connected with nothing useful before the second man grabbed and lifted me off the floor.

The black car I sighted idling on the curb made my insides shake with the cold realization that this wasn’t business as usual. It wasn’t a scare tactic.

This is an abduction.

This is where it ends. I’ll be at their disposal. And I won’t even have a say in what happens next.

The car door opened and, almost immediately, the man holding the door opened fell to the floor.

As I watched in shock, the arms around me loosened. Not because the man holding me decided to be kind but because someone smacked the side of his head.

I hit the pavement on my feet by pure reflex and spun around. That was when I saw the man who had delivered the halting blow.

He was tall. No, not just that, he was broad. His suit was as dark as the aura his expression gave off. The kind of stillness that wasn’t calm but control. The kind that came from certainty that he was the most dangerous thing in any room he walked into.

He said something low in Russian.

The man with the raised hands went white.

They left. More like ran after trying to salvage their pride with threats as they passed me. And then it was just me and Mr. Dark and Dangerous in the alley behind the club. I was at a loss for what to do

He turned around.

His eyes were the first thing I registered.

Light grey, pale as winter sky, set beneath dark brows in a face that was all sharp angles and quiet severity.

His dark hair was swept back from his face, faint silver threading the temples.

He was dressed like the senior staff that regular customers had no reason to meet at the bank.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

His voice was deep. And… dark.

Is it possible for one’s voice to be dark? Sofia’s weird descriptions are rubbing off on me, damn.

I looked down at my wrist, which was already bruising, the marks of fingers dark against my skin. My bag was still on the pavement behind me. I became aware that I was still shaking.

“I’m fine,” I said, as usual.

He didn’t argue or call me out on my lie. He just reached down, picked up my bag, and held it out to me. I took it automatically. Our hands didn’t touch.

“Those men,” he said. “They will come back.”

“I know,” I agreed, a quick nod emphasizing my agreement.

“Not tonight. But they will come back.” He studied me a moment more. The grey eyes were unreadable, but they were somehow made me feel studied. “You cannot go home.”

“I don’t exactly have a lot of other options.”

“You have one.” He paused, as though weighing something. “Come with me. Somewhere safe, for tonight. In the morning, you decide what you do next.” He said it like he just stated a fact; there was no pressure in his tone.

I binked up at him. My heart was still hammering. My wrist hurt. Down the block, a group of tourists were taking photographs in front of a casino marquee, laughing about something, entirely unaware that my life had just collapsed into a single dark alley.

Every sensible thing I knew about the world said, “You do not get into a stranger’s car at two in the morning. You do not accept help from a man whose hands put another man on the ground in under four seconds. You do not mistake danger wearing a good suit for safety.”

But sensible had gotten me here, hadn’t it? Sensible had gotten me a doubled debt and a hand over my mouth and a car door opening onto nothing.

“Okay,” I said.

************************

The hotel was nothing like anywhere I’d ever been.

It was not a casino hotel. There were no ringing slot machines, no carpets printed with aggressive patterns, no smell of smoke and alcohol.

This was something quieter and more absolute.

It featured a private elevator that required a key and floors that didn’t creak.

A suite that opened onto floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the city, the Strip laying out below us like a circuit board lit from within.

I stood in the middle of the living room and didn’t sit down.

He set his jacket over the back of a chair and worldlessly moved to a bar cart near the window.

He poured two glasses of something amber, setting one on the coffee table in front of me without pressure or ceremony.

Then he sat in the chair across the room and looked at me with those still, exposing eyes.

Aside from the fact that I felt vulnerable, the air between us felt like it was charged with something like adrenaline.

I sat and picked up the glass, because my hands needed something to do, and I didn’t drink from it.

“They call themselves loan brokers,” I started.

“When I first came to Vegas I needed to make rent for three months straight—I was in between jobs, and someone at the club told me about a service that gave advances. Private lending. Fast approval, flexible terms.” I heard how na?ve it sounded, even then.

Especially then. “The interest rate was in the contract. I just didn’t—” I stopped.

“I didn’t really understand what compounding meant.

Definitely not the way it works when the people you’re borrowing from aren’t a bank. ”

He said nothing. He just watched me with those eyes that didn’t give anything away. No dismissiveness, impatience, or calculation. He listened the way very few people listened: like the information actually mattered.

“By the time I realized what was happening, I owed twice what I’d borrowed.

I’ve been making payments — I make payments every month — but the interest grows faster than I can cover it, and now they’re saying…

” I set the glass down. My throat was tight.

“They’re saying cash isn’t what they want anymore. ”

“I know what these men are,” he said, his tone simple.

“I figured you might.” I looked at him directly for the first time since we’d sat down. The lamplight softened the severity of his face without quite erasing it. “Who are you?”

He considered the question. “Someone who finds men like that inconvenient.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”

Yet he didn’t offer one. His eyes landed on my wrist. “You should put ice on that.”

I pulled my sleeve down. “I’ve had worse.”

Something shifted in his expression. Not pity—I would have gotten up and left for pity. It was something harder to name. A kind of recognition.

“You’re a showgirl,” he said. It wasn’t a question. The stage makeup I hadn’t fully removed probably told him that, the glitter still clinging to my collarbone, the remnant of false lash adhesive at my right eye.

“Yes. I’ve been for three years.” I paused. “You can check if you want. I’m not hiding anything.”

“I wasn’t asking if you were.”

The events of the alley were already acquiring the slightly unreal quality of things that happened to other people—the arms around me, the car door, the sound of someone hitting the ground —and underneath all of it was the knowledge that nothing had actually been solved.

“Tonight,” he said, “you sleep. Tomorrow, we talk about options.”

We.

That word landed somewhere in my chest and sat there.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked.

He held my gaze. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he uttered in a level tone, “I was there.”

Not quite knowing what to say in response, I swallowed.

I sat in a stranger’s suite in the small hours of the morning with a bruised wrist and half my stage makeup still on, and somewhere beneath the fear and the exhaustion, something else was moving. Something warm and dangerous and entirely inconvenient.

I didn’t understand it yet. I only knew that when I finally looked away from the window and back at him, he was still watching me with those quiet, unreadable eyes.

Okay, I’m drawn to him.

Somewhere between his unreadable expression and his fierce aura, I found myself wanting to be closer to him.

His presence was both comforting and unsettling, I didn’t know how to explain it.

While I didn’t fully understand the tension between us, I knew I couldn’t ignore it.

I should keep my distance, yes. But it seemed like fear and exhaustion seemed to be responsible for lowering my defenses.

I don’t know this man.

But, regardless of what I did(or didn’t do) something was sure: This night was the beginning of a change that might be irreversible—I just didn’t know if that would be to my salvation or devastation yet. I just didn’t want to leave.