Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cormac
As much as we both would’ve loved me doling out a spanking, we both know Joey’s not up to that. She yawned right after I threatened to get Shane, so I crawled back into bed with her until she fell asleep. She’s in a deep sleep because she didn’t react to me climbing out of bed. I watched her from the door for a good two minutes before shutting it silently. I’m back in my dad’s office with the others. There are nine of us now because my dad and uncles are here, too.
Three brothers married three sisters and wound up with six sons. Seamus and I are just bigger enough than our cousins to be noticeable. We inherited our dad’s size and that side of the family’s hair, which is lighter than the red some of my cousins got from our moms. But it’s like being in a hall of mirrors when we’re all in one room.
I texted them when Joey fell asleep, so they know about Pablo’s call. But we couldn’t discuss it on the phone, and no one wanted to text back and forth. So, now we’re where we can talk about it. I recognized my mom’s and aunts’ expression when I walked past the living room from the stairs. If our retaliation doesn’t live up to their fiercely protective expectations, they’ll strike back at whoever hurt Joey and Sean and whoever blew up my home.
Each of them was a mob daughter and mob sister. All three are mob wives and mob mothers. Two are the boss’s aunts and one is his mother. No three women better exemplify the phrase “mobbed-up” than Saoirse, Siobhan, and Breda O’Rourke. Hell, they didn’t even have to change their last names when they married. The O’Rourke clan division into separate families happened a few hundred years ago, but both sides keep having sons to carry on the name.
When Uncle Donovan was boss, they terrified the pish out of him. When he thought about getting some of us involved too young, Aunt Breda—Finn, Sean, and Shane’s mother—put a hit on one of Uncle Donovan’s men. The guy lived—barely and only because she let him—but my aunts and mom made sure Uncle Donovan understood he might’ve been the head of our branch, but they were the neck that held it in place.
The men in the Four Families might be physically bigger and stronger than the women in our families, but the world would do well to understand nothing we could come up with will ever match the lengths these women will go to when they’re protecting their family. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Whoever said that first hadn’t met a syndicate mother. Hell hath no fury like a mother. Period. Full stop.
“What do you want to do, Cor?”
Dillan and the others will defer to me. Dillan might lead our branch now, but whoever this is, went after my soon-to-be wife. It means I’ll lead whatever mission we go on, but I won’t plan alone.
“Niko told us to speak to Gabriele, but we never did. That was before Joey and Olivia met. They were supposed to have lunch today. Shite. Did anyone let them know?”
“Yeah. Thea saw Maria at work, so she passed along the message.”
Finn’s wife is a neonatologist at the same hospital where Maria Mancinelli—who’s Salvatore’s niece and Olivia’s sister-in-law—is a radiologist. If my mom and aunts are mobbed-up, then Maria Mancinelli is the most unassailable woman anywhere. She’s currently—by birth and by marriage—a Mafia niece, daughter, sister, wife, aunt, and soon-to-be mother.
“Thanks. I figured someone let her know since Luca isn’t pishing vinegar at me, but I wasn’t sure. Luca wouldn’t go to this extreme because my girlfriend stood up his wife, and both explosions happened before Joey and Olivia’s lunch date. Then again, is he secretly pissed he’s about to be related to us? That now Jesus might do business with both of us?”
“None of that explains Gabriele’s involvement if Niko told the truth.”
We all snort at Shane’s comment. Nikolai Kutsenko could look God in the eye and lie. That’s the level of chutzpah—audacity—the man has. He and his family rival the Diazes for being the most psychopathic.
We’re all a little touched, as Granny would say. Not quite right in the head. I don’t believe any of the men in my family are natural sociopaths, but no one does what we—the men in all Four Families—do without having some trained sociopathic tendencies. The bratva and Cartel are depraved. Considering what I’ve done, that’s saying something about those motherfuckers.
It’s not like the Cosa Nostra men are any better. Gabriele Scotto’s relationship with the truth is even more distant than any of ours. He’s a lawyer too, so he can bend the truth so far an angel would believe they’re a demon. Fuck. He could turn an angel into a demon. His name has never fit.
If it’s Gabriele, I’ll never let this go. We all helped him when his wife—back then, girlfriend—was in danger. I helped more than the others in my family. If he went after my girlfriend, after I gave him information against one of our men to protect her…His next murder trial won’t go the same way as his first. His arse will be someone’s bitch in federal prison.
“I’ll call him.”
I wake my phone and pull up my contacts. Yup. He’s saved in my phone too. He’s the tallest and broadest in that family—he’s basically Salvatore’s adopted nephew since he’s practically joined at the hip to Salvatore’s actual nephew, Carmine—so he and I have faced off plenty of times in fights. It takes two Mancinelli men to rival Seamus or me, but Gabriele’s pretty equal to my brother or me.
“What do you want, faccia de cazzo ?” Testicle face.
We have such endearing names for each other.
“What the feck did my girlfriend do to you, abhlóir .”
That roughly translates to a special kind of idiot who complains too much and thinks he’s far more intelligent than he is.
“I don’t even know who your girlfriend is.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
That might sound childish if I hadn’t once set his pants on fire…With him in them…On accident…Sorta.
“Fucking get on with it. Sinead and I are about to have dinner.”
Sinead O’Malley. You can’t get a much more Irish name than that short of Márgrég MacDonnell, Dillan’s wife.
“You might have gotten off for the last bombing, but you won’t get away with what you did today.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Gabriele and Sinead met when he was on trial for killing two teens when he allegedly set a bomb off at his lumberyard. The charges were plausible since he also owns a hardware store and has plenty of demolition supplies.
“The bomb that went off at my girlfriend’s place this morning as she and Sean were going inside. The bomb your bestie’s drone dropped on my house today that eviscerated it.”
Carmine’s always been a nosy fucker. Worse than Pablo. Now he has high-end, practically government grade drones that spy on shite. Fortunately for us, Sean has the same ones. Could this be the Cosa Nostra’s retribution for the drone strike Shane ordered on a Mancinelli house after shite went sideways for Carys? When you’re in families as tightly knit as the Four Families, a strike on one is a strike on all of them. Retribution isn’t a straight line. It’s a spider’s web. Could Gabriele be punishing Joey and me for something Shane did to retaliate against a Mancinelli?
Fucking tangled web, indeed. Maybe Shakespeare knew what he was talking about.
“Neither Carmine nor I did shit to your shitty family. I’m telling you right now, Cormac, leave our family out of it. We have more important shit going on.”
The call’s on speaker, so everyone can hear. I look at Finn, who shrugs.
“I thought Maria was fine. Finn said Ally spoke to her at work today.”
Just like Jocelyn is only Joey to me, Althea is only Thea to Finn. Everyone else calls her Ally.
“Yeah, well, you know Maria.”
The woman could be on her deathbed and be more worried about helping others than herself. Considering the fucked-up family she’s from, she’s shockingly unjaded. She’s also midway through a high-risk pregnancy. I know Ally’s felt guilty for how easy her pregnancy is since they’re due around the same time.
“Does she need anything?”
Dillan leans in to be sure Gabriele can hear him. We might not give a shite what happens to the men in that family, but Maria doesn’t deserve any ill will. We’d all give her the shirt off our backs, and not just because our parents would kill us if we didn’t. She can’t stand any of us because of who we are and what we do, but we all like her. We’ve known each other since we were in diapers.
“No. She just needs to keep her stress level down. Finding out one of us bombed a woman’s home wouldn’t do that, so none of us are going to risk her health for your pathetic ass. But thanks for the offer.”
That’s how we roll. We loathe each other, but we can be gracious. Normally, I’d stab her husband’s eye out without a second thought, but no one will touch a hair on Matteo’s head if it’ll harm Maria. We have consciences. And if we didn’t, our parents would skelp us to within an inch of our lives until we found them.
“This is the worst that’s happened, but it wasn’t the first attack. Someone tried to run her over as she stepped off a sidewalk while she and I were on a run with Finn. Before that, two men followed her from the subway.”
After today’s fucktastrophe, I consider those incidents as attacks now, rather than mere threats.
“Who’d you piss off more than us? Who’d her father piss off more than Enrique? Or was it one of his little psychopath minions?”
He means Enrique’s nephews. There’s nearly as many of them as there are the rest of us in each family. Pablo, Alejandro, Jorge, Javier, and Joaquin. “ Este peque?o cerdito. ” Any of them could be the little piggy who cried wee, wee, wee all the way home. Did one of them bitch to Enrique about something besides who Joey’s father is?
“I don’t know. You sound awfully certain while you point the finger at them.”
“Because the most obvious answer is usually the right one. I knew you didn’t learn shit in law school.”
Not all of us went to Yale for law school. I only went to NYU, but I know my fucking bar exam score was higher than his. I fucking bribed someone to check.
“Don’t deflect.”
“Whatever. I did nothing, and neither did anyone in my family. We couldn’t give two shits from Sunday about any of you right now.”
“Give Maria our best.”
“Thanks.” Actual sincerity—that doesn’t last. “ Vaffanculo a chi t’è morto. ”
I have my own response to his go fuck the souls of your dead family members.
“ D'anam don diabhal .” Your soul to the devil.
Basically, I hope you eat shite and die. The difference between Gabriele and me—one of many differences—is my family’s bothered to learn more Italian than we’ll ever let on. No one in the Cosa Nostra —or any syndicate—has bothered to learn Irish.
We hang up, and I’m left just as fucked as I was before. Seamus meets my gaze, and I know he’s mulling something over before he speaks.
“Besides three of the Four Families, who hates the Diazes most right now? Who’d want us or Jesus to accuse Enrique?”
“How much time do we have?”
I glare at Sean, who I don’t find funny. “Shouldn’t you be home with a wife kissing your boo-boo?”
I want answers, not smartass quips. I inhale before I say something I can’t take back. It’s not my family’s fault, and considering what Sean did to protect Joey, I’m being an arse for not showing more appreciation. I open my mouth to apologize, but Sean nods. He gets how I feel, so he apologizes first. I shoot him a tight smile of thanks, dipping my chin to reciprocate the apology.
“Joey told me her father has other Mexicans plus Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorians to back him. They might want to feck Enrique over.”
We’re not allowed to say fuck to each other, and especially not at each other. Certainly not with our dads in the room. We’re not even supposed to use it amongst us in casual conversation.
“If they side with Jesus, I don’t see them going after his daughter. What about the Dominicans and Ecuadorians we squeezed in Port Richmond? Are they pissed at me for enforcing? Pissed at me for dating her? Maybe pissed at Enrique for not protecting them?”
I’m just thinking aloud right now.
“Aren’t those families Jocelyn helps?” Seamus’s brow furrows as he watches me crack my knuckles.
“I haven’t seen her out there enough to know. I can ask when she wakes up. She’s also having problems with her boss. The woman keeps claiming people are filing complaints against Joey. She gave her shite about not coming back into work today even though Joey said she had a fire at her place and got injured. I’ve heard parts of their conversations before. Joey says the woman’s completely different toward her now that she’s dating me.”
“I’ll look her up.”
Finn’s in front of his computer and starts typing. He’s not just our CPA. He’s like one of those hackers on TV shows with the black and green or white screens with all the mumbo jumbo scrolling. If there’s anything worth knowing about Martha, he’ll find it. He doesn’t even need her last name to get started.
My dad and uncles sit quietly, letting the rest of us hash this out and plan. They’re semi-retired, if there is such a thing in the mob. They don’t go out on many missions anymore, but they’ve come out of retirement a few times lately. If we need extra hands or they want to scream a message that no one touches their children—by blood or by marriage—they suit up. We all follow Dillan’s orders, but even he still defers to their experience and wisdom.
“Da, what do you think?”
“I think someone in the other families hired low-rung gang members to scout, so they’d go unnoticed. But you recognized the mercenary, and some no-name off the street won’t know how to make those kinds of bombs or have drones. Find the woman driving that car. Make her tell you.”
Uncle Donovan and Declan shattered the cardinal rule we don’t target women and children. It was a downhill fall from grace after that. My family’s slowly—like at a fucking snail’s pace—rebuilding our reputation for not targeting them anymore. But they opened the floodgates, which means people have targeted most of the new wives.
However, a female mercenary is entirely different. If you hire out your sword arm, you give up any protection. We treat all mercenaries the same: a threat to extinguish or an asset to pay well, but never trust.
Uncle Tate—Dillan’s dad—purses his lips and moves them side to side. I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture, but Dillan’s always done the same thing. They only do it when they’re thinking among family. In public, you don’t know what’s going through either of their minds until they want you to know.
“Do you remember who she was?”
“Yeah. Lilly Schneider.”
Such a misnomer. There’s nothing sweet or fragile about that bitch. She’d hack her mother to pieces for ten bucks. She’ll hire herself out to the lowest bidder because a dollar to her is always better than nothing, no matter the job or the boss.
“She used to do a lot of work for your grandda when she was young. That’s how she got her start.”
“I know. It’s why I recognized her.”
She’s close to my parents’ age, so mid to late fifties. She used to work for my grandfather whenever he needed a honeypot. But time’s not aged her gracefully. She looks like a haggard old prune. Fuck her.
“I’ve heard she’s been hustling at Declan’s.”
It’s a skeezy hole in the wall pool hall my mom’s second cousin owned before he got himself killed. The bratva didn’t like how he led for the millisecond he was in charge. The big bag of arse thought to seize power after Uncle Donovan died. Dillan was so pissed Uncle Don wouldn’t listen to him as his chief strategist, he went out of town for an unexpected vacation.
While he was gone, Uncle Don died. Declan put a hit on our moms and took over. He died for his crimes—largely because we made sure he couldn’t run from the bratva. Before he could call off the hit, a mercenary confused Dillan’s little sister, Colleen, for my mom and killed her. A single shot to the forehead while Dillan stood beside her. She was a veterinarian who specialized in rescuing abused animals like in those depressing ASPA commercial. She’d just adopted a puppy, and she and Dillan were taking it home. The woman who shot my cousin is dead, but her sister—Lilly—isn’t. Yet.
“I want her at the station.”
The abandoned railway station in the Bronx. It’s been unused for public transportation in at least a decade. We did some excavating and renovating. It has a second subterranean level now where we have a full kitchen, full bathroom, and bunk rooms plus an office. We take people there who need a lengthy reminder of who we are.
Dillan steps away from the table to make the call. No one who comes as our guest leaves as anything besides ash or toxic ooze. Either way, they wind up in the Long Island Sound. I’ll get out every secret she has. I’ll sell any worthwhile info to whoever it’s about or whoever’ll find it most useful to screw over the subject. I’ll discover who’s behind this, and they’ll have no one to hide behind. Whoever did this has no idea what’s coming their way.
“Cor?”
Finn’s voice floats through the door, and his knock is as quiet as my dad’s was. I’m back in my old bedroom, dozing beside Joey. I’m too anxious to let myself fall into a deep sleep, but I’m exhausted. She’s barely stirred since I came back after meeting with the others. That was three hours ago. I texted my mom and aunts to ask if I should be concerned. They threatened me on pains of death that I better not disturb her. Not for love nor money. More Granny phrases.
They said if she slept this deeply, it’s because she needs it. So, I do my best not to move her as I slip off the bed and walk to the door. I have sweatpants on now since I still have a few pieces of clothing here. I step into the hallway after glancing back at Joey.
“I found some shite on Martha. It’s not good.”
“Have you told the others?”
“No. I wanted to tell you first.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But she’s your girlfriend, so you have to decide what you do or don’t tell her. I’d rather you get to decide that without an audience or anyone else’s suggestions.”
“Thanks.”
All our homes are large enough for everyone to have their own bedroom. Cousins and sons alike. My aunts and uncles have theirs too. Missions can start or end anywhere, so it’s convenient to have somewhere to crash at all our homes. Plus—really—we’re just that close a family. Everyone is welcome in one another’s homes, so there’s always a place for each of us to lay our head.
Finn gestures toward his room. We sit on the end of the bed together, and he opens his laptop. I’m looking at several incognito browser windows open with emails. I skim the one on top and realize immediately it’s about Joey. I glance at the date. It shocks the shite out of me to realize it’s probably from a month or two after Joey started working for the city. I scan the next one, then the next one, then the next. There’re hundreds of them with nearly weekly or biweekly reports from Martha to an unnamed contact that go back years. They’re basically run downs of Joey’s schedule. Where she was, when she was there, and who she was with.
The responses are vague, and there’s no explanation for why Martha sent them. But as I read more, I piece together the reason for them. Whoever’s behind this counts Joey as a valuable asset. They’re keeping tabs on her for when—not if—they kidnap her and hold her for ransom. They nearly took her when Jesus tried to fuck Enrique over for a major deal with rival narcos.
That was when Olivia and Luca were dating. There was a shootout one night that involved the Colombians, the Italians, and NYPD—dirty NYPD. It got messy fast. From what I can tell, if things hadn’t come out about Olivia’s connections to Jesus, these people were going to use the distraction to grab Joey.
I keep skimming since there are so many. When I’m only a quarter of the way through, I look over at Finn. He looks wiped.
“Did you read all these?”
“Yeah. I found them ten minutes after you came back up here. I wanted to be sure I knew what I’d found before sharing it, just in case.”
He doesn’t need to fill in the rest. There are way too many possible just in cases.
“Did you track these payments they allude to? How much has Martha collected?”
“Several thousand over the years. But as many times as they’ve paid her, they’ve threatened her. They have something on her. From what I’ve pieced together by searching newspapers and government documents, the Federales went after her family in Mexico. It started with her brother committing some legit crime when he was fourteen. It caught the Rumorosa cartel’s attention, and they recruited him. Martha tried to get him across the border and into America. She had all the paperwork to sponsor him properly since she’s twelve years older than him. She’d already worked for the city for five years.”
“Something went wrong?”
“Yeah. When the kid got to Border Control, he sang like a fecking canary. Told every secret he probably didn’t even tell his priest. By morning, he was gone. Three days later, his body’s hanging from a bridge in Rosarito. His head wound up on a street in Tijuana’s worst neighborhood. Apparently, the info the kid gave caused a major crackdown on mules running drugs from Baja into California. Needless to say, it pissed off the Rumorosa cartel. They went after Martha’s family. When they discovered she has a solid job here and makes a good living since she’s single, they started extorting her. She was sending money to them. One month she didn’t send enough, so they cut off her mother’s left ear and right hand.”
“Fecking hell.”
In New York, we don’t leave people alive to tell the tale. In Latin America, the cartels make examples of people. I doubt the ear and hand are all they did to the woman.
“Yeah, well, it gets worse. Martha went home to see her mother. She tried sneaking into the house, but the cartel watched it. They snagged her up, and that’s when the terms changed. She had to spy on Jocelyn. I think one of three things is happening. It’s the Rumorosa who’re squeezing Martha and targeting Jocelyn. The Rumorosa are selling this information to someone here in NYC. Or someone here’s forcing the Rumorosa to share the information.”
I look at all the open browser windows with emails I haven’t read yet. If Finn’s already read them all, he’ll let me know if there are any I still need to see. I think about what Joey told me after she met Olivia.
“The Rumorosa are Jesus’s mother’s people. Total Romeo and Juliet. There was supposed to be an alliance between the Culiacán and the Rumorosa, but it went to shite despite his parents being in love. Both of them died. If that was his maternal grandparents’ side of the family, why are they intent upon watching Joey? Why would they plan to kidnap and ransom her?”
“That was never clear in the emails, but I got the impression someone more powerful is pulling their strings. Someone who wants more of Mexico than they have.”
“A rival cartel?”
The Rumorosa are powerful and control the entire length of the Baja peninsula.
Finn shakes his head and shrugs with a sigh. Not at all reassuring.
“I don’t know that, but I’m certain it’s not the Colombians. Pablo and Tres J’s come up several times. Whoever this is, warned Martha not to piss them off by being obvious if she fecks with Joey. Until recently, Martha just observed. These people pushed her to act despite their years of threatening to tell Alejandro and letting him deal with her if she fecked up.”
“Was this before or after Joey and I met?”
“Before. About two months, but Martha claimed the time wasn’t right. When Jocelyn started dating you, Martha decided she’d start her campaign against Jocelyn. To make sure she didn’t back down, the Rumorosa killed her younger sister’s dog. It was already fifteen years old, but in good shape. Nowhere near dying.”
I run my hand through my hair. The Ruiz family—Joey’s paternal grandmother’s family—runs the cartel. Before them, Baja and Baja Sud—both parts of the peninsula—were contested territory. The Culiacán—the cartel Joey’s paternal great-grandfather ran before her father—oversaw it for a long time, but they lost interest because they could grow way more products in Chihuahua. When the Ruizes stepped in, the Espinozas didn’t like the competition. It was one of those I don’t want it, but you can’t have it.
“You know who’s felt pushed out of Mexico, don’t you?”
I thought the same thing as Finn.
“Yeah. The Cosa Nostra was already doing more deals out there, even before they linked up with Jesus. They weren’t feeling the pinch. But we’ve expanded way more than anyone noticed. At least, until now. Someone else definitely found out. Motherfecker.”
I know who it is.
“You’re certain Heather’s out of town?”
“Yes, Cormac. For the tenth time. She and her sister went on a girls’ trip.”
Finn’s ready to punch me, but we can’t go through with this mission if there’s a woman in the house. We won’t risk her life.
We’re sitting in our SUV a block and a half from our target. Sean’s on his computer, hacking what’s supposedly an impenetrable security system. Won’t it surprise my target and his bag of shite cousins—on both sides of his fucking shitbag family—when they discover we aren’t the knuckle draggers we let them always think we are?
“Time to go. We have three minutes before his guards realize the cameras aren’t swiveling and the security feed isn’t updating.”
Sean puts aside his laptop as he speaks, one hand setting it aside while the other pulls down his beanie. Even in the dead of summer, we all wear beanies because our red hair is too fucking recognizable. Three sisters married three brothers and gave birth to six fucking lighthouses. Our hair fucking announces our presence no matter the weather.
I press my earpiece and give the order. Men in vehicles on each street surrounding our target pour forth. We could have gone on foot from my parents’ house, but passing all the other syndicate houses on the way was too great a risk. Very convenient we were only five streets over, though.
The thirty men we have work with precision this motherfucker’s family would envy. They’re not the only ones who can move like a paramilitary unit. Fuck them and their egos. I’m taking them down a peg or two. This fucknut’s about to remember why he has a scar that wraps around his right ribs. He fucked with my brother in college, and he paid for it. Now he’s fucked with my woman, and I’m going to bring him to the edge of death. It’s a shame he’s too high ranking for me to kill.
I signal for teams of six to spread out and cover the property. It takes no time to disarm his security patrol. His property wall is high enough that we leave the bodies as reminders they failed. Our men stand outside to ensure our safety after we breach the house. We fan out to check each room. We use only one word in our earpieces.
Glan . Clear.
With three men posted at the doors leading outside, my family and I creep up to the main bedroom. I’m certain the piece of shite’s awake by now. We’ve been silent, but every man in the Four Families has a sixth sense. It’s how we’ve lived into our thirties. It’s how all our parents have lived into their fifties. He’s probably already texted his brothers and cousins.
I’m behind Dillan when we separate, so three of us stand on each side of the door. I tap my cousin’s shoulder, and he kicks open the door. I enter first, my rifle pointed right at him. The other guys stream in, taking positions by the windows, the closet, the bathroom, and the door.
“Aleks, you went too far this time.”
Aleksei Kutsenko—Niko’s older brother—shrugs. Motherfucking shrugs. He sits in bed like he hasn’t a care in the world. We all see the pistol on the mattress beside his left hand, and the knife in his right. He won’t do shite to us, but I’m about to fuck his world up.
“Cormac, don’t be so dramatic. You and Niko act like you’re still in the high school drama club.” His Russian drawl makes me want to ram my fist into his throat and crush his voice box.
“You blew up my fiancée’s apartment when she was there.”
“ Pozdravlyayu s pomolvkoy .”
“I don’t need your congratulations on my engagement.”
He shrugs again, but I see the surprise that I understood him. He probably thought I’d struggle to Google Translate it later. Fuck him with knobs on.
“Why?”
“Why what? Target you? I can’t stand you. Use Joey? Because she was there.”
It doesn’t surprise me he knows my pet name for her. He’s baiting me. Seamus and I developed reputations as the hot heads because we’re almost always bigger than everyone else. I’m bigger than Aleks, even if not by much. He’s an inch and a bit taller than me, but I weigh at least fifteen pounds of muscle more than him. I’m about to let him see the reputation I cultivated, but I’m shockingly calm. If I fuck this up, it’s my brother’s and cousins’ lives, and it’s my future with Joey.
I put a bullet into the headboard precariously close to Aleks’s left ear. If he’d flinched—which I knew he wouldn’t—fucking psychopath—I would have hit him. I point the muzzle to a few inches past his feet and fire again.
“Explain the holes to your wife and tell her how lucky I only put them in the furniture and not you.”
I shoot the knife blade beside him, not caring if the ricochet actually hits him. The ping of metal on metal shifts his attitude. He gets serious mighty fast.
“Don’t act all holier than thou, Cormac. You’re just as shitty as the rest of your ragtag family. Don’t come into my house accusing me of shit, or none of you will leave alive.”
“Did you have to call your big brother and cousins to come help you?”
My sing-song voice is fucking obnoxious even to my ears.
“Or will it be your baby brothers to the rescue? Let them come. We’re ready. You have no men left here, and your family won’t take any away from guarding their wives. They definitely won’t leave kids unprotected. They won’t wait around for extra men to get here. Sergei and Anton definitely won’t make it in time. That leaves Maks, Niko, Bogdan, Misha, and Pasha. Five against the six of us, plus the thirty men we have scattered around your property. Call your brothers and tell them false alarm. You and I deal with this just the two of us.”
“You know that’s not happening.”
“Fine.”
I nudge my chin toward Aleks, and Sean and Shane rush forward. They have his gun and knife away from him in a heartbeat, then Aleks is pinned to the mattress. I wrap my hand around his throat. There’s no erotic pleasure to this like when I hold Joey in place this way. My hand tightens until he grunts, and his chin comes up. It gives me space to drive my fist into it and snap his head even farther back. I slam my fist into his left cheekbone, making sure to nail his nose too. My next punch breaks his nose. Neither Shane nor Sean recoil from the blood. I bet they don’t even notice.
I lean into my hand around Aleks’s throat, pushing a good portion of my weight onto him. My fist is indiscriminate where it lands now. It just rains down on his face five or six times. When I release his throat, I seize that chance for the throat punch.
“You could have taken away my chance for a family with Joey. Maybe now I’ll take away your chance with Heather.”
I ram my rifle’s stock into his junk. I catch him entirely unprepared because he tries to howl in pain, but no sound comes out.
The bratva leaders were conditioned to never show any reaction to pain. Their leader before Maks beat any reaction out of them, nearly killing them in the process. None of them know we found our way into the old bratva warehouse where they trained. When we were all teens, we spied on Aleks, his brothers, and his cousins. My brother, cousins, and I wanted to know what we were up against since we suspected their old pakhan tortured them during their training. He did.
I spy a wedding photo on the dresser. I saunter over to it while Sean and Shane keep holding Aleks down. I pick up the frame, turn to him, and grin.
“I bet this is one of Heather’s favorites. You don’t look like a bear’s arsehole in it.”
I bring it down over his now bent knee; the glass contacting the bare skin. It shatters and some shards cut him. I look at the photo, curl my nose in disgust, then toss it on the bed beside him. I won’t damage the photo because I’m punishing him, not Heather. Shane steps away, and I pull back my arm.
“Sweet dreams, motherfucker.”
I put as much force into the punch as I dare. I don’t need to kill him, just knock him out. It lands against his right temple, and it’s night, night for him. I mangled his face, and it’ll take weeks for the bruises to heal. He can’t stay home that entire time, so let the world know he got the shite beaten out of him. That public humiliation’ll be worse than the physical pain. That’s the point.
With his knife, I find his clothes in the closet and slash through most of his suits. He’s rich, and his family’s like mine. They can swap clothes interchangeably. This’ll be inconvenient though. We rush from his bedroom after I toss the knife on the bed.
Tempting as it is to fuck up more of his house, we won’t because we’re here to punish him, not Heather. We make a beeline for his office, though. Three shots, and the door’s open. We clear it out. We grab his laptops—the one on his desk, and the one we know he hides. It took us a moment to find it, but we all think alike. Behind three loose stones in the fireplace.
Dillan starts a fire as soon as we clean out the safe with the computer and an array of fake passports and thousands in foreign currency. Finn and his brothers sort through papers they pull out of drawers and off shelves. Once there’s a blaze, they toss things into the flames. Seamus and I work together to break the massive wood furniture he favors. We smash table legs and rip apart cushions. Together, we hoist his desk and toss it onto the sofa, breaking both.
“We gotta go.”
I’ve been glancing at my watch. We’ve been inside nearly ten minutes, so we’ve been on the property nearly fifteen. If his family’s gotten any alerts, they’ll be here any second. This can’t spill onto the street, so we can’t afford to get trapped in the house. Tempted as I am to risk the house going up in a fireball, I put the grate in front of the hearth as Aleks’s shite burns.
We’re climbing into the SUV as we see Maks and the others arrive in their personal vehicles. They knew better than to come on foot, but they couldn’t get any of their SUVs in time. All Four Families get aftermarket parts at the same place. If the two neighborhoods where all the married couples live are Switzerland, then that body shop is the fucking Vatican. We all pray at the altar of vehicle customization. The wheels on our SUVs still roll, even if they’re punctured. There are metal plates covering the chassis to protect against any street bombs or grenades. All the windows are bulletproof.
The only way to tell the families’ SUVs apart are the hub caps. We have emblems that distinguish them. None of them are what people would expect, and the designs are tiny. They’re discreet, but we all know what to look for that way we never get in the wrong one if we’re all leaving in a hurry.
Shane’s driving, so he pulls onto the street as the rest of us fasten our seatbelts. I look back over my shoulder to see Misha stick his head past the gate. He aims a gun at us, but he won’t shoot. We’re not close enough.
We have another job to do before we’re done for the night. We stay in Queens but head toward the Flushing River. We have a railway station in the Bronx as our secret lair. The bratva, Costa Nostra , and Cartel didn’t venture far from home and stayed in Queens. Too fucking obvious.
The bratva has a warehouse, the Cosa Nostra has a garage, and the Cartel uses an abandoned bodega. We know exactly where each place is. It's not hard to figure out since we all turn our phones off about ten miles from our bat caves. We track where the other families do that. From there we draw a ten-mile radius inward and can pinpoint the abandoned buildings because they don’t appear on any city records. No one’s bothered to figure out where ours is. We don’t think they’ve bothered to find each other’s.
We drive directly to the bratva warehouse, ramming through the fence that encircles the property. I wind down my window as my brother hands me my preferred weapon of mass destruction. At three feet long and fifteen pounds, the rocket-propelled grenade launcher fits in the SUV.
“Around the south side. That bay door is open.”
Shane heads to where I can see the perfect target. If our tires could squeal, they would as he makes a fast turn and brakes. Seamus and Dillan scramble out of the SUV after me, their rifles raised to provide me cover. Walking in lockstep, we advanced away from the vehicle. Shane, Sean, and Finn get out and guard the SUV. If we lose that, then we’re fucked. We’ll have no means to escape.
There’s poetic justice here the bratva will likely guess. This is an RPG-7. It and the version before it were designed by the Soviet Union and are still made in Russia. Mother Russia’s about to fuck over six of her sons.
I load the first missile. For the havoc they create, they’re shockingly light. Only a few pounds.
“Here we go!” I sound like a kid about to go on their first rollercoaster.
We watch the blue-white smoke tail as I launch the first one. It sails beneath the half open bay door. I’m loading the second one before the first one explodes. I aim for where we suspect the office is and fire. Within seconds, flames consume the building. I’m certain my house looked much like this, but on a far smaller scale.
“Let this be a lesson to those motherfucking pieces of shite. Come for me and my house, and I’ll barge the fuck into yours and fuck it all up. We might not have fully trashed Aleks’s place, but we did some damage.”
Now…
Now, they’re royally fucked. They’re going to need a new place to take their captives and will have to build a new torture chamber. That takes time to get just right, and it’s not cheap nor inconspicuous to buy industrial size vats of acid.
An abandoned building isn’t hard to find in New York City. One that isn’t on any city maps or plans that has no deeds in a neighborhood where no one asks questions is entirely another story.
Seamus’s thoughts run along the same line as mine and probably all the other guys’ as we watch the destruction.
“The bratva once struck us where it hurts most. This won’t cut as deep, but it sure as fuck will sting.”
Our ancestral home of sorts. The first home the O’Rourkes had in America. We’d kept it in our family until the Kutsenkos came along. They went on a rampage thanks to Declan’s lasting shitstorm and took out a few of our businesses too. Fortunately, no one lived in the old family house.
My brother and I have always thought alike, so I know what I’m about to say matches what’s going through his head.
“They didn’t come into our homes like we went into Aleks’s. I’ve made sure they know there’s nowhere safe to hide. Losing a couple businesses was inconvenient, but it was nowhere near as personal as taking out one place that was supposed to be impenetrable to them.”
Dillan shakes his head, his expression smugger than it was a moment ago.
“This—this fucked them over to a level that’ll take time to recover from.”
“We’ve let the other families underestimate us for years. We’ve let them think we’re stereotypical undereducated—though we all went to Ivy Leagues or top tier universities—pipe wielding, dock working, poor—relatively speaking, of course—Irishmen. It’s suited us. That shite ended today when I discovered they’ve targeted my woman for years .”
We turn back to our cousins and head to the vehicle. When we join Finn, Sean, and Shane, I say what I’m certain we’ve all thought since we realized they were behind all of this.
“The bratva swears up and down they’ll never target women and children because of what their moms faced while in Russia. They swear they’d never be like the men their fathers ruthlessly protected their moms from when the women faced sex trafficking. They might not have planned to sell Joey to a brothel, but they still planned to sell her back to her father. That’s what a ransom is. It’s selling a person.”
Not today, Satan. Not today.
“Too bad those fuckers won’t get to see this burn.” Dillan gives me an unrepentant shrug as he speaks, and I just grin.
By the time they get here, some of their men who live closer will have put the fire out. There’ll just be ash and rubble. It’ll take them a while to figure out how we did it. Let them stew on it.
“Are you satisfied?” Finn’s looking past my shoulder.
“As satisfied as I’m going to get while they’re still breathing.”
Seamus bumps shoulders with me. “Let’s go home to our women.”
We go straight back to my parents’ house, parking in the garage.
Mair, Ally, Nikki, Tiernan, Carys, and Joey jump out of their seats in the living room as soon as we file into the house. Our parents hang back, letting us greet our wives. Joey’s as good as my wife after tonight.
“ Cailín , it’s done. No one’s coming near you again.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Not even a hair out of place.”
Reassured I’m hale and hearty, Joey dives in for a kiss that makes my toes curl in my boots. If I didn’t know all the other couples were sharing kisses like this, I might worry it was indecent. None of the guys worry about our parents seeing us with our women like this. Who else did we learn it from? We all remember what it was like after our dads hugged each of us. The way they kissed our moms was just as scandalous.
The moment each couple pulls apart, the wives hurry to step aside. It’s our parents turn. There will never be a day in my life when a hug from my parents doesn’t make the world better. Joey’s arms are home now, but my parents’ embraces will always remind me nothing ever comes before family.