2. Finn
FINN
“Let me guess.” A slow smile tugs at the corners of my boss’s mouth when he eyes up my swollen face.
“You stopped off at your favorite Irish bar on the way back and got into a brawl to let off steam.” His chuckle bounces off the walls of his spacious living room as he pours a hefty chug of whiskey into a crystal tumbler and hands it to me.
I swallow the liquor in one mouthful and follow the burn as it goes down.
“Not even close.”
It’s the understatement of the fucking century.
Not only did I not get any information on the Russian Bratva, but I also saw no evidence of illegal trafficking at the Iroquois Landing, and the frosting on the cake: I lost my heart to a Russian beauty over one kiss that may or may not have been my undoing.
Only time will tell, I guess.
“Talk to me, Finn.” Aiden knocks back the whiskey in his own tumbler and refills both our glasses, gesturing for me to sit on one of the squashy, beaten-up leather sofas he had shipped over from the family home in Ireland after he took over the Kavanagh mob. “What did you see?”
A Russian beauty with a green stripe in her raven hair, black eyeliner flicks on her eyelids that make her look like a heroine from a dragon-riding fantasy, and black Doc Martens that are sexier than a pair of boots have any right to be.
I haven’t made a conscious decision not to tell my boss about her, but I won’t anyway.
Because she’s mine. She’s my secret, and I’m keeping her tucked away inside my chest until I find out who she is.
“No sign of the Russians doing anything illegal.” Unless you count sending in their greatest weapon dressed in black to steal the heart of anyone who stands in their way.
Aiden narrows his eyes at me. “And yet you got close enough to get a black eye.”
My swollen eye twitches in response as if offended that the boss noticed the bruises it’s currently wearing like a trophy. “This was a misunderstanding.”
“One day, you’ll learn to stop teasing the opposition.”
I shrug. “Nothing wrong with a little foreplay to make them believe they can win.”
Heat pumps around my body at the word ‘foreplay’ and hits my loins with an erection that hurts.
The Russian beauty didn’t need foreplay to believe she could win.
She had me the instant she kissed me back on the grass behind the shipping containers, and she knew it.
Even now, sitting opposite my oldest friend in his penthouse apartment with the whiskey slow-burn in my gullet, all I can feel is her body beneath mine, and I know that I would take a bruise on the other cheek to find out her name.
Aiden tilts his head, watching me closely. “Was the information worth it?”
“Short of torturing the fuckers, I wasn’t getting any information out of them, and torturing isn’t my style.”
This conversation is doing nothing to suppress the raging erection tenting inside my pants or the heat flaunting its way around my veins and setting me on fire.
I need to get back on track and try to get the Russian girl out of my head where she seems to have taken up permanent residence since I first saw her.
“But the port is clean. I spoke to a couple of workers in need of some decent remuneration to sort their lives out, and they’ve not seen a Russian ship or heard a Russian accent in a while. I checked out the containers coming in myself.”
After I’d watched my heart walk away in Doc Martens and with my gun in her hand, I gave her description to everyone I spoke to. I would’ve believed she was a dark apparition were it not for my lingering hard-on and the taste of her lips on mine.
“Typical cargo: fertilizers and pharmaceutical products. I’d have smelled the shit if they were hiding a few bodies on board.”
Aiden nods slowly. He can see right through me and he’s deciding which parts of the story I’m holding back on.
“Twenty-seven years we’ve known each other,” he says finally, “and I think this is the first time you’ve ever lied to me.” He grins. “But I understand you have your reasons, and you’ll tell me when the time is right.”
“I’m not lying about the port being clean.” No point trying to deny it.
Aiden’s world is my world, the only life I’ve known since I was eight years old, and his pa found me on a Dublin street rooting around inside a discarded carrier bag for a bite of something to eat.
I’d have stolen a clean bone from a guard dog given half a chance, and when Seamus Kavanagh wandered a little too close, weaving drunkenly and singing ‘Danny Boy’ at the top of his lungs, I’d followed him, hoping to catch a few coins from his loose pockets.
Instead, he turned around and waved his wallet at me, the song lyrics fading into the icy night.
“This what you’re looking for, lad?” he’d asked.
“Aye.” I’d already recognized that you didn’t lie to the Kavanaghs, not if you wanted to stick around in this life. So, I took honesty to another level. “I’m fecking starving, mister.”
Seamus Kavanagh had smiled at me with the same familiar smile I’ve seen on his son’s face every day since. “Where’s your ma?”
“She’s dead.” I’d already hardened to the feel of those words on my tongue.
“Your pa?”
“In the pub.” I didn’t add that my pa would either stumble home when someone kicked him out of the bar, or he’d sleep off the booze in a gutter somewhere.
“If you can take the wallet, it’s yours, laddie.” Seamus Kavanagh raised his arm and held the wallet above his head.
I stared at it like it might suddenly go bang and burn the flesh off my bones in some sick kind of joke, but it didn’t, and the man holding it aloft didn’t budge. He studied me closely like he was trying to preempt my next move. That’s when I realized what was at stake. Or at least I thought I did.
I knew I could never reach the wallet in his hand.
So instead, I cast around the street for something to bring the wallet to me and found a smooth rock on the sidewalk, glistening from the earlier rainfall.
I picked it up, got a feel for the weight of it, and stepped out of the glow of the streetlamp so that the light wouldn’t distort the trajectory of the missile I was about to launch.
Then I lobbed it at his hand, hitting my target which was the soft flesh on the inside of his wrist.
He dropped the wallet, and I grabbed it and ran.
The next day, he came back to the same street, but this time he brought his son, Aiden.
We’ve been inseparable ever since.
Now, I hold eye contact with my friend as I sip my whiskey slowly. “I’m not lying about the lack of information either.”
“Shit.” Aiden rubs his jaw with his large hand, his palm scritch-scratching across his stubble. “I knew it was too fucking neat to be true.”
He pulls his cell from his pocket, locates the number he’s looking for, and hits the call button.
“What have you got for me?” he speaks into the handset.
I sit back and ignore the hum of the voice on the other end.
I can’t recall the last time I experienced real fear.
As Aiden’s bodyguard, I’m always packing at least one weapon and dancing with death almost every time I walk out of this apartment.
It comes with the territory. He’s the boss of the largest Irish mob in the city of Chicago, and mobs make enemies not friends.
But I’m afraid right now. I’m afraid of never finding out who my Russian beauty is. But more importantly, I’m afraid that the image in my head of the way she looked at me when I was on top of her will fade and I’ll never get it back.
“The fucking cowards,” Aiden growls into the phone in his hand. “Of course they didn’t show their fucking faces. Stay where you are. I’ll cover every fucking terminal from here to New York City to stop the bastards.”
He ends the call and knocks back the rest of his drink, squeezing the empty glass in his fist.
“I sent Liam and his team to the Calumet Landing. The place was crawling with fucking Russians, but they were either expecting the wrong kind of company, or their cargo didn’t land as expected.”
“Or died en route,” I add.
We know it happens. The whole world knows that women and children get trafficked because there are too many sick fucks out there who aren’t content with lining their pockets from smuggling drugs in and out of the country.
Sure, the Kavanaghs started out in Dublin with a small-time protection racket like a lot of other gangs.
But Aiden’s grandfather had the business acumen to grow that racket into a legit security firm that earned him his first million, and Seamus took it to the next level, branching out into nightclub management and land acquisition before handing it all over to his eldest son.
Aiden might be a mob boss; he might be a ruthless asshole who will sever ties with anyone who doesn’t serve a purpose in the Kavanagh empire, but anyone he has ever killed deserved their fate, and he sure as fuck wouldn’t trade kids or women for profit.
Mouth pressed into a tight line, he refills his glass and slides the decanter my way. It belonged to his grandfather, and since we were old enough to acquire a taste for the booze, I’ve never seen my friend pour a drink straight from the bottle.
“They knew we would be at Iroquois.” He studies the amber liquid in his glass. “Whoever got close enough to give you that shiner was scoping out the opposition. Seeing what they were up against.”
Something inside my gut squirms like a worm that lost its tail.
Does she know what currency her Pakhan is trading in?
Or is that information on a need-to-know basis only, and she was simply there following orders?
Because it doesn’t sit right with me. I only met her briefly, but I can’t imagine her defending the sick trafficker with her life.
It’s worth far more than that. She’s too fucking special to devote her life to an animal without an ounce of compassion for other human beings.
I refuse to believe that she’s involved, and I already feel the weight on my shoulders of my personal mission to track her down and prove my best friend wrong.
On the other hand, finding her might be a whole lot easier if Aiden knows who we’re looking for.
“Do we have a name?”
“Ivanov.” Aiden raises his glass in the air to toast the inevitable downfall of the Ivanov family now that they are in his sights.