Chapter 2 #2
“I gave her a brownstone for our first anniversary,” I say on an exhale.
“She wanted space from me. Her own space. She claimed it was claustrophobic, living in the mansion with me all of the time. She had security. Or she was supposed to, anyway—there was an entire contingent of guards that were supposed to be there at all times.”
“And there weren’t, the day that she died?”
I shake my head at my father’s question. “No. She sent them away except for her three personal guards. Apparently, she’d been doing that for a while, without my knowledge.”
“And where are those guards now? The ones who agreed to leave?” My father’s voice is low and deadly, and my jaw tightens.
“They’re dead. Along with her personal guard, who survived the attack. Executed for disloyalty.”
I feel Tristan stiffen next to me, but a proud smile tugs at the corners of my father’s mouth. A familiar rush of satisfaction floods through me, the sensation I’ve chased since I was a boy—the feeling of making my father proud of me. Of being the eldest son he always wanted.
“Good.” Padraigh’s voice is as full of pride as the expression on his face.
“A good message to send to the men who work for you. Disloyalty will not be tolerated. Secret-keeping will not be tolerated. You are the boss here—not your wife, not anyone else. There is nothing that happens in your family, in this family, that you should not know about.”
“But,” he continues, the pride leaching from his voice, “the question remains, what secrets were they keeping from you, Ronan? And how did they manage it? How did you not know that your wife was not protected as she should have been? Why did she send them away?”
I clench my teeth, knowing that there’s no keeping this from my father.
No way to get around the shameful knowledge of what my wife was doing behind my back.
“She had a lover,” I grit out. “She was meeting him at the brownstone. The man I executed confessed what she was keeping from me before I shot him. And we have evidence—security footage from the house.”
They must have been deleting it for her, in case I ever reviewed the footage.
But they didn’t get a chance to, this time.
My teeth grind together at the memory of watching that footage hours after I identified my wife’s dead body—the sight of a twenty-something, muscular, naked man between her thighs.
I’d forced myself to watch it, a self-flagellation of sorts, to see her hands tangling in his long, curly dark hair as he’d lapped between her thighs, hearing her scream his name as he made her come with a cock smaller than mine, but clearly enough to get her off.
My hands curl into fists. I want him dead, too, but he’s lower down the list. A lesser priority than the man who shot my wife, although killing the one who fucked her sounds pretty fucking cathartic as well.
“Your wife,” my father repeats slowly, pulling me back to the present, “was cheating on you. Making you a cuckold.”
I swallow hard, feeling my stomach twist and dip at the disappointment in his voice. The one sound I’ve striven hard all my life to avoid hearing, though with Padraigh O’Malley, it’s inevitable. “Yes,” I say flatly, and I feel Tristan flinch again next to me. “She was sleeping with another man.”
“And he’s still alive?” My father’s voice is cutting, and I let out a breath.
“Rocco is the higher priority.”
Even Padraigh can’t argue with that. “So the baby might not even have been yours,” he says with disdain, and my chest squeezes.
“It was. A test confirmed it. The child was mine.”
Padraigh drags a hand over his face, looking back at the grave with all sympathy washed from his face.
If Siobhan were alive now in front of us, I know, he’d put her in that grave himself.
Disloyalty to the family is a capital crime in our world, and Siobhan had to have known that if she was caught, the consequences would have been dire.
I think she just knew that I wouldn’t pay enough attention to catch her. That I was so glad for some fucking peace that I never wanted to spend time looking into what she was doing when she was away from home.
“How could you let this happen?” Padraigh bites out, and I feel that disappointment wash over me again, clinging to my skin like a film.
“We hated each other,” I say flatly. “You know we did. But it didn’t matter. In all the ways that mattered, it was a good match.”
I don’t dare say anything else, not to him.
I didn’t protest the marriage, just like I’ve never protested anything that my father has ordered me to do as his heir, wanting his pride, his approval.
But I knew Siobhan and I were ill-suited for each other.
She was selfish, snobbish, high-strung, cold.
We weren’t suited for each other in the bedroom, either.
She lay there like a fish on our wedding night, staring at the ceiling while I thrust into her, only letting out one small grunt of pain when I took her virginity.
I tried everything I could—tried to make her come, tried to please her, but she was completely shut off from me.
And without reason, as far as I could tell.
I treated her well, denied her nothing, tried to give her whatever I could to thaw her out and make her happy.
But she hated me, although she hadn’t protested the marriage either, so far as I could tell.
That security footage I watched stung for more reasons than one.
I’d thought Siobhan just hated sex, and I tried to stay out of her bed unless it was likely to get her pregnant.
After our wedding night, I asked her to tell me when it was the right time in her cycle, and I’d visit her room like clockwork, doing my best to please her and failing every time.
It was like that for the entire eighteen months of our marriage.
But according to that tape, she didn’t hate sex. She wasn’t unable to have an orgasm.
She just hated it with me. And I have no fucking idea why.
The other part of it is that, for those eighteen months—longer, actually, since the day our betrothal was made official—I was faithful to her.
I didn’t like her or particularly want her, despite her outward beauty, but I never wanted to be the kind of man who cheated on his wife, even if having a mistress in our world is not only sanctioned but assumed.
I haven’t touched another woman since well before Siobhan and I announced our intent to marry before God and man, and I haven’t had sex I enjoyed beyond the fleeting physical pleasure of my climax since then, either.
I gave up something for her, and it never mattered.
It mattered, apparently, even less than I realized.
“That’s no excuse,” Padraigh growls. “You let your wife cuckold you. You let her fuck another man behind your back. That child could have been another man’s.
She could have passed a bastard on as your heir, because you weren’t paying attention.
And now she’s dead. This was a good marriage, Ronan.
Do you have any idea how furious her father is?
How this could impact our business? De Luca is declaring war, and Connelly may no longer be on our side.
His loyalty to you will fracture with the death of his daughter, especially knowing that—” He shakes his head, the fury in his voice enough to heat the air between us. “You disappoint me, son.”
I hear Tristan’s intake of breath. “I’ll make this right,” I say quietly. “I’ve already executed every man who was responsible for not protecting Siobhan, and for keeping her secrets. I’ve made an example of all of them. And I will kill De Luca, too. You have my word.”
“I expect more than that.” His voice is hard. “I expect De Luca dead, yes. I expect every man who had a hand in her death to be dead as well. And I expect a new marriage arrangement on the heels of that, something that will strengthen our position again. Siobhan’s younger sister, maybe.”
I stiffen at that. Siobhan’s sister, Maeve, is eighteen, and only just. Half my age.
The idea of taking her into my bed makes my stomach twist. She was here at the funeral, though she wasn’t at the wake.
Too young to drink, which makes the idea of bedding her nauseate me all over again.
She didn’t speak to me today. And I didn’t blame her.
The thought of marrying her is abhorrent. But I know better than to tell my father that, or to argue right now. There will be time to try to find a different way—when De Luca is dead and the Italian threat is handled.
I blow out a sharp breath, reaching for a cigarette despite the rain. "Any word from your contacts in Vice?" I glance at Tristan, who still has connections here despite his new position in Miami.
"Nothing official. But word on the street is De Luca's been bragging about it. Called it a message to the Irish—said we needed to learn our place in the new Boston." Tristan spits into the mud. "Fucking dickhead thinks because the Sicilians gave him his father's seat, he can start a war."
I press my lips together around my cigarette, sucking in a drag of the nicotine.
A habit I’ll break again, I promise myself.
“Fucking Sicilians,” I mutter. Like the council in Ireland, that gaggle of old men ultimately holds the power over every boss in the States, the final word on marriages, on inheritance, on life and death itself.
I’ve never questioned the authority of the council or chafed at my place, but I’ve also never understood how being allowed to inherit can give a man a sense of arrogance he doesn’t deserve. Like, in this case, Rocco De Luca.
His father, Giuseppe, wasn’t an ally of ours. But he obeyed the lines of territory, stayed on his side of the city while we stayed on ours. There was no alliance, no friendship, but there was peace. Giuseppe was pragmatic. Calm. Easy to work with, if not friendly.
And now, his son has thrown away decades of fragile, hard-won peace for reasons I can’t begin to fathom.
“He’s getting into trafficking,” Padraigh says, as if reading my thoughts. “The Russians aren’t pleased with it either—at least not the Petrovs. And they’re the ones that matter. They might be allies in this.”
“Trafficking women?” I feel a thread of anger run through my veins as my father nods.
“Young ones, especially. It wouldn’t have been our business, but he made it ours, with his attack on your wife.”
I feel that anger build. Like hell it isn’t our business. My desire to kill Rocco De Luca magnifies with that knowledge, a feeling that I’m no longer taking him out only for my own revenge. There’s justification beyond that, and it makes my trigger finger itch even more than it already did.
I look down at the grave, seeing Siobhan’s body laid out in front of me all over again. Two bullets to the chest and one to the head. Clean, professional, and a message that couldn’t be misinterpreted.
“I’ll make De Luca pay,” I say flatly, flicking my cigarette into the slush. “I’ll make all of them pay. And then we’ll decide what comes next.”