Chapter 15
The muffled grunts of men trying to escape their binds halted as Steel entered the living area. The plastic crinkled under his boots with each step. The woodsy, sweet smoke of his cigar permeated the air around him, seeming to glow in the beams from the tall work lights.
Kelly Gavigan was a heavyset man of less than average height.
He’d only recently inherited a good portion of his dealings from his uncle, whose new cement shoes had not been good for his health.
Unlike their father who was short and round, Seamus, Eoin, and Declan had the frames of taller, athletic men.
Fergal and Tadhg had their father’s wider build but matched their brothers in height.
One thing Steel had to give Kelly, though, was that the man was calm under pressure.
Neither he nor Eoin were gagged, and while all five of his sons fought to break free, Kelly sat stoically and watched his surroundings, like he was sitting in a theater waiting for a movie to start.
The moment Steel walked into the room, Kelly’s eyes fixated on him.
There was no confusion in the man’s cold gaze. Steel wasn’t surprised Kelly recognized him. He hadn’t told Roisin his name, yet she’d known it.
As Steel lifted an empty chair through the center of the circle, he came to a stop directly in front of Kelly.
The man’s large mustache twitched. His sons and Eoin’s soldiers started to renew their futile efforts to break their bonds.
If Shaw, a former Marine and CIA operative, couldn’t break free, what chance did these amateur thugs have?
Steel sat, crossing his ankle over his knee.
After another couple of puffs, he pulled the cigar from between his lips and held it in the crook of his pointer finger as he rested his hand on his knee.
For several minutes, the only sounds in the room came from the mobsters’ struggles as Kelly and Steel stared at each other.
Kelly broke first. “I’m honestly surprised you had the balls to come after me. Do you have any idea who I am?” Unlike his daughter-in-law, Kelly’s accent was heavily Americanized. He barely sounded Irish, and it made Steel wonder if the man faked an accent around the other syndicates.
Then again, Steel didn’t actually care one way or another.
He took a single puff of his cigar and then blew the smoke up towards the ceiling. “What makes you think I give a shit who you are?”
Kelly’s right eyelid twitched. “You’re a dead man. I make one phone call, and every man in the family will be gunning for your head.”
Steel reached into his coat’s front inside pocket and pulled out his phone.
He tossed it onto Kelly’s lap. “Go right ahead. I’m sure they’ll love to hear about your little fuck up, which has now turned into a massive fuck up.
” Steel glanced to Kelly’s right and then left, where his two oldest sons sat bound and gagged.
“Do they even know? Have you told them why they’re about to die? ”
Kelly’s red cheeks turned nearly purple. With his hands bound, he clearly couldn’t call anyone even if he wanted to—which they both knew he didn’t. He was posturing, and Steel had called his bluff.
“Would you like to tell them?” Steel offered. “Or shall I?” He leaned forward a little, his eyes never straying from Kelly’s. “Father to father, who do you think they’ll be more pissed at? I mean, we both put them in these chairs, didn’t we, Gavigan?”
Kelly clamped his mouth shut, metaphorically gagging himself. Likely, he thought Steel didn’t know everything that had transpired. And he’d be right, because Steel was still missing one key piece of information.
But he was about to get it.
“Fine,” Steel sat back in the chair. “I’ll tell them.
Now, don’t be afraid to speak up if I get anything wrong.
” Kelly’s mustache flared as the man let out a hard breath through his nose.
“Now, one of you knows this story. Four of you don’t.
Care to hazard a guess which one knows?” Steel asked rhetorically, as the answer was obvious.
From his seat, he faced the six Gavigans with his back to the six soldiers, who were nothing more than peons in a never-ending power game.
“Roughly ten weeks ago, one of your warehouses that holds your pharmaceutical supply was broken into. They didn’t take much, mostly Adderall, Ritalin, and some Atomoxetine.
Now, four of you don’t really have your hands in the prescription drug trade, so you might be wondering what the hell those drugs are and why you are going to die for them.
“Simple answer is this: they’re sold like candies around college and high school campuses to help with concentration, memory, staying awake, and curbing impulse control.
And Eoin here,” Steel pointed the tip of his burning cigar at the middle brother, “was making a pretty penny pushing them. He was even thinking of expanding his sales outside the city. Which brings us back to the theft that took place ten weeks ago.”
Eoin spoke up for the first time, his accent stronger than his father’s. “I’ma not dyin’ for some bitch wh—”
Steel moved so fast Eoin didn’t have time to react before Steel’s lit cigar was shoved down his throat, cutting off his statement mid-word.
The chair Steel had been sitting in flipped into the air and landed with a clatter.
Eoin coughed, gasped, and spluttered as the burning roll of tobacco cut off his oxygen for several precious seconds as it made its way down his esophagus.
Walking back over to his chair, Steel picked it up and righted it. He sat down, once again crossing his ankle over his knee.
“A low-level dealer named Sebastian Castriota was the thief. You may recognize his name as his body was found floating in the Delaware about eight weeks back. The police report shows clear signs of torture, which is likely where Eoin here,” he gestured to the still-coughing man, “learned that Mr. Castriota wasn’t working alone.
He had a local college student who was actually selling the drugs. A student named Rodney Baldwin.”
Steel turned his attention fully on Kelly.
“Your father knew of the theft and ordered Eoin to take care of the problem. Eoin did, torturing and killing Mr. Castriota. However, rather than take care of Mr. Baldwin himself, Eoin ordered his henchmen to do it. A fatal mistake that has now landed all of you in your current predicament. Because if Eoin had killed Mr. Baldwin himself, he might have shown restraint. He might not have pulled the trigger when Mr. Baldwin was walking down the street of his college campus next to my daughter.”
Kelly didn’t even blink, not even as his middle son continued to choke on the burning cigar Steel had shoved down his throat.
“Now,” Steel continued, looking over at the other sons.
“You might be thinking I’m full of shit, that I’m making all this up.
Maybe I was hired by an enemy, and this is all some big elaborate scheme to take down you and your family.
Because your father couldn’t possibly be so stupid.
And none of your brother’s men have been killed recently, which would be the appropriate response after fucking up so colossally as killing an innocent and bringing unwanted attention to your organization.
” Standing, Steel pulled out the picture of Melanie.
Starting with Seamus on Kelly’s left, Steel made a slow circle around the bound men, making sure each of them saw her smiling face that would never grace this world again.
He buried his anger down. It wasn’t time yet to let it loose.
“My daughter.” He watched the faces of the thugs as he passed them, trying to determine their guilt when faced with their crime.
When he finally got to Kelly, he held the picture even closer to the man’s nose, but spoke to the room as a whole.
“Do you understand now why you are all here?”
Happenstance. It had all been happenstance.
A mere coincidence, an accident, a quirk of fate.
Melanie hadn’t died because of Steel’s enemy.
She hadn’t been murdered to send him a message or because he’d aimed the crosshairs at her.
Melanie had died because of poor timing.
She was walking next to the wrong person down a public street.
Learning this did not lessen Steel’s pain.
The sheer agony that had been assailing him since the moment he was told of Melanie’s death had tripled.
He was barely able to contain the anger and hatred at both himself and the universe—because the truth of the matter was he couldn’t have protected Melanie from her fate.
He couldn’t predict the unknown, no one could. The little bits of time, space, and opportunity that could be good one moment and bad the next. What was life but a kaleidoscope of coincidences?
Steel wasn’t a god. He wasn’t omniscient, wasn’t all-powerful.
He couldn’t change Melanie’s fate any more than he could change the color of the sky.
And that powerlessness, that knowledge that nothing could have been done to save his daughter from being gunned down in the street over a drug theft she hadn’t even been involved in, caused more pain and agony than words could describe.
Steel would rather suffer through open-heart surgery with no anesthesia than live with that knowledge.
But unless he took a bullet to his brain, there was nothing he could do to forget.
Vengeance wasn’t the only reason he hadn’t eaten a bullet. Steel had no plans of dying, of ending the torture he was barely living through. He owned it, felt it. He burned because he deserved to.
Fate should have taken him.
When Jenna first received her diagnosis, Steel had known his fate. He would fight like hell to help Jenna, to keep her alive, and when that battle was finally lost, he would join her in death. Be that Heaven, Hell, or the oblivion of absence, they would be together.