Taken By the Enemy (The New York Underworld: The Callahans #2)

Chapter 1

ONE

Lochlan

They say dead men tell no tales.

Which is funny.

Because I’ve never had more to say.

I died on a Tuesday. On Christmas. It was unusually warm and sunny out in New York for that time of year. A solid fifty degrees and some change.

Otherwise known as sweater fucking weather.

At Sing Sing, we began the day like we always did. Five a.m. count. Breakfast in the mess hall, enjoying such fine dining cuisine as imitation eggs and flavorless oatmeal. The rest of the morning into the afternoon was spent doing busy work like laundry duty or kitchen cleanup.

Come afternoon, we were in for a rare highlight at the big house.

Christmas dinner.

Rubber turkey. Soggy stuffing. Grainy mashed potatoes with syrupy gravy and rock hard rolls. What’s not to look forward to?

Still better than the slop we ate most nights for dinner. Hell, still a lot better than most guys got on the outside.

So most of us were practically licking our chops and rubbing our hands together at the prospect of our Sing Sing Christmas feast.

…and then disaster struck.

Or to put it more accurately—all hell broke loose.

Holidays mean holiday leave. Holiday leave means fewer staff on shift at a maximum-security state prison.

It means doomsday levels of incompetence and stupidity when half the staff stuck working Christmas are recent hires with only a few months under their belt.

All it takes is one misread of the schedule. One hectic movement period. Two or more assholes who hate each other’s guts winding up in the same place at the same time with only a handful of rookie guards in the way—and boom.

You’ve got a prison riot breaking out.

That was how we celebrated Christmas that afternoon. By beating the shit out of rival gangs and getting the shit beat out of us in turn.

Everybody’s got a clique. Behind bars, you belong somewhere whether you like it or not.

You’ve got the White nationalist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood. The street gangs like the Crips and the Bloods. The Latin Kings and the Italians’ Cosa Nostra. Even the fucking Albanians had their own little clique going.

I wasn’t part of the White nationalist group nor did I want to be. (It’s not like the Irish were historically welcomed in their circles anyway).

I fell in the other group—the group of guys without a real home, who usually had ties to street crime but didn’t have the numbers to form a specific faction.

Prison politics and dynamics put simply: everybody had a group and most groups had problems with other groups.

So on Christmas Day when dummy new-hire prison guards moved one housing block too early according to the schedule, they encountered a different housing block they had beef with.

It was as basic as one fist being thrown.

A fight that starts off small—this time between some White nationalist asshole and another guy from the Latin Kings. Their respective groups jumped in, and the dummy new-hire, short-staffed prison guards were quickly overwhelmed.

Think WWF Royal Rumble level of insanity.

Soon everybody was caught up in it. Fists were flying and blood was splattering. One guard got boxed in by some guys and had his head bashed in on the concrete floor.

The alarm blared. Red lights flashed. Prison guards from other blocks rushed toward the scene, hoping to contain the anarchy. But it was already too late.

The cat was already out of the bag. The genie out of the goddamn bottle.

Fires broke out and sprinklers turned on, ironically enough washing away some of the blood smeared across the concrete. Not that it mattered—there was enough fresh blood ready to take its place.

It quickly became evident this was about to go down as one of the worst prison riots in modern times. The guard who got his head bashed in went from twitching to laying limp and motionless in a corner. Nobody seemed to notice except me.

I was one of the few on the sidelines. Just an observer watching the chaos unravel.

…until somebody came up from behind and shanked me in the stomach.

I knew it was a gamble when I decided I would die. Not only was I risking the plan going south and the feds catching on, adding even more time to my sentence, I was making a deal with a fucking snake.

Dren Kosovo being that snake.

It just so happened that me and the Albanian crime boss had interests that had aligned in recent times.

To put it simply, we both hated my family’s guts.

How’s the saying go? The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Except Dren was no friend of mine. So I guess it would be more accurate to say the enemy of my enemy is temporarily the asshole I work with to achieve what I need.

The new-hire dummy prison guards did what Dren instructed them to do. The prison gangs fought like we all knew they would. One dummy guard was a casualty, but that’s small fries for crime bosses and warlords like us.

But if I was to break out of Sing Sing, I couldn’t do it alive. Nobody in modern times ever had. In order to do it, I had to be dead.

It was some skinhead fucker who stabbed me, again thanks to Dren’s wallet. I needed to be incapacitated long enough to be taken to medical and then pronounced dead.

A lot of fucking trust to put into somebody I consider a snake.

The riskiest gamble I’ve ever made in my life.

But what other choice did I have? It was either take the chance or rot away in a prison cell for seven more years.

All while the mighty Callahan Clan reigned supreme and enjoyed the fruits of my fucking labor.

So I took the chance. I stood by and let one of Dren’s insiders stab me. Then I let the medical personnel he’d paid off tag me as dead and send me to the morgue with the other riot casualties.

From there, it was all about waiting out the transportation logistics—as I pretended to be dead. Really, I was just heavily drugged to the point it looked like I was barely breathing.

The good thing about dying in prison is once you’re logged as dead, nobody gives a fuck anymore. People stop asking questions and most families of loved ones don’t have the institutional power to demand answers.

Mine did… yet they didn’t even bother with that much. No surprise considering my dear dad cares more about saving his own fucking hide than rocking the boat.

Another bonus about dying?

Dead men don’t have anything left to lose. That’s what makes them so dangerous.

That’s what makes me so dangerous. So unexpected and lethal.

I emerged from prison dead to the world, with the stitches in my side to show for my troubles. I had little to my name except the money I’d had Eddie transfer to an offshore account and some family valuables I kept hidden. But I was alive.

I was free.

Ready to wreak havoc and get revenge on everybody foolish enough to wrong me.

Home base becomes the only piece of property I have access to—a long-forgotten Callahan estate in upstate New York that’s sat abandoned for almost two decades.

It once belonged to the legendary Finn Callahan, my late grandfather. The man who started it all back when our family was nothing more than impoverished Irish immigrants barely able to rub two nickels together. He built everything from the ground up through ruthlessness and cunning.

My father inherited everything he has, like the useless sack of shit he is. He was born with the foundation already laid out for him. All he had to do was carry on the Callahan legacy and not fuck up.

I was that son too—the next heir in line. The one designated to take the crown and head the family. From the moment I was born, I was groomed for it.

But I’ve since realized it’s all smoke and mirrors. None of it means shit.

As the heir—the so-called golden child—you’re as expendable as any low-level fucking buttonman. A lesson I’ve learned the hard way.

Coming out on the other side, my whole worldview has shattered. The man I spent years believing myself to be is dead, and a new man has emerged.

I retreat to the desolate old Callahan property for that reason. Not only does it offer discretion and seclusion, but it’s the property I inherited from Grandpa Finn when he passed.

In today’s age, the large house is far from the luxury home it once was. Built during the gothic revival period of architecture with its two turrets flanking the main structure, the place hasn’t been maintained in years, and it shows.

Three stories high, the gray stone is dark from moisture and the arched windows are caked with grime. Ivy climbs the walls, and the iron gate is rusted and permanently cracked open. Weeds swallow up the driveway, and rodents have taken up residence at the property.

The interior’s no better.

The light switches don’t work, the house without real electricity, and the pipes groan and squeal at odd hours.

Dust is so thick inside, coating practically every inch of the place, it’s in sheets.

After so many years, the detailed plasterwork on the ceilings is yellowed and peeling, and the furniture has been in place for so long, it leaves a cast when moved.

But it’s home.

It’s my base of operations as I execute my plan. The Callahans—the entire New York Underworld and even the fucking city itself—won’t know what hit them.

They won’t see it coming when I destroy them and laugh in their faces as I do.

Death is an ending for some men. But for me it’s only the beginning.