The Dangerous Dance (The Costello Syndicate #1)

Liam

The boardroom on the forty-second floor of Rosso Real Estate smells like old money.

Vito Rosso sits at the head of the table the way he sits everywhere — like the furniture was built for him.

Marco is on his left, Dante on his right.

Both carry the particular stillness of men who've decided, before walking in, that they don't trust me.

I don't blame them.

Six months ago, my father was alive and the Costellos ran the Irish in this city without needing anyone's permission.

Six months ago, I'd never sat across from Vito Rosso.

A lot has changed. My da is in the ground.

I'm the one in his chair. And the Italians, who used to be a problem we managed, are now an alliance my brother thinks I shouldn't be building.

I take my seat across from Vito and set my hands flat on the table. No folder, no agenda packet, no theater. I never understood the theater of it. "Thank you for making the time."

"You requested the meeting," Vito says.

"I did." To my right, Conor settles in with the quiet competence that keeps him employed — he came up through my father's crew, ran security for fifteen years, runs it for me now.

Beside him, the chair meant for Declan sits empty.

I don't offer an explanation. Vito is too smart to pretend he hasn't noticed.

He notices everything. It's what makes him dangerous.

It's also, I'm slowly learning, what makes him useful.

"Your brother sends his apologies?" Marco asks. The tone is courteous. The meaning isn't.

"My brother sends nothing," I say, because lying would be worse. "He disagreed with the agenda. I'm here to represent Irish interests regardless."

Vito folds his hands. He studies me the way he studies every room — counting exits, weighing what I'm worth against what I might cost him. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of powerful men's scrutiny. His is among the more thorough.

"The agenda," he repeats. "Which is."

"The Russians." I let it sit. "Three incidents in sixty days. Two of them in territory that borders your shipping routes as much as mine. The Bratva isn't testing us separately, Don Rosso. They're testing the seam between us." I hold his gaze. "I'd like to make sure there is no seam."

It takes two hours. The conversation is careful and correct and colder than the room's climate control has any right to be.

We reach agreements — some provisional, all contingent on the kind of sustained trust that can't be manufactured in a single meeting.

I know that. He knows that. We shake hands anyway, because that's what you do, and I leave with Conor at my shoulder.

In the elevator, Conor says nothing. He's good at that.

My phone buzzes as we step into the lobby. Finn.

I answer before he can speak. "I know. I'm sorry for it."

"She's not angry," Finn says, which is his way of telling me Gianna absolutely is. "But we agreed we'd be done with this for a while, Liam."

"I know."

"We had plans. For the hotel—"

"I know, Finn." I push through the revolving door onto Sixth Avenue.

The November wind cuts through my coat. "I wouldn't have called if I had anyone else.

Declan pulled out this morning. Last minute.

I needed someone standing beside me who the Italians could recognize.

Costello blood. Someone who vouches for what I'm trying to build without me having to say it. "

Silence. Then, "Gianna wants to know when it ends."

The question lands the way it's meant to. I don't have an honest answer. "Tell her I'm working on that too," I say. "And tell her I'm grateful. Both of you."

He hangs up.

I stand on the pavement a moment longer than I need to. Then I tell Conor to take the car back and walk the nine blocks to the compound, where I know Declan will be.

He is, as I suspected, drunk.

Not falling-down drunk. Declan doesn't fall down.

He sits in the armchair in the small sitting room off the main hall, a glass balanced on his knee, his jacket over the arm of the chair, his collar open.

He looks at me the way you look at someone you've been expecting and weren't looking forward to.

"How'd it go?" he says.

"How do you think it went." I don't sit. "You were supposed to be there."

"I told you I disagreed with the meeting."

"You told me at seven this morning, Declan. The meeting was at nine."

"I told you."

"You ambushed me." I keep my voice level.

I've been keeping my voice level for six months.

I am very tired of keeping my voice level.

"I had to call Finn. Pull him away from a life he's trying to build with his wife — a life I gave him — because you decided the morning of that your principles wouldn't allow—"

"My principles." He sets the glass down and stands.

He's not smaller than me, not by much, and the anger in him has nowhere to go but out.

"Don't talk to me about principles. You sat across from the man who put Gianna under surveillance for months.

Who used his own sister as a piece on his board to trick us—"

"That's not—"

"You've rewritten history to make the alliance palatable, Liam, but I was there. I remember what they did. And now we're what — partners? Allies?" He says the word like it tastes wrong. "Da would have—"

"Da is dead." Quiet, which is worse than shouted. We both know it. "And the things Da would have done got him killed. So I'd like us to stop using him as a compass."

He crosses the room faster than I track, and then his hand is in my collar and mine is at his chest — two men who love each other and can't find their way back to whatever used to sit between them.

I push him back. He doesn't go easily.

"Enough." Ailish's voice from the doorway.

Not loud. It doesn't need to be. She's Declan's — has been since before our da died, in the way certain people become someone's, the close confidant, the one who knows the operation from the inside and has standing he gives no one else.

Which means she has standing with me too, by extension and by her own merit, and she's the only person outside this family that Declan and I have ever genuinely listened to.

She stands with her arms crossed, her expression composed in the particular way that means she's furious and choosing not to be yet. "This is done for tonight."

Declan steps back first, which surprises me. He picks up his jacket and his glass and walks to the window with his back to both of us.

I straighten my collar.

"Ailish," I start.

"I know," she says.

"I wasn't going to ask you to—"

"I know," she says again, firmer. "I'll talk to him."

This is what I was going to ask. Declan doesn't hear me anymore, not really. But he hears Ailish. He always has. "Be careful what you push him on. He came from somewhere tonight before he sat down with that glass, and I don't think it was anywhere friendly."

Ailish looks at me with the expression she has when I'm telling her something she already knows. "I've got it."

"Maybe take a few days back. Let it settle. Things are—"

"Liam." She says my name like a period at the end of a sentence.

"I'm not going to pull back and lay low.

That's not how I operate, and you know it.

" She glances past me toward Declan's silhouette at the window.

Something in her face moves, then it's professional again.

"But I will go greet Gianna. Finn texted they've arrived. "

I exhale. "Good. She could use someone normal."

"She could use someone who isn't wrapped up in all of this," Ailish says, pulling her jacket off the hook. "Which is you and Declan both, tonight." She looks at me once more on her way out. "Go to sleep, Liam. You solved nothing tonight, and you won't solve anything more now."

She leaves.

I stand in the sitting room with my brother's back to me and the silence of a house that used to feel different. Declan refills his glass without turning around.

"I needed you today," I say to his reflection in the dark window.

He doesn't answer.

I go to bed.