Chapter 1
Alizé — twenty-three / Cillian — twenty-eight
Wedding Day
It was far too cheery a day to get married.
Where only rare clouds crudely splotched the bright sky, it should’ve been raining.
That would’ve suited me better. That way, there would’ve been no false pretenses, no bliss and smiles.
Under melancholic showers, we could call this exactly what it was: a mutually beneficial agreement none of us really wanted.
I spun my folded karambit knife around my finger, and the hooked blade clipped shut as I collapsed my head against the edge of the headrest.
My empty eyes stared back at me in the tinted car window, as our driver took us from the airport to the Lyon City Hall.
Each old-as-shite French apartment building we drove past looked no different from the next.
They were all dainty and overembellished.
Every baroque detail and fancy balcony was an eyesore, repeating themselves over and over, with no end in sight.
None had a lick of charm like Dublin’s rich character or like Boston’s robust blend of old and new. I couldn’t wait to get back home.
A meaty hand slapped over my shoulder, and I jerked against the touch, lost in thought. I spun around, fist raised, stopping short of Liam’s—my youngest brother’s—nose. The little shite peeked around my fist and grinned.
“Jaysus, son,” our father groused. “Calm it down.”
Da turned his phone around. The screen blazed in the darkened space, jerking up and down as his hand tremored, but he pretended not to notice.
Angus O’Leary had always been good at pretending problems didn’t exist, and he took letting this one go undiagnosed as long as possible very seriously.
Well, he could wallow in it for all I cared.
“Alizé De Villier, your bride. Get a good look at her face.”
I shoved the phone at him and gazed back out the window. “Not interested.”
“Looking at a picture isn’t going to kill you.”
“No point.”
“Is it me, or does Cillian not seem thrilled to meet his bride?” Liam teased.
Flattening my palm, I smacked him upside his messy quiff hairstyle. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be here. He knew that.
“Oi,” he groused, rubbing the back of his head as I laid mine against the seat and focused on the scenery.
“You deserve worse.”
Liam snatched Da’s phone. “She’s fierce pretty. I’d tap that.”
“Appearance has never been a requirement for you,” my middle brother, Brody, droned, his nose buried in his laptop as he conducted last-minute research on my bride-to-be.
“I’m an equal-opportunity lover.”
“Give that back.” Da also smacked Liam across the back of the head, harder though, always harder, and plucked the phone out of his hand.
“Will you all stop hitting me? You know how long it took me to perfect this look?”
“No one needs your bleating.” Da massaged his probably stiff hand after that slap. “Just look at the bloody picture, Cillian. You’re about to marry her. Might as well know what she looks like.”
“I’ve no interest in what your gambling is costing me.”
We all had our ways of coping, but unlike my brothers and me, who internalized our trauma without involving the family and business, our father took to gambling and put us all in hot water with the Urabá cartel. This alliance with the French was how we fixed his mistake.
“Da, leave it be,” Brody said, not looking up.
“She’ll be dead in days. Weeks, if she’s lucky,” Liam added. “Just another O’Leary name on a tombstone.”
“She’s not taking our name,” I growled.
That was where I put my foot down. I would marry the woman, but I wasn’t doing anything more than signing my name on a piece of paper. It was a business contract. Nothing more.
I settled deeper into my seat and crossed my arms, wishing the day were over already. A pair of shooters clinked in my pocket. I took one out and downed it in two gulps, but the bland rum barely had any effect at all. Just my luck. Happy two-monthiversary as a widower to me.
“There’s a chance our Love Knot Killer won’t come all the way to France,” Brody commented.
I grunted. If it weren’t for the sake of our contract with the De Villiers and the money we very much needed to save our hides, I wouldn’t care whether my wife-to-be lived or died.
“All the better if she does,” Da added, and I pressed my lips together in a tight line. He really was a right selfish bastard. “The photo is so you know who you’ll be paying your respects to.”
Liam shivered. “Oh, that’s cold.”
I chugged down my second shooter—this one an American whiskey I usually didn’t get within ten feet of. Sadly, neither bottle numbed nor dulled the drag of my thoughts down the rabbit hole. “We need her to live. That’s nonnegotiable.”
“No, what we need is to catch this LK bitch. Don’t tell me you’re going soft, son.”
I turned my withering stare on him. “My priority right now is cleaning up your mess.”
“This may be Da’s debt you’re paying off,” Brody said, rocking back and forth over his laptop and wiping his hands along his jeans.
It was one of his usual tics whenever the serial killer came up.
His voice trembled slightly, but he remained in his analytical mode, focusing on facts to rework difficult stimuli in his favor.
“But if LK offs Cillian’s new wife, the De Villiers will get involved.
They have the resources to dig further. Her death will give them the motivation to find exactly who’s been fucking with the O’Learys.
We might finally be rid of this once and for all. ”
“We need their money more than we need their resources,” I stated, cold and steely as a grave.
“Now you listen to me, boy.”
“No.” I batted aside Da’s wagging finger. “I’m here for one thing and one thing only. To pay off the Urabá cartel. No one, not my brothers nor anyone else in our clan, will meet their end like Galagher ever again. His death was your mess, old man, and I’m cleaning it up.”
The O’Leary clan protected their own, and no loyal man in the outfit deserved to be skinned alive and left on our doorstep like Galagher had been. He died because our leader forgot about those who followed him. That was never happening again.
Liam huffed at me. “At least have some fun with her once. Your bride looks like she’d take it good and hard.”
“Like I said, not interested.”
“She’s a dead woman walking. If you aren’t, I am.”
Again, I backhanded Liam’s head. “You’ll do nothing to jeopardize that money. And you”—I pointed at our da—“won’t touch those funds. Remember what we discussed.”
Angus O’Leary clenched his jaw, not pleased to be reminded of our deal, but I couldn’t find one fuck to give.
The moment I signed that contract, I took over as head of the O’Learys.
No more gambling on his part, or I’d throw him out to the wolves—family or not—then stick whatever was left of him in rehab.
It was as good as he deserved after everything he’d put us through.
The De Villier French mafia needed our muscle for a possible war with the Italians in California, while we needed their infinite funds over the next decade.
The caveat—the De Villiers demanded their daughter marry the heir of the O’Leary clan and stay married for a minimum of fifteen years. Enter me, the newly widowed heir.
“That won’t go over easy with the crew heads,” Da argued, and I scoffed.
“They won’t know any better if you tell them straight out, old man. You’re seeing gold today, but the well will run dry if the Love Knot killer skewers and brands the French woman. And I’m not marrying for kin and duty again.”
“I’ve more than one son.”
“I refuse,” Brody stated flatly.
With the constant furrow of his brow, his shaved head, and scraggly ginger beard, he was always mistaken for the brawn of our brotherly trio, when he was, in fact, the most withdrawn and unlikely to fight.
“I will, but she’d better be smoking.” Liam grinned and covered his head with his arms.
I pinched his exposed tricep, smirking at his responding squeal. “You need to toughen up.”
“Toughen up?” He put me in a headlock and knuckled my head. “I’ll show you.”
With one pointed strike to the radial nerve of his arm around my neck, Liam released me with hissed inhales.
“You’ve still got much to learn, baby brother.”
The car crawled to a stop in the middle of a road that split into a wide pedestrian street. The intercom hummed.
“We have arrived at your destination,” our driver said, his voice distorted and words nearly lost beneath a strong French accent.
I gazed out the window at the gated building in front of us, stretched out with rectangular arched windows, odd stone faces at each window corner, statues atop the roof, and several flags flying over the entrance. All gray and bleak.
“Does she even speak English?” Liam asked.
“The whole family does,” Da said. “So, all of you, mind your tongues in there.”
I grunted, whirled my knife around my finger before pocketing it, then pushed my door open. “Let’s get this over with.”