LORIK
Eighteen Months Later
“Iknow that look.”
Cas says it with his back to me, pouring two fingers of my best Scotch into a glass he didn’t ask permission to use.
A twenty-five-year bottle worth more than most men’s cars, and I’ve never put a drop of it past my lips.
My oldest friend, on the other hand, helps himself any chance he gets.
Some nights I think he spends more time in this room than I do, and it’s my bedroom.
Hers and mine now.
It isn’t that I don’t drink. I don’t dislike the taste.
I’ve simply spent my entire life watching my own back, and for twenty-two of my twenty-nine years I’ve had to watch his too.
I can’t protect either of us with liquor in my blood, and with the demons Cas carries, I won’t ask him to stay dry any longer than the job requires.
So he drinks my Scotch, and I let him, because he is the only man on this earth I trust.
Anyone else who put a hand on that bottle without my say-so would be wearing a round from the forty-five resting on my thigh.
The liquor isn’t for him, or for me. It’s set dressing.
The same crystal decanters line the bar in my office downstairs, in my penthouse across the river, in the law practice three blocks from the hotel I own.
I have an image to keep, and the booze is part of the uniform—the way the suits are, the way the gun is.
Who is a mob boss without liquor, guns, coke, and women?
I’m a mirror of my dead brother, I suppose.
Except Admir didn’t have a law degree, or the patience, or every senator and damn near every congressman in the city folded into his pocket the way I do.
Which is precisely why the stupid bastard got himself killed thirteen years ago, when the New York families decided three bloodlines were stronger braided together than apart and lifted him off the board like he was nothing.
He wanted a bride he’d sampled without her permission and then he bought her. They made him disappear for it. And a sixteen-year-old boy who wanted no part of any of it inherited an empire he never asked for and has spent every year since learning how to wield.
There are ways my brother and I are carbon copies, and one way we will never be. But that difference is a secret I keep even from the men who would die for me, and tonight is not the night to take it out and hold it up to the light.
“What look is that?” I ask, because he wants me to, and because watching Cas arrive at a point he’s already reached is one of the few entertainments left to me.
“You’re wondering,” he says, finally turning, the glass cradled to his chest, “why you didn’t just put the whole family in the ground.” He tips his head toward the bed. Toward her. “Instead of the headache that one’s going to be.”
“Don’t you mean us?”
“You. Us.” He shrugs. “Same thing, at this point.”
He isn’t wrong.
I haven’t taken my eyes off her since he started pouring.
Brooklyn De Salvo lies on the white duvet like something staged, her dark hair fanned across the pillows she’ll spend the next however-many years wrinkling.
Her lips are parted. A thin line of drool has tracked from the corner of her mouth for the last five minutes.
A side effect of the sedative, and one I find I don’t mind, because it means she’s breathing slow and even and exactly the way I measured for.
I would know. I weighed the dose three times. The wrong milligram, the wrong compound, and a girl whose body goes into open revolt over shellfish and cheap bread and the wrong detergent doesn’t wake up at all. I have never been more careful with anything in my life.
I’ll die before I say that out loud.
Three hours ago I followed her into a women’s bathroom at the largest event venue in New York City.
Tonight was her father’s last fight before retirement.
The great Matteo “the Beast” De Salvo should have walked out under those lights and ended his career with a knockout the city would talk about for a decade.
Instead he lost, because his baby girl wasn’t in the stands, and his baby girl wasn’t in the stands because she was hunched over her phone in a bathroom, texting some boy she had no intention of ever touching.
I’d know. I read every word of it. I wouldn’t be much of a stalker if I didn’t keep eyes on every device she owns.
She’s been baiting me for months. Dangling other men in front of a man she’s never seen, daring me to do something about it.
She pulled the same stunt on her birthday last year, and she’s doing it again now, picking the most forgettable boy in her contacts and announcing she’s going to give him what she’s spent eighteen months trying to hand me.
She thinks if she threatens to give her firsts to someone else, I’ll finally break my own rule and take what’s already mine.
The thread is still open on the burner in my jacket. I’ve read it enough times to recite it.
brOOKLYN
You there? Or are you ghosting me on the one night it actually matters.
Dad fights in an hour. There’s a party after. After that, I’m not going home a virgin—with you or without you.
Your call. You’ve had over a year.
I didn’t answer fast. I never do when she’s pushing; making her wait is half of what’s kept her mine.
Tonight the silence cost me.
brOOKLYN:
His name’s Tyler. He’s asked me out twice. At least he shows me his face.
The infuriating part is that she’s right. About all of it. And that last line, at least he shows me his face, is the one that put a needle in my hand and her on a private jet bound to Washington, D.C.
That string of texts is the only reason she’s here a year ahead of schedule. I hadn’t planned to take her this soon. She’s nineteen, two months out of her first year of college, innocent of everything that matters and most of what doesn’t. And too young. Far too young for me.
I told myself I’d wait until she was twenty-one. I built the entire plan around it.
But the moment I read what she swore she’d hand to a boy who hadn’t earned it, bait or not, I saw red, and red is the one color I have never been able to think through.
I’ve studied this woman the way other men study scripture.
I know she shoved a red dress to the back of her closet two Decembers ago, tags still on it, because a stranger told her to buy it and she hated that she obeyed.
I know the boy she meant to give herself to tonight throws a punch like he’s apologizing for it.
I know which side of the bed she sleeps on, which foods will close her throat, the precise pitch of the laugh she gives the little ones in her family and never once gives a camera.
Somewhere in eighteen months of careful watching, the surveillance stopped being about the Caputos and started being about her. And I still haven’t decided whether that makes her my weakness or the reckoning I’ve had coming for a long, long time.
So I made a choice.
Her head was down. Her thumbs were flying. She never felt me close the distance, never saw the syringe, and by the time the needle found the side of her throat her eyes were already rolling white.
Cas carried her to the car while I taped a note to the mirror for her uncle to find.
Dolls are such delicate little toys.
They’re often forgotten, misplaced, allowed to wander unsupervised. Then along comes a monster who needs a new plaything since he’s broken all his others.
You stole something that belonged to my family, Caputo.
Then you made the dire mistake of eliminating our Krye.
You removed my brother from this world. It’s only fair I take something of yours as compensation.
You can look, but you will never find her the same as I never recovered Admir’s body. I still don’t know what you did to him, but the mind conjures many different scenarios.
You may have ended the reign of the sadistic one, but what was born from that was more savage, more vicious, more ruthless than you can imagine, Domenico.
A smart man would heed this warning. If you do come for her, I’ll return for the rest of your family, and I’ll wipe every Caputo, Nikolayev, and De Salvo off the face of the earth.
Be thankful it was Brooklyn I took. That I didn’t wait until your daughters came of age.
That is the only kindness I can offer, but really, I’m just an impatient man. I got tired of waiting, and I am a vengeful man who will make her bleed for your sins.
Her life is over, but mine has just begun.
Thank you for my child bride . . .
Domenico Caputo will read it and know precisely whose hand reached into his house and lifted out the precious thing they all protected first.
There is not one thing childlike about Brooklyn De Salvo. I oversold the note. It’s something I’m good at, and that was part of the point. I want him to know. I want him to come. So I baited him the same as Brooklyn does to her stalker when she wants a very specific reaction.
The plane was wheels-up before the venue finished understanding that the De Salvo girl had gone quiet. I sent Cas ahead with her and made one detour of my own.
To collect a priest.
He’s here now, folded into the wingback in the alcove like he’s trying to fold himself out of existence entirely. The man is older, soft through the middle, and eyes the size of communion plates.
“She’s so young,” he tries again, because apparently the last three times didn’t take. “This isn’t right.”
“She is young.” I let my gaze travel over him, slow, the way you look at a man you haven’t decided whether to keep. “And I’d wager every cent to my name that’s exactly how you like them, Father. Is that it? You want her for yourself? Or is it little boys you prefer?”
“I have never been inappropriate with any child, man, or woman in my life.” He spits it like the words are foul in his mouth, and the genuine disgust on his face is the first thing about him I respect.
“So you say. We’ll take your word for it.
” I gesture lazily between Cas and myself.
“Otherwise my finger gets twitchy.” I don’t tell him how little stands between him and a bullet if he turns out to be the kind of holy man who leaves marks on the small and the helpless.
If he’s lucky, he’ll never learn what that particular subject does to me.
“Sit there. Stay quiet until I need you. Do as you’re told and you’ll walk out of here breathing, with a generous donation to your parish for blessing my marriage to this—” I let the pause stretch. “Sweet, young, innocent little girl.”
She’s a legal adult, and she’ll be a consenting one before the sun comes up. I’m only over-selling it to watch him squirm.
“Don’t,” Cas adds from the bar, conversationally, “and I’ll fold you in with tomorrow’s trash and go find a priest with a better sense of self-preservation.
” The corner of his mouth lifts. He means it, and worse, he’d enjoy it.
Between the two of us I’ve put more men in the ground, but Cas is the one who treats it like therapy.
To me it’s housekeeping. A case to close.
The priest shuts his mouth.
“Mmh.”
The sound comes from the bed, low and pained, and every other thing in the room ceases to matter.
Her hands come up to her face, and her palm scrubs down it. Her elbows dig into the mattress before she pushes herself up by inches, dark lashes fluttering as they fight the drug the whole way. And then her eyes open, and they are the exact blue of deep water, and they land on me and stay.
I have looked at this woman through a thousand screens. I have memorized her from a careful distance for eighteen months. None of it prepared me for what it does to be the thing she sees first.
I don’t let people touch me. It’s the first rule the men who work for me learn and the one they never test twice. A hand I didn’t invite is a hand I haven’t accounted for, and I account for everything. It’s why I’m breathing and Admir is a story.
And yet I have spent over a year and a half imagining what it would cost me to let this one girl lay her palm flat against my chest, and the wanting of it is the most dangerous thing I own.
“Did you sleep well, my love?” I ask, in the smooth, pleasant voice I save for men I’m about to ruin in courtrooms. It comes easy. It’s my default.
For a long moment she only stares, fitting the pieces together behind those eyes. The strange room, the gun on my leg, Casimir behind me, the priest in the corner, the ring she hasn’t yet noticed weighing down her left hand.
Then my bride opens her pretty mouth.
“Who the fuck are you?”