This meeting was supposed to be my crowning achievement.
On the other side of town, the heads of The Family are gathering. In about an hour, I’ll be there too. If everything had gone as planned, I’d be arriving as the unspoken king. Prepared to give them their final marching orders before leaving for the overworld.
But now, I might need to ask for their help. And that’s the best-case scenario. Worst case, they are in cahoots with both Ciro and the Black Delphi. I guess I’ll find out when I get there, but first, I’m heading to the office to meet Dad and Nolan and Shane.
I had the helicopter drop me off just outside of the city. Waiting in the lot of an old abandoned gas station were a few of my men, a bullet proof jeep, and my Ducati. The security team tried to keep up as I wove through traffic, breaking just about every road law known to the state of New York, but it was a hopeless task. I roared ahead, alone. It’s not like I was worried about being pulled over. Half the cops in this state are Irish, and ninety percent of those Irish cops are under my payroll. The Family only have about thirty percent of the Italian cops under their payroll, but we both have enough high-ranking members that we hardly have to worry about speeding tickets.
I’ve never been more thankful for that little hitch in my entire life. The fresh air, though harsh, is much needed. Anything to blow away that nagging fist of domesticity that Elisa wrapped around me last night. Right now, I can’t afford to think of her still naked in bed. I can’t think about how, when I woke up, she was pressed against my arm fast asleep. I can’t think about how hard I was for her. How much I finally wanted to fully take her. How much I wanted to taste her arousal again. How dangerous it is that I can fucking see myself actually caring for her as something more than just my captive.
I can’t linger on any of that. I just can’t.
Thankfully, as important as that all seemed before I slipped on my clothes and headed out for the day, the moment I stepped onto the helicopter, I realized what was truly important.
Business. Family. Power.
Revenge.
As I speed through traffic, the only thing on my mind is how I’m going to deal with The Family. What I’m going to do about Ciro. And what the fuck the Russians want with me.
Those questions swirl in the wind with my hair, but it all keeps coming back to one person. Elisa. No matter what I’ve told her, no matter what I did to her, she still looked disappointed when I said I’d kill her father if he came for her.
Why does she think he’s so great? He fucking sold her to me, his worst enemy. Before that, he locked her away in a cage, and occasionally dangled the myth of her beauty for prospective buyers.
There was a time when Ciro was still doing well enough that he could have forged a terrifyingly strong alliance if he had arranged a marriage between Elisa and another member of The Family. Why he didn’t do that still confuses me. If he had, it would have been near impossible for Dad to build himself back up after Ciro’s betrayal. It would have protected the Italian from my family’s wrath. It would have been a ruthless act of genius.
But then again, Ciro was never much more than just ruthless. He only ever got invited into The Family at all because of Dad’s scheming. And he only managed to successfully betray Dad because of the help he got from others.
I whip around a tight corner as anger engulfs me at the memory. Dad’s told me about how Ciro and The Family conspired behind his back to steal all of his connections and accrued wealth because they didn’t like the impurity of having an Irishman in the syndicate.
He’s told me about how, one by one, they threatened all those who’d invested with him, until eventually he had no one left to do business with. He’s told me about how they burned whatever the government didn’t repossess, and only left him and his family alive in case they ever needed that big brilliant Irish brain of his again. He’s told me about how, to make sure that he wouldn’t use that same brain against them, they allowed Ciro to take me as a hostage. If they saw him starting to build up again, then it was my life on the line.
But Dad was too smart for those Italian fucks. He knew that if he was able to get a certain amount of legitimate connections quickly enough, he’d be able to take them by surprise.
If he had a senator under his thumb, for example, then killing me in response to his rise would suddenly become suicide.
So, Dad went to work. He snuck in the backdoors of the companies that were stolen from him. He gathered his old crooked Irish cop buddies and threatened the CEOs that had stopped drinking with him once The Family got through with them. He stole and he blackmailed and he racketeered, then when he had enough to start all over again, he invested.
Dad’s investing prowess is legendary. He always seems to know who to bet on. It’s part of the reason I’m so proud to have his seal of approval. And I’m sure it’s also a big part of why The Family chose to heed my call for a meeting today. They understand that Rian Kilpatrick knows what he’s talking about.
That preternatural forecasting ability was a big reason why he and Ciro were invited into The Family in the first place. Michelangelo sculpted, Einstein reinvented physics, Rian Kilpatrick made money from nothing.
Within three years, he had enough to make his move. With almost nine figures in the bank and both a state senator and a state AG on his side, he pounced.
First, he crashed a meeting that The Family was having at the very spot where we are going to meet them later today. The Irish chief of police, along with a hundred police officers surrounded the joint as my father walked in with an ultimatum.
Return Aiden or go extinct.
Apparently, Ciro panicked. He knew it was lights out for him no matter what, and the rest of the supposedly dignified heads of the Four Families had to wrestle his phone away before he could call in the order to have me killed.
From that moment on, Ciro knew he was fucked. Maybe not immediately, but eventually he’d be bled dry.
Dad’s second act was to work towards having him kicked out of The Family. Then, he wouldn’t be protected at all. No allies meant no one to stand by him as we snipped away the last of his connections, the last of his cash, the last of his hope.
The rest of The Family would pay for their betrayal in a different way. With their servitude. We still needed their combined connections, after all. The network they had built up was essential to keeping the underworld from tearing itself apart.
But Ciro wasn’t needed for that.
Still, even with the odds slowly turning against him, the bastard kept fighting, clinging onto the last threads of his connection to the most powerful crime syndicate on the east coast.
He must have realized that the only way he was going to stay relevant was if the world was on fire. After all, his kind of cruelty is always welcome during wartime. So, from under the cover of anonymity, he set the streets alight.
Car bombs. Assassinations. Turf wars. For a few years, the city was almost constantly on fire, and we were all too busy stomping out the flames to realize that Ciro was behind it all.
It didn’t help that the weasel was constantly framing us for the shit he started.
By the time we understood what was going on, he was finally losing steam, and we were becoming more powerful than ever. His little bid for relevance ended up baptizing me in fire, and when I stepped out of the ashes, I was ready to take my place on the throne.
I’ll give him credit where credit is due. He did delay our tour of vengeance for a little longer than I would have liked. In the end, though, he was never going to outsmart us. Behind all of that mayhem, he was still just that same old stupid cruel fuck.
… But now he’s that stupid cruel fuck who has managed to escape from under my watch. That makes me look stupid. It makes me look weak. Even if I have his daughter, it makes me look like a fool.
A truly cruel response would be to bring Elisa’s severed head to the meeting today. But I don’t want that. It’s Ciro who should pay. Not Elisa. He doesn’t care about her; that’s becoming more apparent every day he stays hidden in the shadows. And it should have been clear from the moment he started bringing his underage daughter to his ‘fundraisers’.
But Elisa doesn’t know that. She’s too naïve. Too pure.
Fundraisers my ass. In the Italian underworld, those are called auctions.
That fumbling fool Ciro had been trying to pawn his daughter off on someone for years before Nolan got his clandestine pictures of her.
That’s what makes this whole thing stink to high hell.
Elisa is too beautiful to not have had any takers. The fuckers were probably crawling over themselves to get a taste of the sweet, innocent D’Ignoti princess.
… Or maybe’s Ciro’s stench was so great that no one would dare get close enough to see her true beauty.
There’s a mystery there that isn’t sitting right with me.
I pull up in the underground garage at Kilpatrick Inc. and head upstairs, but my mind is a hundred miles away.
Years ago, before we’d ruined him so much that a measly thirty million dollars could entice him to give up his daughter to me of all people, he must have had a chance to sell her. Why the hell didn’t he?
The conundrum still tugs at me as I enter the boardroom upstairs.
Of course, Dad is the first one here. I’m the second. We’ll have to wait a little for Nolan and Shane to show up, as always.
I must really be struggling with my Elisa problem, because when he sees the look on my face, Dad foregoes any greeting and gets straight to the point.
“What’s wrong?”
“Everything.”
He laughs. “When everything is wrong that just means there’s endless opportunity to make things right.”
Some wise words and a pat on the back always makes me feel better, but there’s still a whole world of shit out there right now. “And when everything is going right, there’s endless opportunity to fuck up.”
“Sometimes you can do everything right and still get fucked,” Dad shrugs, turning to the window and looking out onto the city he conquered. “But as long as you’re still breathing, there’s hope. Understand?”
I step beside him and think back to what it must have been like when he was betrayed. Everything was taken from him, including me. He didn’t give up. And now, look at us.
“Yes, I understand.”
“Good. Ready for the meeting?”
That I know for sure. “You bet. I’ve got all of our bases covered. We still don’t know if anyone from The Family is working with Ciro or the Russians—hell, we don’t even know for sure if Ciro is working with the Russians—but I’ve prepared reactions for all eventualities. I know we’re walking into the lion’s den, but one wrong move by them, and we’ll have every one of them shot and quartered.”
“Very good. You can’t play around with these Italians. They like to believe that they hold themselves to higher standards than us ‘barbarians’ but really, they just do whatever benefits them and then worry about the reasoning later. If we’re not careful, they’ll stab us in the back again and then say it was just pre-emptive self-defence. Can’t have that.”
“We won’t have that. Half of the cops on our payroll, including the chief of police himself, will be nearby and I won’t make any secret of it. I don’t trust those fuckers one bit, but right now, they could be the necessary evil we need to do what needs to be done.”
“And what needs to be done?”
“Find Ciro. Find the Russians. Kill them all.”
“And what about going clean?”
“We’ll have a nice long shower afterwards,” I smile.
Dad smirks too. “And what about the princess?”
That’s where I hesitate. Dad is too observant not to pick up on it. “Is all that going according to plan?”
“We’ll be married by the end of the month. Even if Ciro doesn’t really care about her, I’ll still have an Italian bride, which means an excuse to rejoin The Family. From there, we will take true control of those fucks. Unless they end up being behind this betrayal. Then there will be no Family left, because I’ll have wiped them all out.”
“Then what will you do with the D’Ignoti girl?”
“I don’t know,” I grumble. It’s the truth. I have no fucking idea.
Dad sighs. “I only wish you could have married for love. Like I did.”
My chest tightens, just like it always does when I think of Mom. “Love is weak,” I growl.
Dad turns to me, his grey eyes suddenly hard as steel. “What a foolish thing to say!” he scolds. My chest only tightens all the more. He pinches his nose and sits at the edge of the conference table. “Love isn’t weak, Aiden. It’s the strongest thing there is. It’s men who are weak when they are in love, but if they survive that initial barrage, they can become stronger than ever.”
I think about how Dad became even more powerful after Ciro’s betrayal. After we lost Mom…
“Would you trade all of this to have her back?”
“No.”
The answer is like a kick to the heart. “How could you say that?”
Dad motions for me to sit beside him. After a moment of hesitation, I follow his lead. “As much as we loved each other, it was you boys we loved the most,” he explains. “I wouldn’t risk anything happening to you three just to go back in time and have her by my side again, and I know she would say the same thing.”
“… Then why did she do it?”
Dad doesn’t respond. He just grabs my shoulder and lets me know he’s here. With his help, I try to fight back the bad memories. We need to prepare for the future, not get lost in the darkness of our past.
“Mr. Kilpatrick. Your boys are here.” The secretary’s voice comes over the intercom, breaking our heavy silence.
“Are you sure you’re ready?” Dad asks as we help each other up.
“Yes.”
“I know it,” he smiles, patting me on the cheek. “Let’s go show those bastards who’s boss.”
