Page 83 of Mob Star

“She is your woman, after all.” Sean grins at me.

“I dare you to say that in front of Thea or Mair.”

He pretends to shiver. “I’ll pass. Where are you going to be if I find something new?”

“Corey is gauche as fuck. He got a hotel room at the Waldorf. I’m certain he’ll have company, but I’ll make sure the hookers are gone before he and I chat. By the end, I’ll have him thinking Ewan’s a chump he can walk all over. The kid’s got brass balls, so that won’t play out well for Corey’s members still up in Boston. In the meantime, get Seamus over to Rosedale.”

I own a bar out there called Connacht. It’s named for one of the ancient kingdoms and one of the four provinces of Ireland. It’s where our family hales from. Where the O’Rourkes once dominated. I can almost guarantee Corey’s men will go to Queens to drink there since it’s no secret it’s mine. McGinty’s is too popular for them to pull off anything. Rosedale is an affluent area where they’ll stick out like a sore thumb if they go in their jeans and leather vests.

They’ll do that on purpose because they can afford the overpriced drinks and would blend in if not for their clothes, tats, manners, and attitude. But it’ll make them easier for Seamus and our guys to spot. As the owner’s cousin, it’ll make sense for him to be there since his red hair, freckles, and green eyes will make him stand out just as much as the bikers, but for a different reason.

“Anything you want Shane to do? Cormac’s at the hospital for the night, right?”

“Yeah. See if Shane can relieve Cormac in the morning if I can’t go. I’ll call Dillan on the way to the Waldorf and see if he wants to deal with Gareth and the O’Briens.”

“Sounds good. Be careful. Corey is fucking batshit crazy if he went after Ally when he knows you’re together. That makes him unpredictable.”

“I know.” We turn toward the door. “Actually, can you have Shane look into Ted? Thea said some guy shoulder checked him at the hospital today. She didn’t see them pass anything to each other, and she said Ted checked his pockets. Short of someone else I trust checking them, I won’t believe they’re empty.”

“Sure thing, Doubting Thomas.”

My little brother goads me, but he won’t disagree. I know he wants nothing to happen to Thea, so he’s not being flippant about her safety. He’s just doing what little brothers do: being annoying.

We have people working all over the city for us. That includes the highest end restaurants, bars, night clubs, and strip clubs— many owned by our rivals —along with hotels, sports clubs, coffee shops, and cigar and vape shops. Anywhere people with money go to spend it.

It makes it easy for us to get access to places we shouldn’t like a hotel’s reservation software. It only takes a name for the woman at the front desk to give me a key card to Corey’s room. I knock on the door and wait. I hear giggles. Gross. I knock again. Still nothing. Good. He’s unlikely to be in a position— literally —to fight back. I let myself in and want to gag. The stench of sex fills the air. It’s never pleasant when it’s someone else’s.

“Corey, we need to talk.”

One of three women spins around and recognizes me. She works at one of our casinos. Hmmm. I didn’t know she was moonlighting. Her eyes nearly pop out of her head. She runs to grab her clothes.

“We need to go. Now.” She’s whispering to the other women, but it comes out as a hiss.

“Let’s chat on Monday, Stephanie.”

She looks like she might be sick. I haven’t taken my eyes off Corey since I recognized Stephanie, and she recognized me. I lean against the wall with my arms crossed, and my right ankle crossed over my left shin. I look smug and bored. I can tell because there’s a mirror straight across from me. The women are still pulling on their clothes as they run from the room. The moment the door closes, and I see we’re alone, I pull a gun from my shoulder holster. I make sure Corey can see I have the other one. I lift a robe off an armchair with my pistol and fling it at him.

“Cover your wee willy before I laugh and can’t stop.”

“What do you want, Finn? I helped your guys take care of Rowan and Riley.”

“Yes. That was restitution for what you’ve already done to Thea. We still need to talk about staying away from her family and her. We didn’t get to that last time. You were a little too distraught.”

After I saw Corey at his home, I made another house call on the way to the airfield to make sure he understood I wasn’t giving him a suggestion, but a command. He was practically shiting himself when I burst into his clubhouse and started shooting at shite on the walls and behind the bar. Then I started shooting at people until he ran out of the office. I turned my gun on him while my guys blocked him from leaving. I thought he was going to have a stroke from the way the vein in his neck stood out. That was before I discovered what happened to Thea at that place.

“You’d like to live. That means you must continue to be useful to me. If you’re not, then there’s no reason for you to breathe. You sure as shite don’t matter in Boston now that Rowan and Riley are dead. Ewan couldn’t care less about you. If you want to remain relevant, I’d do as I say if I were you. Irrelevant shite gets forgotten when it’s gone.”

“Ewan knows the deal still stands even if his dad is dead.”

“Have you met Ewan? No, it doesn’t. He wouldn’t give two fucks what his dad or his granddad did before him. He thinks he’s going to breathe new air into his family. He thinks he’s going to modernize them. And do you know who he’s going to emulate? My family.”

Rowan got some girl knocked up at sixteen, so his son is already twenty-seven, even though Rowan was only a decade or so older than me. We’re all closer in age to Ewan than Rowan, but we can all remember Rowan as a whiny arse little bitch teenager.

I keep my gun pointed at Corey as I walk to the chair across from him. Blessedly, he has the robe on. I look relaxed and comfortable, but he knows better than to believe I am.

“Here’s how it’s going to go, Corey. You’re going to ride your arse back up to Boston. You’re going to see Ewan and tell him you heard we have another shipment coming through Belize with more kilos than the last one we sent through Boston. You’re going to tell him you can get him an in with the Cardinals and the Dawgs since your members are so similar. You’re going to tell him you’re the only one who can make that connection. You’re going to tell him it was the Viscusos who took out his dad because Rowan wasn’t paying attention to anything but revenge for me taking back what was mine.”

Ewan won’t believe a damn word of this and will know Corey is lying. It’s not that Corey is a shite liar. He’s actually pathologically good. Ewan’s an old soul. He’s way smarter— therefore, potentially a greater threat —than his dad and uncle combined. He and I are cordial, and he’ll realize I did him a favor by bumping off his dad. He’s been considering patricide for years. I took care of it for him.

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