Page 11 of Mob Princess

“What?”

“Your hot dog’s ready.”

I look down at the plate he fixed me. Not only is there a hot dog with mayo and ketchup, there’s macaroni salad, a brownie, and Doritos. He offers me a lopsided grin as I accept the plate. It’s all the stuff I like. He tries, and I have to give him credit for that.

Turns out, though, it’s not so altruistic as I hoped.

“You’re going to New York in two days.”

Chapter Three

Sean

Finn and Shane just pulled into Dillan’s driveway behind me. I texted Dillan when I turned on his street to let him know we were almost there. Now that he’s married and can’t keep his hands off his wife, the open-door policy to his house slammed shut. We make sure to give them a heads up before we come through the gate. Finn’s the same with his wife. They moved into a house two streets over.

Among the many fucked-up things in this world, all the married syndicate couples live in the same two neighborhoods. My parents and my aunts and uncles live near Nicoletta and Massimo Mancinelli, who live a block from Massimo’s second cousin, Domenico, and his wife, Carlotta. Their neighborhood is around the corner from the one all the Kutsenkos and younger Mancinellis moved into. Dillan’s on the corner of the two neighborhoods, and Finn is six houses down and two streets behind.

The neighborhoods are Switzerland. We see each other, but we keep our eyes forward. At least, we supposedly do. There isn’t a moment we aren’t watching for who’s in front, beside, or behind us. But there are children in these families now, so no one will risk taking a shot with one or more kids being in a car. Outside the neighborhood, when we’re certain it’s only the men? Fair game, bitches.

“Hey. Welcome back.” Shane is my absolute mirror image except I have a freckle on my throat, and he doesn’t. The freckles on our face are so damn similar, they’re of no use for people to tell us apart.

“Thanks.” I knock before punching in the code for the front door.

“Dillan? Mair?” Finn calls over my shoulder as I step across the threshold.

“Mair’s at the office. I’m in the kitchen.”

Dillan’s voice carries in the mostly furnished home. They made sure they set up all the bedrooms as soon as they moved in. We all have our own room. It’s that way at all the parents’ homes. It’s that way at Finn’s. Dillan and his wife are taking their time to furnish the family room and living room. They have similar taste, so it’s not because they can’t agree. They just aren’t in a hurry to settle. Finn and Ally merged their belongings.

My cousin looks up from the sandwich he’s making. There are already three others waiting on plates. “How’d it go?”

I shrug. “How does any funeral go?”

I grab a plate and move to the kitchen table. Shane and Finn do the same, and Dillan joins us once he puts everything away.

“Did you have a chance to see any friends?” Shane speaks before he takes a bite. I haven’t filled Shane or Finn in yet, either. Finn and I talked about other stuff when he called yesterday, and I had to stop texting with Lina.

I got home the night before last, and I spent yesterday catching up on work. I know Lina got home yesterday, so I used her flight as an excuse to text her.

“I saw Taylor Hamilton for breakfast before we headed to the funeral separately. There were a few people I wanted to say hi to at the reception, but Amanda cornered me.”

All three of them have matching disgusted expressions. Shane warned me away from her, saying she was trying to sink her fangs in because I’m rich. I am. We all are. Like billionaire rich, even though the rest of the world thinks we’re scraping by as just barely millionaires. We like our net worth to appear far smaller than it is. And not just for the tax advantages. Let the Diazes, Mancinellis, and Kutsenkos gloat. None of us could give a flying fuck. We own shite for a rainy day that would make their heads spin.

“How’d you escape?” Shane’s smirk matches the one I’m usually wearing when we talk to Dillan and Finn. It’s fecking annoying seeing my reflection directing his patronizing as feck expression at me.

“I ran into someone who was close to Dr. Carmody, too. They distracted Amanda.” They. Not her. I don’t want to hear about it from them.

“Does they have a name?” Dillan appears casual as he takes a sip of iced tea, but his tone irks.

He’s probably already planning to run my unnamed woman’s background check, get surveillance on her, and dig into her bank accounts. He loves Mair more than anyone else, but they had a rocky start. They probably wouldn’t be together if he’d run a full background check on her, but it would have made life a little easier. He ran a full check on Finn’s wife, but Finn asked him not to say anything to him. My brother wanted to get to know Ally on his own. Life might have been a little easier if Dillan told Finn the one big thing he discovered. But it worked out in the end, and that one big thing is dead now, anyway.

“Nik. We didn’t talk much. Just long enough to extract me from Amanda.”

No one needs to know Nik isn’t what Nicolina goes by. No one needs to know I think of her as Lina. For now, it’s not a lie, but it sounds masculine. I have too much to sort out in my head about why I want her so much. I don’t need the peanut gallery chiming in.

“Anyhow. Did anything turn up about Ewan’s plans for the rugs we wound up letting them have?” His father and uncle are dead, in part, because they fucked us over and stole rugs that had nano chips woven into them.

We took our stolen shipment back but decided on second thought to let Ewan and the Boston Irish have them to keep them doubly indebted to us. They might run Bean Town, but we run the Eastern Seaboard. If this were the Middle Ages, we’d be their feudal overlords. They’d be vassals who can do what they want, but only to a point. If they stay out of our way, then we give them freedom.

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