Page 58 of Iron Blade

“Do you know why the Greens started Gallery Four?” Her fist clenched, as she brought her voice low, like the angry growl of a she-wolf before it pounced. It’d be scary, if she wasn’t a socialite in expensive shoes.

I rolled my eyes. “Money laundering, obviously.” I almost laughed, using the exact joke that Eoghan used.

“That’s… that’s right.” She sputtered, momentarily disarmed by my response. “Why do you sound like that’s preposterous? That’s exactly what they do there.” She shook her head. “And you’re their best asset when it comes to cleaning their filthy, blood money.”

“Yes, of course, there’s no way we could be selling decent art at our gallery,” I bristled, annoyed at her accusation, even though it was completely true.

She just didn’t know it.

Still, how dare she assume such a thing? It was insulting.

“I didn’t say that! But it happens to be true.”

Again, she wasn’t wrong… but I had to keep my cover.

“Fine words coming from the daughter of a man who made his fortune in strip clubs.” There it was. Deny, deny, deny - then counter accuse. That’s what I had been trained to do. Turn it around and put them on the defensive. “I mean, don’t you think that maybe that’s a better way to launder money?”

I almost laughed, picking up my red wine and bringing it to my lips, tasting the expensive glass.

It was a far cry from the $9 bottle I had at home.

“You don’t even understand half of it.” She slammed her hand on the table, then balked as if she was surprised by her own reaction. “You don’t understand the world we live in. You don’t get to see what’s going on. You’re just… blind to all of it.”

Now she was being elitist.

Fucking rich people. They always thought that we never understood what was going on. That us poor people couldn’t possibly “get” their rich people problems. It was insulting.

“Has he told you about his mother?” She leaned back, looking smug as fuck. As if this was a ‘gotcha’ kind of moment. “Did he ever tell you that?”

“I know that she’s dead.” My heart thumped in my chest.

Eoghan hadn’t told me how his mother had passed.

But I knew it. The information was so in depth, it was almost a fucking novel.

“They’re fucking Mafia, Kira.” Cosima’s whisper took me so off guard that I started laughing!

How dare she try to judge Eoghan for being Mafia, when she was the don’s daughter?

“Don’t roll your eyes at me!” she screamed, grasping a fresh wine glass that the waiter had put down in front of her.

If she grabbed it any harder, she’d snap the stem, and get a cut on her palm and scar it.

I had to bite my tongue as she started in on the story she heard.

“The Irish were at war with the Bratva over some docks with access to the water. This escalated and they kidnapped Eoghan Green’s mother. They tortured her, and beat her, and she died on their porch when she was delivered as a message to Alastair Green, Eoghan’s father.”

That wasn’t the half of it. As much as she accused me of not knowing what happened in her world, this was a story that I knew far better than she did.

Isla Green was assaulted, tortured, beaten, starved. She was hurt every hour on the hour. They dumped her at the Green’s front gate, bleeding and near death. But not near enough to be unconscious. They made sure she was awake for everything they did to her.

They had photographed every excruciating hour of her final days, right up to when they slapped her awake as they dumped her body at the Green Mansion’s gate.

The worst part was that our spy in the Bratva got hold of pictures. Pictures I had to sift through. She went from a beautiful woman with defiance in her eyes, to nothing but a skeleton, covered in bruises, her legs spread and broken, her most precious female parts cut and abused so badly, there wasn’t a surgeon in the United States that could have fixed it.

I swallowed, then placed my skeptical mask back on.

I had a job to do. I had information to gather. The best way to do that, was to act like you didn’t believe a word.

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