Page 50 of Mob Saint

“There’d be no bridge if it weren’t for me.”

“Seamus, don’t beg trouble where there is none. Let it go.”

She’s told me that too many times. She shouldn’t have to. I watch her, and I know if I keep pushing this, it’ll only drive a wedge between us. That’s the opposite of what I want. I nod and give her a peck on the lips. She leans against me, and I pull her hips toward me.

“What do you think Gareth is going to say to you since you’ve waited so long to go down there? Have you spoken to him today?”

“He won’t say shit with you there. I talked to him the day the verdict came in and the day your brother got the settlement. I told him what I knew about each. He told me both outcomes were my fault. I told him to screw off both times. Beyond that, it’s only been texts about him being too busy or me not having time to make the drive.”

“And if I wasn’t with you?”

“He’d have some shit to say about me being a disappointment to him just like I was as a wife. He’d say I failed just like I did at becoming a?—”

This time, when she cuts herself off, I know without a doubt what she was going to say.

“He fecking says that to you?”

My heart is racing. I’m more pissed than when I spoke to Zack. I’m more pissed than when I heard Stella insult Tiera. I remind myself I don’t want Tiera to see the side of me threatening to come out. I don’t want her to know what I’m capable of. That whatever she imagines is a fraction of reality.

My grandfather was a fucking tyrant when training my brother, cousins, and me. He insisted we practice until we could master every move to get out of a hold or put someone in one. Uncle Donovan insisted we practice on each other. It was my mom’s cousin Declan who punished us when we got it wrong. Granddad and Uncle Don would walk out of the room and leave Declan to it.

That fucking sick bastard. None of us are quite right in the head after what our families train us to do, what we see, and what we carry out. But that motherfucker loved to see our pain. He was thirty years older than us and got a kick out of making boys want to cry.

To this day, Finn and Dillan won’t speak about our training. I don’t know that they even let themselves think about it. It was worse for them because they’re the oldest of the six of us. Sean and Shane came as a package deal, and Cormac and I basically did, since I came two months early. Finn and Dillan only had each other while the rest of us came in sets of two. Finn and Dillan had already been doing jobs and started training two years before the rest of us. They knew shite, and Declan used to make them demonstrate on each other and on us. Granddad just encouraged him because we might have been his grandsons, but Declan was also his nephew.

Uncle Donovan actually stepped in a few times when we were really young. He had to remind Declan that if he broke any of our growth plates, we’d be no use to them in the long run. The worst was when we had to go up against Uncle Don’s best friend, Colin. He’d been a golden glove boxer until Maksim Kutsenko rang his bell one too many times.

He was a bitter old shite because he couldn’t fight for money anymore. He’d pick bar fights and roughed people up for money—usually Granddad’s. We had to box against him to learn to hold our own in a fight. Really, it was more about learning how to take a punch. The five concussions I’ve had in my life were all from punches I took to the head from Colin. A fucking wrecking ball to the temple is what it felt like.

But all of this made me into the enforcer I became and the enforcer I remain. We all have our roles beyond the obvious jobs we do for the family. Dillan’s the boss, and Finn’s the accountant and second-in-command. Sean’s the intelligence gatherer, and Shane’s the PR guy. That leaves Cormac and me as the enforcers. Part of it is because we’re the biggest and automatically the most intimidating. But a lot of it is because we’ve made people believe we have the shortest fuse. All of us have the patience of a saint—though Sean’s stubbornness makes him more patient than the rest of us. It just serves Cormac and me to have a reputation for flying off the handlebars faster than anyone else—in our family or the other syndicates.

Besides being an attorney too, Gabriele Scotto is the biggest in the Mancinelli family and their head enforcer. Sergei Andreyev and Anton Kutsenko are the Ivankov bratva’s best hackers, and Anton is the head enforcer. Alejandro Diaz is probably the most emotionally fucked-up of all of us, even though Pablo is probably the most emotionally dead. Alejandro’s their strategist because he gives no fucks about anyone who isn’t related to him. Even his own men know not to cross him because he won’t wait for an explanation, but he will fillet them the same as he would anyone outside his organization.

We’re all roughly the same size, which is bigger than the other guys in our families but not so much that we can’t all wear our brothers’ and cousins’ clothes. There aren’t too many other people in our world who rival the six of us. In rugby, we would make up three-quarters of a tight scrum—the guys who huddle, push, and run together. All six of us could play any position because we’re all fast despite our size. We’re all as tall as each other and the other members of our family—though the bratva guys have us by about two inches—and we’re all stronger than anyone else we encounter except for each other. Too bad we aren’t friends.

“Daddy?”

“Sorry, little one. My mind wandered for a moment.”

“You weren’t plotting his demise, were you?”

I don’t like the fear I hear.

“No. My mind leapfrogged from him to rugby.”

“What?” She leans back.

“You don’t want to know how I got to that, but I was thinking about how some of the other syndicate men are the same size as Cormac and me, and we could make up six out of eight guys in the tight scrum.”

“Okay.” She sounds hesitant and as though I’m nuts.

I am.

I’m certain at this point all the men in our families are.

“Daddy, I think it’s time you filled me with some more cum.”

I look at her face, and I know she’s worried, so she’s trying to distract me. Not so I won’t think about Zack and what I could do to him, but so I’ll relax. I know she can feel I’m tense despite the silence.

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