Page 20 of Glass Omega

Perrie hadn’t seemed too put off by the fifteen year age difference between us, even if her brows had shot straight up when I told her. I’d had almost six months to get over my reticence, but I was worried she would outright refuse and decide Pack Ricci was a better option being that the four of them were between twenty-eight and thirty.

But after digesting the information, the woman gave me a little shrug and moved on to continuing her earlier argument about meal times. We’d finally settled on two meals a day of my choice amongst other things. In another life, Peregrine Chandler would have probably made a hard-ass defense attorney with her ability to bull-headedly argue her case until she was victorious.

Rhodes shrugged. “And I’m not the one marrying her.”

Not yet at least,I said to myself silently as I responded to Oona’s text, asking her to keep a basket of snacks in Perrie’s room. I’d noticed it yesterday, but seeing her in a pair of form-fitting jeans and t-shirt confirmed that the omega was far too skinny.

It had been six months since she was last in the hospital, so it stood to reason that she should have rounded out a bit, but her collar bones still stuck out just a bit and her cheeks were hollowed when some of her earlier pictures showed them to be softly rounded, like the women in renaissance paintings.

I hardly knew the woman, but seeing her like that nagged at some deeper nurturing instinct that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge yet.

“We’re two minutes out,” Sullivan, my usual driver, called as he turned into the parking garage of City Hall.

If the righteous, upstanding citizens of the city knew what sorts of meetings actually happened here, they would lose their minds.

Sullivan parked and we waited for the all-clear from my security team before stepping out.

Despite it being a late-summer evening, a chill crept through the underground parking structure as one team stepped onto the elevator and went up first, radioing down when it was my turn to take the elevator to the fifth floor where the mayor’s office was.

It was probably overkill to bring a fifteen-man security team with me for a simple meeting like this, but I knew the other four heads would be doing the same and it was all just a silly game of‘my guns are just as good and shiny as yours, so don’t fuck with me.’

“You’re good to go in,” Callum informed me as soon as I stepped off of the elevator. “But just note that they’re all already in there.”

Irritation filled me at being the last to arrive. One glance at my watch told me that I was exactly on time for the meeting.

That just meant that they’d all coordinated an earlier start time without me, trying to herd me and make me feel like I’d lost control of the situation.

“Do you have everything we’ll need?” I asked Rhodes as we waited for Callum to open the double doors that led into Ethan Chandler’s office.

Rhodes shot me a solemn nod, his dark eyes darting around and taking in everything around us. His lighthearted mood from the car was gone and he’d settled completely into his role as mysecond, gauging the various risks that were being presented to me on a silver platter right now.

Callum pulled the doors open and I stepped inside. Sucking in a deep, steadying breath I plastered a neutral smile on my face and greeted the people inside. “Gentlemen and lady, it seems as if I’m a little bit late to the party. I do apologize.”

The large office was packed full of security lining the walls around the circular conference table where most of our brokerings had happened over the past two hundred years of criminal activity in the city.

There was a place for all five of us and an additional one for the mayor that was supposed to be the neutral party to settle our disagreements. I searched each face critically as it turned in my direction, trying to see where each person stood when it came to our impending topic of discussion.

Amante was a bastard who kept a ham-fisted grip on the drug trade going in and out of the city, beating out whatever cartels tried to sell, but he was also the easiest of the bunch to read. The older man was clearly still pissed about my crashing his little wedding ceremony yesterday, his eyes sparkling with barely repressed anger as he shot me a smirk.

I ignored him. Amante was the least of my worries right now.

Directly next to him was Ethan Chandler who was shaking like a terrified chihuahua as he glanced between me and who I surmised he’d chosen to be the master of his leash.

On Amante’s other side sat Jifein Cheng, the head of the Chinese Triad and the only female family head in our little quorum. She was an elegant older woman with nearly gray hair and an air of superiority about her. Cheng also tended to side with Amante on most things as their relationship was more symbiotic than the rest of us—the Triads controlled the city ports and Amante’s drugs came through those ports.

If Amante wanted Perrie back, then Jifein Cheng would be his biggest defender. But she also thought Chandler was a fucking idiot, so that was a point in my favor.

Next to her sat Shuuhei Saito, the only member of the group that was close to me in age. Saito had come into power of the Yakuza at the same time I rose within the Keane family. Money laundering and nightclubs were his game, not the flashiest out of all of us, but it solidified his place as a voting member of our tenuous alliance.

I could get Shuuhei to agree to almost anything thanks to a maybe misplaced sense of camaraderie that had grown between us over the past few years.

The last member of the five families was Vladimir Volkov and he looked over at me last, his too-bright blue eyes taking me in cooly before his gaze slanted away from me again.

Volkov was always the wild card of our meetings. No one was even sure exactly what the Russians got up to and anyone who pried tended to end up dead.

I knew they dealt in flesh—something that made me a little bit queasy to think about. They also provided the girls that the rest of us utilized to blow off steam and I hadn’t forgotten the woman who’d managed to fire off two rounds at me in my own home.

Yulia had been the softest of Volkov’s working women before she’d married and was widowed by one of my own men, but it still made me realize that trusting any of these people too much was a recipe for a quick death.

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