Page 58 of Glass Omega

Two weeks ago… also known as Perrie and Edison’s wedding day.

Just when I thought the rat who sold his daughter for political funding couldn’t sink any lower, he proved that the bar was, in fact, deep in hell.

When Perrie and Edison were negotiating she told us that the only reason she was marrying Pack Ricci was because her father threatened not to pay for her medical bills and now he’d made good on that promise despite the fact that he’d originally made the other end of that deal with Edison.

“I’ll handle her insurance information and get it all updated,” I told the woman, trying my best not to let the anger I was feeling leak into my voice as I turned to Eli again. “Take care of Perrie until I get back?”

Eli seemed to size me up, his expression still pissed, before he finally let out a long sigh as his shoulders dropped. “Yeah. Getting through all of the scans should take another hour or so.”

“Thanks and don’t mention this to her? I don’t want to stress her out.” It was all too easy to envision the little redheaded omega and how she would deflate like a balloon when she learned that her father truly was a monster. Just like I had when I’d learned that about my own father eighteen years ago.

Perrie was better suited for smiling as she fiddled with the settings of her too-complicated camera, or laughing at whatever her vapid friend Kailey had to say. Not this.

Eli eyed me with a contemplative look on his face. “Who are you and what have you done with Rhodes McCreary?”

Shrugging at him, I turned and followed the billing lady back down the hallway.

Because I wasn’t sure what I’d done with him either.

Seventeen

“Thanks for letting me know, I’ll handle it just as soon as I’m done here,” I told Rhodes and hung up my phone, gripping it tightly in my fist as I tried to get a hold on my emotions.

Anger coursed through me that had nothing to do with the man who was sitting across the table from me. Shuuhei Saito had been a hard man to track down for the last week and made it to where I only returned home to change and put my head down for a few minutes before heading back out again.

We were currently sitting in a small, run-down diner that served as one of our neutral meeting grounds outside of City Hall.

Perrie’s scans had thankfully come back all clear and my omega was healthy. Unfortunately that knowledge came witha reminder that Ethan Chandler was, and would always be, a weak-willed bastard who reneged on his promises. Even if that promise was to his own fucking daughter.

“Problem?” Shuuhei asked as he slowly stirred sugar into his cup of coffee, willfully oblivious to my men glaring at him from over my shoulder. His own men, dressed in their bright and colorful suits—a trademark of the Saito Yakuza—were also starting to get twitchy while they waited for us to get down to business.

I took a sip of my own coffee and tried not to grimace. Sally, the owner of this diner, may have been a scary ass woman with a cigarette perpetually perched in between her cherry-red lips, but even after twenty years her coffee still hadn’t improved much.

“Nothing more than the usual shit,” I told him offhandedly, not wanting to give away my frustrations that had been building over the last two weeks since my interrupted wedding night. “So tell me, Saito, what have you been up to?”

It was phrased like we were two friends catching up, but Shuuhei knew that I wouldn’t have arranged a meeting like this unless I had a really good reason and I had really good fucking reason.

Two weeks ago, after a brawl broke out at my wedding, I received news that our biggest shipment of the year so far had been intercepted and my men had been ambushed.

Fifteen casualties and the weapons were gone. The only thing left behind? The body of one of Shuuhei Saito’s men. One that I recognized from our last all family meeting the day Alessandro Amante tried to protest my marrying Perrie.

My knee-jerk reaction—if I ever gave into those—would have been to get revenge for the young men who had died leaving their wives, children, and other family members behind for some fucking guns.

But then I took a step back and viewed the scene as a whole. I was no expert on crime scenes, but even to me the scene that had been set forth on a backroad upstate had been too perfect. Almost theatrical.

And at the center of the dead bodies of my men was Shuuhei’s man who had been posed, almost like he was a flag exclaiming: ‘The Japanese did it!’

“The same as always. You know how it goes.” Shuuhei’s voice was flat, all of the friendly inflection from earlier gone as his dark eyes narrowed at me. “Now are you going to tell me why you’ve really called me here, Edison? Last I checked, we’re not the type of friends to get a casual brunch on a Friday afternoon.”

It was a risk to let him know I was onto him if he had been the one who’d ambushed my men and stolen my shipment… but as I stared at him my instincts, which had never steered me wrong before, were telling me to trust him.

“One of my shipments was ambushed two weeks ago and this,” I gestured for my men to bring the little gift that I’d brought for him, “Was left at the scene.”

We’d kept the body of Shuuhei’s man on ice, and while pulling him out in the late summer was probably not a good idea, I’d always had a flair for the dramatic.

They deposited the long black body bag on the ground next to our table and Collum, the man who usually took over for Rhodes when he couldn’t be with me pulled the zipper down to reveal the grayed face of the man who had been the bane of my existence for the past two weeks.

“Haruto!” One of the men behind Shuuhei gasped, only to be silenced by the guy standing next to him.

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