Page 8 of Glass Omega

“Funny because you told me to go and fuck myself not even an hour ago,” I told him dryly, watching as the man flinched.

Alessandro’s green eyes ping-ponged between the two of us and I could practically see the man making calculations in his head before he spoke again. “Edison Keane, I don’t know what business you have with my future in-laws, but could it not have waited after the wedding? I didn’t realize that the Irish were so crass as to interrupt a sacred ceremony such as this.”

My lips pulled up into a smirk, making the man’s faux-friendly smile drop.

He really had no idea what I was talking about.

Ethan Chandler was a weasel, but damn did he know how to keep a secret.

Taking another step forward, I heard the sound of several safeties being flipped off echo off of the stone walls of the cathedral.

I ignored them. They wouldn’t risk shooting me. Not if they wanted to avoid a war. The last one had been in the seventies before I was born, but it had taken out almost an entire generation of young men. Young men that Alessandro Amante knew personally. The patriarch of the Amante family lifted his hand in the air, effectively stopping his men from putting a bullet in me.

Chandler’s eyes practically popped out of his head as I came closer and it looked like he was about to tuck tail and run like the scared little rabbit he was.

“Ethan.” My voice was soft as I spoke, offering him a genial smile. “Do you want to tell them, or should I?”

“What do you mean? T-there’s nothing to tell,” Chandler managed to stutter.

A heavy sigh left me.

“Fine. The hard way it is.” I turned to face the rest of the congregation again, tapping on the barrel of my pistol with one of my rings, waiting until all eyes were on me. Like clockwork, Rhodes slipped into the crowd and disappeared to complete his next task.

“Alessandro, what did he offer you for his daughter? Political power? Looking the other way when your guys get up to shit? His ear if he somehow manages to make it into the governor’s seat?” I listed off all of the promises that Ethan Chandler had given me when he visited my office in the city six months ago.

Most people thought that what my people did for a living was awful and immoral, but watching that man shop out his twenty-two-year-old daughter to the highest bidder had to be one of the worst things I’d ever seen.

Even the older generation of men in my family, who I by no means got along with, at least pretended to care about their children as they fiddled with the strings of their lives. The Keane family took care of their own—loyalty first—and this little rat wouldn’t know loyalty if it bit him in the ass.

“He promised me all of that too, and in return I gave him a blank check for all of his lovely political aspirations.”

Alessandro’s face shifted as I spoke from shock to a quiet, thunderous rage as he wheeled around to look across the aisle at Chandler.

“And I paid it—and paid it first, I believe. So, I’m here to re-collect my ten million, then I’ll get out of your hair. I’m sure the happy pack can’t wait to get back to their nuptials.”

I turned to look at the bride for the first time and met a pair of shocked gray eyes.

Something about them was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where, but I didn’t have time to focus on that.

Underneath the pile of tulle and ridiculous veil, I was sure she was pretty, though whoever dressed her should have been drawn and quartered because she looked like a bridal shop that had exploded all over her.

A curl of deep auburn hair peeked up from underneath the white material and as we looked at each other, the massive bouquet she’d been clutching for dear life slipped from her fingers and dropped to the ground.

“So, Ethan, what’ll it be?” I slanted a glance at the man who was now profusely sweating in his tuxedo.

Chandler’s next swallow was heavy, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down before he answered. “I can’t possibly pay that right now.”

“Really?” I wasn’t overly surprised. I figured as much seeing that the man had been ramping up his next campaign over the past couple of months. Regardless of my support, I had a feeling the weasel would be our new governor come next year. “Then I guess I’ll be taking what’s mine, Rhodes?”

My second-in-command seemed to materialize behind the priest, side stepping him and hauling the bride over his shoulder, causing the girl to squeak and try to struggle against him.

The pack she was supposed to be marrying grabbed for her but Rhodes danced out of their reach, pulling out his gold pistol with his free hand and pointing it at their leader. Elio wasn’t the worst person I’d ever met from the Amante crime family, andI’d known them since they were little boys, but right now he was getting in the way of the thing I’d paid for.

I half-expected them to whip their own guns out and it took me an extra beat to realize that they’d walked into the church unstrapped, the idiots.

“I don’t know how you think the two of you are going to get out of here when you’ve got about twenty guns pointed at your heads,” Elio hissed his eyes shifting away from his bride-to-be to the woman standing next to Alessandro.

I recognized her almost immediately even though she rarely appeared at public functions. Luscinia Amante, the shame of the Italian mafia. A deaf beta that was ignored up until the death of Alessandro Amante Jr. a few years ago. My sources told me that everyone in the Amante family disliked her, though, with the way Elio was looking at her, I wasn’t sure how accurate that information was.

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