Page 88 of Glass Omega

They were just lucky that was all I’d done. I had long grown tired of the older generation of my clan and their chances were quickly running out. Their sons, who were firmly on my side after watching their aged fathers take their much younger mothers as wives and then proceed to treat them like shit, were also coming to their last straw with the men as they refused to give up their power despite them being so old.

An entire generation of young boys that wanted to have nothing to do with their fathers had created the current divide in the Keane clan. The pot that had been heating up for decades was about to boil over.

“She’s taking pictures of the man who’s asleep in his soup,” Rhodes whispered back, nodding to one of the tables where an older man, some business mogul that was nearing ninety and still dragged himself out to these things, was almost face first in the split pea soup that had been served for dinner.

Perrie, oblivious to the people around her, had her camera up to her eye and was snapping photos of the man, the red curls of her loose updo bouncing as she held the camera away from her face to look at the screen, a little smile pulling up on her glossy pink lips.

Then, as if she felt my gaze on her, Perrie’s gray eyes lifted to meet mine and the smile grew.

She pointed to the doors and mouthed the wordbathroom, waiting for me to nod before she let her camera fall around her neck. The urge to immediately follow her filled me and I nearly did so before Liam cut into my line of sight, effectively blocking Perrie from me.

“Are you listening, Edison?”

I slanted a glance at Rhodes who was already breaking away from us to follow, ducking and weaving in between the people in the packed ballroom, before turning my attention to Liam again.

“You were saying something about the ports?”

“Yes, the ports!” Liam again launched into his tirade about the fees that Jifein Cheng lobbied at the five families for using her ports—a long standing issue with the branch heads who had all utilized her services at one time or another.

“I just think that maybe using a more northern port owned by the Doyles would be better—I hear he wouldn’t charge us half of what Cheng is.”

I had to force myself not to roll my eyes at that. Bobby Doyle and the Doyle clan ran the ports up in New York and while it was true that he charged less for using them, he also skimmed other things off of the top.

But most of the branch heads liked him because he was closer in age to them and ran things the same way they’d been run in the 80s when all of them were in charge.

I couldn’t stand the man. He reminded me too much of the worst parts of my father.

“We would still have to pay to get our shipments to us by ground,” I pointed out before adding silently:and the last time we did a ground shipment of weapons I lost fifteen men.

After my scrapped meeting with Shuuhei Saito we had to reschedule. Shuuhei was less than enthused about having to wait a week to tell me what he knew, but when he finally did it just left me with more questions than answers.

Things were pointing in multiple different directions and it was muddying the investigation to a point that I was starting to get jittery. Apparently Haruto had a woman and had gone to see her the day he went missing. They just didn’t know who she was yet.

My money was still on the Italians being the culprits—which made sense seeing as Alessandro Amante still had a stick up his ass about my stealing of his selected bride.

It should have been cut and dry from there… except for the evidence pointing in other directions.

The bullets Shuuhei dug out of his guy were special. So special that they were favored by the Cheng’s men to use while they guarded their portion of the city’s ports.

That brought the running total up to three families implicated in the ambush, and now four because Liam was trying far too hard to convince me to drop Jifein Cheng’s partnership for something that would inevitably cost me more in the end.

Now all I needed was something that tied the ambush to Vladimir Volkov and I’d have a royal flush of fuckery and no clue who was doing it.

“There is a balance in this city that is kept up because we all use each other. It’s a symbiotic relationship and you know it,” I told Liam off-handedly, my mind far away from the blustering of a man far past his prime.

The only reason the five families were able to coexist in the city was because they all had a role to play. To mess up the balance would allow for another war to break out and there was nothing I’d like to do less.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Liam looked as if he wanted to continue to argue, but I was already stepping away from him and making my way towards the door Perrie had disappeared through.

The hallway was much quieter than the ballroom, the lights dimmed to create an almost secretive ambiance for the couples that were tucking themselves into alcoves to have a chat, or judging by the drunk couple sitting on a bench by the window, something far touchier than a chat.

I ignored them, trying to find Perrie’s strawberry scent on the air that was already laden with hundreds of others.

As I stood alone in the hallway, I felt one brief moment of panic that I didn’t know where my wife was.

This would be the perfect place to snatch someone if you had half a mind to do so. There were lots of people everywhere,workers going in and out, and far too many entrances and exits to monitor them all efficiently.

Anxiety began to crawl up my spine as I strode in the direction of the restrooms which were a few turns down the long hallway from the ballroom. The further I walked, the quieter it got until the sounds coming from the Gala were just a whisper in the distance.

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