Page 10 of Mob Bride

“Hey Nikki, how are you this morning?”

I lean forward and give her a kiss on the cheek as she lifts her chin to me. My brothers certainly didn’t have a simple time dating the women they fell in love with, but the couples in my family don’t marry unless it’s to their soulmate, and no one is better suited to my twin than Nicolina.

She grew up with mobs all around her life, connected to the syndicates in Boston and Quebec, but now she leads a much quieter life in New York. Isn’t that ironic? I serve myself some of the quiche sitting on the counter. Then I take a seat at the breakfast table.

We chat as though we’re the most normal family. We talk about the concert I missed and about how excited everyone in the family is to hear Finn and Ally are expecting their first child. Our family can definitely use some good news these days.

Nikki takes a cue once we’re all done eating and leaves the kitchen while Sean and I do the dishes and clean up.

I get straight to the point. “Have you figured out anything else about her?”

I want to know; I don’t want to wait. He grins at me because between the two of us, he’s the patient one. He’s also knownas the most stubborn. I don’t know about all that. He’s an I-can-wait-you-out-until-forever and I’m a better-hang-on-and-keep-up-because-I’m-ready-to-go kind of guy. But I would say we equal each other in stubbornness. We walk alike, talk alike, sound alike.

We’re fucking Patty Duke from that old TV show my mom showed us when we were kids, except if I remember right, Patty Duke and her mirror image were cousins. Sean is my baby brother by just a few minutes. God bless our mother because we went to our due date, and we were both almost eight pounds each. There’s nothing little about either of us and never has been.

“Hello. Earth to Shane. You want to know so much, and yet you’re not even listening. You don’t pay attention. As usual.”

I flick water at Sean, but I stop letting my mind wander as we dry our hands and head over to Sean’s computer.

“Let me see what I can find, but it may take me a while. I’m going to have to dig a lot deeper than I already have. I found pretty much the same thing you could when you looked through her social media. But like I said before, I got into her bank accounts and her police record, and the other stuff Finn could have done for you.”

“That’s why I came to you for the stuff Finn can’t do. I’ve got my work to deal with, so I’ll leave you alone. You do you, I’ll do me, but by the end of this I want a dossier on her as thick as the CIA would hand over.”

Sean rolls his eyes, but I open my laptop which I’d left here last night before we all went to the concert. We planned to meet at Dillan’s to work out, then I was going to come over here, anyway. I look at invoices from the construction site where I found Carys last night.

I look at the schematics for the mini mall that’s going to go on that site, and I look at the Gantt chart to see we’re almost a weekahead of schedule on construction in New York. That’s about a holy miracle. I never expect things this good to last.

It’s been kind of quiet the last couple of months. The Diazes, the Mancinellis, and the Kutsenkos have done nothing to piss us off, and we’ve been too busy with our own happy blissful moments and marriages to do too much more. Well, it’s all relative.

Things took a nasty turn for Seamus’s wife, Tiernan, but that was really more about her own family down in Trenton. Another syndicate was involved, but we didn’t know until the very end.

“Hey, take a look at this.”

Sean turns his computer toward me with the portable tri-screen monitors attached to it. I glance at the computer’s clock and see we’ve been working in silence for forty-five minutes. Damn, that went fast.

It looks like a social media profile, so I shrug to my brother.

“Isn’t this what I’ve already seen?”

“No. I got into posts she deleted. You said she dated this guy a few months back, and there were photos of him. Well, I did a reverse search to see if I could find anything up with these photos. Look at him. Same time and date stamp on the picture with Carys is on this one with a joyous family.” He clicks on something else. “And look at this. Another one with him with a woman who looks nothing like Carys, but probably is supposed to be his mother.”

I frown. “What the hell? What does this mean?”

“It looks like she doctored the photos. She spliced him out of these and put herself next to him.”

“Who is he? I can’t tell.” I lean in to see better.

“I’m going to keep digging, but it almost looks like these photos are the kind that come in a frame you get in a store or online, like the model photo or whatever.”

I watch Sean click around some more and between his main screen and the one on the left. He pulls up photos of Carys and this guy that have the exact matching background and pose as the ones that seem to be stock images.

Holy fuck.

What the fuck is going on? Why did she manufacture a boyfriend and go so far as to put together fake photos? I don’t know what to make of this. I feel like I’m constantly saying that to myself ever since I met this woman, and that wasn’t even twenty-four hours ago. This makes me even more suspicious.

“What do you think? I’m tempted to call David and see if he can dig around near whatever neighborhood she supposedly lives in out in Pittsburgh.”

“What? You don’t believe she actually lives out there? You think she got on a train to go almost four hundred miles for nothing?”

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