Page 38 of The Mob and his Messenger

“Anyway, that’s a lie,” Gabriel chuckles. “You murdered those two Irishmen last night, remember?”

I did more than that last night, God fucking help me.

“Oh, that’s right,” I laugh grimly. “How could I forget that?”“All the streets have been swept,” Ms. Kerkenwall tells me over the phone, two hours later. I’m sitting in my high rise office overlooking the city, spinning my silver letter opener between my forefinger and the desk. “No causalities. Press speculation, but nothing concrete. It seems we might have escaped a disaster here. Well done, Mr. DeLuca.”

“Just remember I was there when you needed me.”

I hear her frown and I smirk, and then I hang up the phone and sit back. Gabriel stands at the window with his hands behind his back, staring down at the city.

“What would this place look like if Patty was in charge?” Gabriel murmurs. “We can’t let that happen.”

“No,” I agree.

He turns to me and for a moment he’s eleven years old again, wanting to ask me a question but worried I’ll make fun of him for his ignorance. The years fall away and he runs a hand through his lank black hair.

“Dom, I know,” he says.

“What do you know?” I ask, my heart pounding in my chest now.

I feel like a piece of dirt.

He’s my best friend.

And yet my need for Dallas and the family we started last night – and I know she’s pregnant, I just know it – is so powerful I’m certain that I won’t give an inch here. Gabriel might hate me, but my hunger for Dallas is all-consuming, a primal desire sent down the generations, a put-a-baby-in-her-belly-now urge I can’t deny.

“I know about you and Dallas,” he says, confirming my suspicions. He walks over to the desk and stops at the other side. “And the truth is—”

The sound of my phone blaring through the office interrupts his words.

If these calls weren’t so fucking important, I’d put this son of a bitch on silent.

I glance at the phone to see if I can ignore it, but when I see the name, grim determination moves through me. I show the phone to Gabriel and he nods, silently agreeing to table this discussion for now.

It’s Patty.

Gabriel knows. And I don’t even know how he feels about it. Growing up on the streets like Gabriel and I did makes being able to hide your emotions a necessity.

I shake my head to clear my thoughts and answer the phone, putting it on speaker, gripping the letter opener so hard it digs into the wood of the desk.

“Aye, Dom, you there?”

Patty sounds jovial, like a little kid on Christmas morning. Something in my stomach sinks.

“Are you ready to settle this like men?” I growl.

“I thought about that,” he says, and I can imagine him pacing giddily up and down.

He has something.

I glance at Gabriel and he grimaces. I can’t tell if it’s about the phone call or the fact that he knows, somehow, about me and Dallas. He could’ve known this entire time. It’s only been a few days, which seems completely insane when I think about it, that in a few days this dream-made goddess has entered my life and remade it completely.

“But then I decided that I don’t really want to play into your petty games,” he goes on. “So what I did is something very clever. I had drones spy on your estate. You can get them online these days, you know. It was very high-tech of me. That was how I learned about you and your consigliere’s daughter.”

Dallas. No. Please God no.

“Anyway, I already had a plan in place to kidnap Samantha, his ex-wife. But I thought, well, why not do one better than that? You see, I had to target Gabriel’s family because you don’t have any, Dom. I sent my man Cillian out to seduce this Samantha slut, which was pathetically easy to do. And then I had her contact her daughter and lure Dallas out to me. And now, well, I have them both. It really worked very fucking well, if I do say so myself.”

My mouth feels dry as his words try to untether me. I stab the letter opener into the desk and hold it there, pinned, my body trembling and my fist so tight I can feel the desk quivering.

“You have Dallas and her mother,” I murmur, my voice somehow calm.

Iceman, Dallas teases from within.

“That’s right,” Patty says. “So I’ve got a new proposition for you, Dom. You and your consigliere are going to come and meet me—alone. I’ll know if you tell your little whore in the police. If you let anybody know where you’re going, the sluts die. If you bring weapons, they die. And if you keep me waiting, what do you think happens, Dom? I’ll text you the address. You’ve got one hour.”

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