Page 117 of Mob Knight

If it’s Gabriele, I’ll never let this go. We all helped him when his wife—back then, girlfriend—was in danger. I helped more than the others in my family. If he went after my girlfriend, after I gave him information against one of our men to protect her…His next murder trial won’t go the same way as his first. His arse will be someone’s bitch in federal prison.

“I’ll call him.”

I wake my phone and pull up my contacts. Yup. He’s saved in my phone too. He’s the tallest and broadest in that family—he’s basically Salvatore’s adopted nephew since he’s practically joined at the hip to Salvatore’s actual nephew, Carmine—so he and I have faced off plenty of times in fights. It takes two Mancinelli men to rival Seamus or me, but Gabriele’s pretty equal to my brother or me.

“What do you want,faccia de cazzo?” Testicle face.

We have such endearing names for each other.

“What the feck did my girlfriend do to you,abhlóir.”

That roughly translates to a special kind of idiot who complains too much and thinks he’s far more intelligent than he is.

“I don’t even know who your girlfriend is.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

That might sound childish if I hadn’t once set his pants on fire…With him in them…On accident…Sorta.

“Fucking get on with it. Sinead and I are about to have dinner.”

Sinead O’Malley. You can’t get a much more Irish name than that short of Márgrég MacDonnell, Dillan’s wife.

“You might have gotten off for the last bombing, but you won’t get away with what you did today.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Gabriele and Sinead met when he was on trial for killing two teens when he allegedly set a bomb off at his lumberyard. Thecharges were plausible since he also owns a hardware store and has plenty of demolition supplies.

“The bomb that went off at my girlfriend’s place this morning as she and Sean were going inside. The bomb your bestie’s drone dropped on my house today that eviscerated it.”

Carmine’s always been a nosy fucker. Worse than Pablo. Now he has high-end, practically government grade drones that spy on shite. Fortunately for us, Sean has the same ones. Could this be theCosa Nostra’sretribution for the drone strike Shane ordered on a Mancinelli house after shite went sideways for Carys? When you’re in families as tightly knit as the Four Families, a strike on one is a strike on all of them. Retribution isn’t a straight line. It’s a spider’s web. Could Gabriele be punishing Joey and me for something Shane did to retaliate against a Mancinelli?

Fucking tangled web, indeed. Maybe Shakespeare knew what he was talking about.

“Neither Carmine nor I did shit to your shitty family. I’m telling you right now, Cormac, leave our family out of it. We have more important shit going on.”

The call’s on speaker, so everyone can hear. I look at Finn, who shrugs.

“I thought Maria was fine. Finn said Ally spoke to her at work today.”

Just like Jocelyn is only Joey to me, Althea is only Thea to Finn. Everyone else calls her Ally.

“Yeah, well, you know Maria.”

The woman could be on her deathbed and be more worried about helping others than herself. Considering the fucked-up family she’s from, she’s shockingly unjaded. She’s also midway through a high-risk pregnancy. I know Ally’s felt guilty for how easy her pregnancy is since they’re due around the same time.

“Does she need anything?”

Dillan leans in to be sure Gabriele can hear him. We might not give a shite what happens to the men in that family, but Maria doesn’t deserve any ill will. We’d all give her the shirt off our backs, and not just because our parents would kill us if we didn’t. She can’t stand any of us because of who we are and what we do, but we all like her. We’ve known each other since we were in diapers.

“No. She just needs to keep her stress level down. Finding out one of us bombed a woman’s home wouldn’t do that, so none of us are going to risk her health for your pathetic ass. But thanks for the offer.”

That’s how we roll. We loathe each other, but we can be gracious. Normally, I’d stab her husband’s eye out without a second thought, but no one will touch a hair on Matteo’s head if it’ll harm Maria. We have consciences. And if we didn’t, our parents would skelp us to within an inch of our lives until we found them.

“This is the worst that’s happened, but it wasn’t the first attack. Someone tried to run her over as she stepped off a sidewalk while she and I were on a run with Finn. Before that, two men followed her from the subway.”

After today’s fucktastrophe, I consider those incidents as attacks now, rather than mere threats.

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