Page 2 of Harry

“What’s happened?” I ask again as I close the gap between us.

She pulls me into a tight hug. Over her shoulder I can see Brig and our mother, their identical brunette heads resting against each other. My mother’s arm around Brig, gently soothing Brig as she cries. James and some other guy I don’t regonise, are sitting at the desk and a prickle of rage ripples over my skin. My dad sits at that desk.

“Will someone tell me what’s happened?”

James steps forward, his pressed suit making him look too thin and out of place. I fight the visceral urge to shudder. The man has always given me the creeps and I’m filled with anger that he is here, sharing in this private moment with my family.

Jack lets me go and shoots a warning look at James before pulling me into the drawing room and sitting me down on the plush sofa.

The panic and anxiety in me turns into something else, and I find I’m wanting to cry, to turn back time because I know that whatever this is, it’s bad. I begin to shake uncontrollably, my entire body trembling at the news I haven’t yet received.

“Harry,” Jack’s voice cracks a little and she frowns and clenches her jaw as if to reset her voice box. “Dad was…” she pauses, swallowing hard again.

“For fucks sake,” I grit out, shaking my head at the horror that’s unfolding in front of me. I know what she is going to say, part of me is surprised she can’t say it. She is a police officer after all. She says bad stuff to good people all the time. “Just say it,” I say, the words coming in a strangled whisper.

“He’s dead,” she finally says as tears breach her lash line and run down tear tracks that were already traced on her skin. “He was killed this morning…last night…” she shakes her head, figuring out the time difference like it could change things. “In Chicago.”

Aidan

The barman puts another glass of scotch in front of me, taking away the empty glass I was staring into.

I’ve always been so capable in this line of work, nothing has ever phased me. I’ve seen men killed, I’ve killed men, I’ve done despicable, hellish things.

But the moment that Richard Cordez’s body collapsed beside me and I knew I wasn’t capable of saving him, it was a different feeling entirely. The control of whether he lived or died didn’t lie with me. It was out of my hands.

I failed him.

The man who took me in off the streets when my parents were killed. The man who provided a roof over my head, and food in my belly. He made sure I knew how to kill a man with my bare hands and that I earned my place by his side, at his back. He trained me to be the best Capo, and I failed him.

No one saw it coming.

My skin is stiff and sticky but I can’t shower. I can’t wash his blood from my hands because then he will be gone and it will be my fault.

Images of pressing down on the wound in his chest as blood pumps from his body and between my fingers won’t leave my mind as I replay the scene over and over in my head.

His grey eyes searched out mine as he gripped onto my bicep. I was shaking my head, asking what the fuck I should do. The man who raised me, who always seemed so much larger than life, was fading away in front of me. Then he smiled.

Who smiles when they’re fucking dying?

“My girls,” he muttered to me in a strained and strangled gasp. “Look after my girls.”

He didn’t say any more. Couldn’t. Not with the blood gurgling up his throat and over his tongue, staining his teeth.

I didn’t think about what he said at the time. I was too busy trying to come up with a way to stop the bleeding, all while knowing it was too late. The bullet went clean through his heart, it would have been shredding more with every weakened beat.

The glass sticks to my fingers as I lift it to my lips and down the amber liquid, then go back to staring into the empty tumbler.

I don’t know when Julian and Vaughan joined me. The three of us sit in silence until finally Julian sighs long and hard.

“What happens now?” he asks. His voice is rough and raw with emotion. Not that any of us would show anything beyond our silence and vacant expressions in such a public area. Neutral ground still breeds gossip.

“He is worried about the girls,” I say, before realising I used the present tense and shaking my head.

“In the club?” Vaughan clarifies, his huge frame sagging beneath the weight of grief and I shrug my shoulders.

“What other girls are there?” I ask. Richard ran Club Curve for as long as I can remember. It’s the gentlemen's club on the top floor of Sindicate Towers. Naturally, the club is also used to rinse money, even though it turns over a hefty amount by itself.

We fall into silence again.

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