Page 69 of Iron Cross

Oh, she had been fooled alright. And worse yet, she hadlikedit. She had liked every reminder of the husband she'd thought she had left behind. She had missed me, as I had missed her.

Shiny looked appalled as she looked between us. "Good God, it worked didn't it? You didn't recognize him?"

The cars behind us squealed as they tried to keep up with my erratic driving. As Shiny readied to lean out the window again, I turned, pulling a 360, landing us on the other side of the road going in the opposite direction. Shiny almost fell out of the car, smacking her head on the top of the window, before getting herself together to fire off another shot. But she missed. Fucking typical.

I shouldn't be so hard on her, of course. Trying to shoot out of a moving vehicle, even if it was moving at a steady rate, was like trying to surf and hit a two inch target with a fucking lawn dart. But I needed her to be good at this job - a job we did not adequately train for at Green Fields Enterprises. I had to make note of that and tell Dairo that the men had to learn how to effectively shoot out of a vehicle. Surely that was something that those morons in the British SAS would know how to do.

She had one magazine left before I had to hand her my pistol, which was something I didn't want to do. I didn't want an entire side of the vehicle to go without a weapon, just in case. It was not good to have a weak side, after all.

With the two cars still hard on our tail, I felt the tension sweeping up my arm.

Shiny's prattling didn't help.

"Un-fucking-believable," she said with a roll of her eyes. "You idiots were made for each other."

"Hey!" I said, glaring at Shiny for just an instant before turning my eyes back to the road. "You don't talk about my wife like that."

She laughed. "But I can talk aboutyoulike that?"

"Just not in front of our troops." I grumbled, as I turned down a small town main street, where there were cars stopped on the side of the road, one trying to parallel park.

"Fiiiiine," she said, annoyed.

"How about you concentrate on trying to kill those bastards, instead of getting on my arse?" I griped, again.

I knew I had little control of Miss Shiny Flanagan. Or was she Shiny LeBlanc now, since she'd married our MMA trainer? I wasn't sure. They'd had a wedding, but I never stopped calling her Flanagan. So there was that.

"Hang on!" I warned, before I came to an abrupt, screeching halt, forcing the Italians to skirt around us or risk impacting us from behind. They took the bait, blasting past us and stopping half a mile down the road in front of us, as I had already turned and brought us out of the little town.

"You alright?" I called back to my wife, who had been silent through our exchanges.

"I'm fine," she said, quietly.

"I'm running low on bullets, Eoghan," Shiny said, and I pushed my pistol towards her. Damn.

We hadn't packed to take on a squad-sized element. We were only packed to handle maybe one or two enemies at the most. But three fucking cars? That was a lot, even for Durante.

"Kira, I need you to get under the seat and find the damn gun that's there," I said.

"Damn gun!" Cillian echoed.

Strictly speaking, I did not like that he was learning my foul language but at the same time, I also liked that he seemed to pick up everything I was saying. Like a chip off the old block.

Kira didn't respond. Shiny tried to shoot again outside of the window but only managed to land a hit into the right side of one car, killing the passenger, and spraying the inside of the vehicle with blood. But the driver was unharmed, and still chasing us.

"How big is the bounty on my wife?" I asked Shiny, wondering who the fuck was working so hard to try and catch us that they'd drive through the blood of their own mates to get to us!

"Oh, you don't want to know," Shiny siad.

"Idowant to know."

"Half a million."

"Christ alive!" I groaned. "Can Durante even afford that?"

I had attacked him ruthlessly for the past two years, hitting him where it hurt most, in ports that he didn't know I knew about. All thanks to my secret consiglieri. I had crippled him in every possible way, so much so that there were rumblings of deposing him as the head of the Cosa Nostra. Replacing him with noneother than his own daughter, or possibly a far off cousin who was less competent than a monkey trying to type out Shakespeare.

"Who knows?" Shiny said. "But I'm running low, Eoghan."

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