Page 67 of Tide of Treason
Rafael’s lip twitched. Weller’s didn’t. He was sprawled with one shoe dangling off as if he’d come home from a long day of getting fucked in the ass by the system. I nudged his corpse with the toe of my shoe, testing the weight. In the wake of that, I used the dumb fuck as a footrest. Looked around.
I knew their stories better than they did, every last skeleton in their closets.
Yates liked his coffee black, but only if his wife brewed it. Something about the way she stirred the sugar first, even though he never took any. The ritual of it, the familiarity. He hadn’t been sleeping in their bed for two months now. Too much time at the office, too much weight on his shoulders. But I knew the real reason: she’d found the burner phone in his glovebox, the one he used to send wire transfers to a college sophomore with legs up to her ears and daddy issues thick enough to spread on toast.
The others were just as easy.
Michaels, Justice Department: a recovering addict starting to eye the edge of the cliff again.
O’Shea, FBI: a former mob enforcer turned liaison, which was just a polite way of saying he used to break knees for my kind and now he answered emails for Uncle Sam.
And those were some of the best in the room.
Point is, these men were compromised, just like every other man in the American justice system. Power only ever came down to the size of your cookie jar, and right now, every crumb in this city was mine.
Rafael nudged my arm with the tip of his pen, a subtle gesture that meantwrap it up before I have to mop the floor with another white boy’s brainstem. I gave him a small nod. Considerate, really. I didn’t mind the blood, but the cleaning staff had been complaining, and I was still pretending I gave a shit about appearances.
We left the boardroom in silence. I tossed my jacket over my shoulder, and my men fell into step behind me, three suits in a row, four guards at our flanks, our shoes thudding in unison. My own blood simmered low, and when Rafael caught my eyes, he gave a short laugh through his nose, shaking his head.
“No more off-the-books deals, huh?”
I grinned, then pushed open the door to the lobby.
“No. Just the on-the-books ones.”
The drive toLong Island was smooth, the city smudging into a blur of steel and rain as we put distance between us and the bureaucratic hellscape I now ran. An hour later, the skyline gave way to sprawling estates, where old money bled into old blood, and the scent of fresh-cut grass had been masking the stench of bodies for generations.
The Sforza manor loomed up ahead. A monstrosity of stone and wrought iron, its gates taller than the average man, its guards tense at their posts.
Then came my favorite part—
Recognition. Realisation. Pure, uncut dread, slicing across faces when our ride pulled up.
Fucking poetry.
I parked right at the foot of the marble steps, because nothing said “fuck you” quite like a newly-minted federaldirector pulling up to a mafia stronghold in a car that still had government plates. Rafael and I stepped out in unison, shutting our doors with two sharp, synchronised thuds.
Vito stood at the top of the steps, scowl already etched deep. It darkened to a grimace when Rafael nodded at the shipment being unloaded in the background by Vargas and Dom. Dry ice swirled in thick white clouds, pooling onto the estate’s pristine stone driveway as the lid of a crate was flipped open, revealing the latest batch of product we’d been moving. Bricks of pure, untouched cocaine stuffed into vacuum-sealed packs, neatly tucked between frozen lobsters.
Francesco whistled low from the other side of the driveway.
“Good batch.”
Vargas tapped a gloved hand over the product. “Purest cut yet.”
I slipped my hands into my pockets and tilted my head at Vito.Come on, big guy, you missed me, didn’t you?
His response was a grunt, knuckles cracking as he flexed one hand, then the other. An absent-minded sweep of his eyes—down my throat, along the broad stretch of my shoulders, across the crisp lines of my suit. Somehow, I had a feeling he was sizing me up for something that had absolutely nothing to do with dumping my body in the Hudson.
Habit had me dragging a hand over my jaw.
And then I made a mistake.
I let my eyes flick down his frame.
What? He started it.
The man was built as if he’d been constructed in a top-secret government lab, a prototype for some unstoppable war machine. Fucking ridiculous. No one should have arms like that. Or a chest like that.
