Page 7 of Devious Kingpin
Just the beating of my heart and the pain in my brother’s eyes.
“Were they like us?” I questioned, shooting a glance at Killian. He’d given me a rundown on everything he remembered and all the facts he had. “Like Dad?” Then, remembering he probably didn’t think of Liam as our dad in the same way I did, I corrected, “Like Liam?”
Killian shrugged. “More or less.”
I raised my eyebrows. That didn’t tell me much. “Don’t be stingy with information,” I complained.
Killian tilted his head, studying me. I never could tell whether he saw too much or not enough. We both had blue eyes and dark hair, but in terms of personalities, we couldn’t be more different. I was rash, he was calculating. I had a temper, he didn’t.
“Our father—birth father—was a hitman for the Brennans,” he said, his voice cold. “Liam and Dad were best friends, and spent a lot of time together. Mom was—” He paused, searching for the right word. Or maybe he got choked up. Killian was way too good at hiding his emotions. Another thing the two of us didn’t have in common, but I was getting better at it. “She was gentle. She had no connection to the mafia. Seeing the brutality of it was hard for her.”
I swallowed, a lump in my throat growing. It wasn’t because I was mourning what I never knew. It was because I heard pain in my brother’s voice.
My hand reached for his and I squeezed it, offering comfort.
“You remember that night, don’t you?” I whispered.
Killian nodded, a dark expression passing through his eyes. “I do. And I’m working through my list of accomplices. I’ll make every one of them pay, Jules.”
There was no sense in scolding him about it or telling him we should take a higher road. Be safe. Fuck taking a higher road and fuck being safe. The bastards who hurt our parents should pay. They’d scarred Killian.
“Can Dad… Liam… help us?” Liam Brennan was the head of the Brennan Irish mafia. He saved both my brother and me, and raised us as his own.
My brother’s eyes met mine. “I have a list of names. Behind them all is one person.” I held my breath, waiting. “Sofia Volkov.”
That night, running through that list of names in my head, I went to my self-defense class with an additional purpose.
CHAPTER5
Dante
Isat in my office at Royally Lucky Casino.
It had been a few months since I met with Alessio Russo. Life moved on. I found new gun suppliers. Alessio, on the other hand, fucked up. Because now he needed a favor, and I was paying him back with the same courtesy.
What could I say? What goes around comes around.
“It was stupid to get on Alessio’s bad side,” Byron Ashford stated matter-of-factly. I let the grating voice roll off my back. As if I gave two fucks about it. “You want to make alliances, not enemies, Dante.”
He was lucky it was just the two of us in the office and he could get away with talking to me this way. Byron Ashford, a cousin on my father's side, strolled through the door like he didn’t have a care in the world and sat on my office couch with an arm resting across the back.
I shrugged, glancing toward him. “He’s the one who put an end to our business arrangement, not me. I had to jump through fucking hoops to find a replacement on such short notice.”
“He got out because of his woman.” He rubbed a hand across his smile, studying me. He was probably searching for my weaknesses. There were so fucking many, but I’d gotten good at hiding them. “Don’t you have a woman you want to impress?”
“His woman is not my problem,” I deadpanned. Autumn Corbin, Alessio’s woman who apparently wanted to save the world, got stuck in Afghanistan in search of a story. Alessio was desperate to find a way into the country so he could save her. Not. My. Problem. “And my woman is none of your business.”
I tried to forget the girl with blue eyes and dark mahogany hair. I really fucking did. But it was impossible. Physically, it was fucking impossible. That girl had somehow grafted herself in my bones. Whether she was an obsession of my heart, my soul, or a physical addiction, it didn’t matter. There was no moving on.
She was in my dreams and part of my thoughts, every waking moment. Fuck, I couldn’t see a woman with dark hair without thinking about her. And her eyes… Jesus H. Christ.
Was this even healthy?
Fuck no. It required a special kind of therapist to cure this obsession. Maybe electric shock or some shit like that.
I shook my head, knowing full well there was no point. It was the curse of the DiLustro gene.
Basilio, my cousin, hunted for the identity of his mysterious blonde princess. I searched for my girl with beautiful eyes, the color of the Ionian Sea. There was something calming about her that spoke to a fundamental part of me, despite all the turmoil that happened over the last few months.
