Page 60 of The Mafia Assassin's Redemption
“I don’t have a love life. I have arrangements. Sexual encounters. That’s it.”
A flash of thunder clouds darken in her eyes but she nods. “Then send me away?—”
“Fuck no.”
“But—”
“Stop.” The command is lacking in sexual innuendo, but I know how to pitch it for a sub. Even an untrained one. And she straightens and dips her head, spots of color blooming on her cheeks.
So fucking trainable, so fucking perfect. A piece of tightly wrapped candy waiting to be tested, tried, shaped.
But the anger’s still swirling inside of me and I clutch it tightly.
My mind trips back to the calm of the violence from last night.
The shooting where one man got winged by me and I just missed doing the same to my brother’s head.
Unlike Dec, who has natural ability but no real finesse, I timed it all perfectly, and even if Cal moved, I’d have moved, too. But he knows better than that. We’ve played this game before, and I think he gets off on the element of danger. He’s also disciplined and he trusts me and my skill set.
I have a file on assassins. Those for hire and those who are part of crime families. Funny enough, the latter are easier to find. There are fewer of them.
The former?
It’s a file I’m constantly building, and it spans continents.
The man who tried to make the hit in the gardens was homegrown to the States. He probably did work for different families, picking off strays and problems here and there. A simple gun for hire who hadn’t gotten the memo to call off the hit on Harry.
Ricci also seems like the type not to bother pulling in the big guns unless needed.
But some are hiding in the shadows, and I saw one last night sitting in the Irish bar where my brothers and I went after collecting our money. It’s a bar we’re thinking of buying, a perfect fountain of information, and also a perfect setting for laundering. It brings in a mix of locals, tourists, and the underbelly of New York, nestled on the corner between West 130thand Madison Avenue in Harlem, right near the Bronx.
Shadows are like ghosts, slipping in and out and able to do things in plain sight. No one notices. Unless you’re of the same cloth, like me. This one—wearing a baseball cap pulled low and a bulky overcoat—was watching us, and I don’t like that.
When he left, I followed and stumbled into a fight where a girl was being attacked by a few men.
I shot the guy who was trying to molest her, as well as the one holding her down in a dark little area covered by bushes.
The others scattered after that, and I warned the girl to run. She did.
The shadow I followed didn’t stop once, though. I looked for him but he disappeared. Back at the bar, on the back table where he’d sat, Ifound something.
Two pictures of Harry on a folded piece of paper. Her age, maybe nine, and a recent one with Father Luigi.
My heart did a free fall into my shoes at the sight.
A faint scent in the air reminded me of Shiv’s perfume, and my stomach clenched as it always does when that smell wafts into the air around me.
The bartender said he remembered a young guy sitting at that table for the past few days. One of the Irish thugs from the Bronx, looking for work.
I’ve put out feelers.
But I don’t like knowing someone is watching and waiting.
I don’t give a fuck about the blood on my hands after the killings I made. My head had been filled with images of Harry’s mother as I’d found her in Dublin, and the thought of someone doing that to Harriet made me physically ill. So I killed the two guys just on principle.
The morning papers called it a gang killing.
Harry mutters something under her breath as we pull up outside our brownstone in the West Village.
