Page 85 of Irish Brute
There’s the map Fiona made me agree to—no Fishtown work west of Tenth Street, even though the border has been Fifteenth Street forever. The port’s off limits too, and I can’t expand the corner drug trade, not a single, solitary block. Half or more of my weekly take—gone.
There’s the series of texts from my driver at the docks—my container was in, then headed for the warehouse, then stolen at gunpoint by a small Italian army. A quarter of a billion dollars—gone.
There’s the pictures from more than a decade ago—a body on the road, another in a ditch, a third behind the wheel. A car in a garage with a broken axle, fingerprints, tracker data, all the other evidence. Samantha’s reputation—gone.
She tries to reach me with the urgency in her voice. “Braiden. You can’t believe what he just said. Don Antonio?—”
“He’s not your fucking don!” My words echo off the lobby’s marble floor like gunshots. The girl behind the hotel’s front desk ducks for cover.
Fiona snaps her fingers like I’m a badly trained hound. “That’s enough!” she scolds, as if I’m a child.
A clinical voice at the back of my brain asks questions. Is that just Fiona being a bitch? Or is this still part of her plan?
Because therewasa plan upstairs.
The summit was never about my war with Russo. No one cared that Russo hit first because I put a ring on Samantha’s hand. No one paid attention to the fact that he took out my girls, my clubs, my best enforcer. No one gave a single shite that Russo burned the Hare and Harp to the ground.
Scuderi must have paid off Ingram when they set the time and place for the meeting. The two giants parceled off Fishtown, using my territory, myhome, to make good on some fucking trade-off in New York or in Boston, or both.
The entire meeting stank to high heaven, and I had to shake hands on it, Russo gloating all the while.
Now I catch a smirk on Madden’s face, exactly the sort of insubordination that was guaranteed by Fiona’s casual discipline just now. My brother doesn’t say a word out loud. In fact, he smothers his reaction almost immediately. But he’s the one who warned me about Samantha.
Ibelievedher—every word. I gave her my collar. So when she starts in again—“You can’t believe what Russo says”—something inside me snaps.
I clamp my hand on her arm and drag her across the lobby. She fights me like she fears for her life, which only stokes my fury more. It’s easy to overpower her. I’m not concerned about being kind.
Once the elevator door opens, I drop her arm like she’s scalded me. I push her in and fill the doorway so she doesn’t have a chance to escape. It’s not until the doors close that we retreat to our corners like someone’s rung a bell to start the round.
I slam the button for the third floor, and I’m walloped by a jolt of déjà vu. But Samantha and I reallyhavebeen here before, the two of us in an elevator, staring at each other in metal doors. The first time, though, was in the middle of a Delaware snowstorm. Samantha was a woman I wanted. I thought she was a woman I could trust.
Now I wonder if I’ll have to kill her before this fucking night is over.
She’s clever enough not to say a word until the suite door clicks closed behind us. Even wiser, she puts the sofa between us, circling round to the far end before she says, “Russo lied.”
“So you didn’t give up my contacts at the docks?”
“I didn’t know anything about the shipment!” she shouts. And then she lowers her voice, which I think is one of thoselawyer tricks she uses to manipulate judges and juries. “I won’t lie. Russo asked me to get him dirt. The past forty-eight hours have been hell, knowing the truth about that night on the mountain would finally be made public. But I never considered hunting down the information Russo demanded, much less handing it over. I promise. I swear.”
Forty-eight hours.
With all she just said, those are the words that knife through my brain. “Russo made his demands two days ago?”
She flexes her twisted shoulder, and I can just glimpse the bandage under her collar. Belatedly, I realize I must have hurt her, dragging her to the elevator. Shame is just another emotion stirred into my overflowing cauldron.
“At the flower show,” Samantha says.
Something nasty gnaws into my belly. I realize I’m scraping at my scarred forearm, digging deep with the nails of my left hand as I try to keep from chasing my feckin’ wife around the sofa. I fold both hands into fists and suck a breath through my teeth. “Russo threatened you two days ago?” I ask. “And you didn’t say a fucking word until now?”
“What could you do? He had proof of what happened on the mountain. If I gave him information about the port, he’d just ask for more in the future. Now, he can’t threaten either one of us again.”
She makes herself sound so honorable. My voice is so low the words sound like thunder from Mars: “If I’d known, I could have done something.”
“Like what?” She sounds outraged.
“Off the top of my head? I could have fed Russo lies, pointed him toward a bratva warehouse and let the Russians take him out. I could have alerted the Feds, so my lost cocaine put that guinea behind bars for years. I could have set a honey trap last night or today, caught Russo killing a girl on camera before theship even docked, so I had something to hold over his head at the port.”
She blanches. I spun out those ideas in fifteen seconds, but that was enough time to know she’d hate the last one. “Don’t,” I warn her.
