Page 1 of Entangled Mafia Princess

Chapter one

Kai

“Bad day?” Rafe Lee guesses as soon as I soon as I walk into the study of my home in Marin County overlooking the bay and Golden Gate Bridge.

“A shit day,” I acknowledge.

Rafe shows me the glass he holds. “I helped myself to a drink.”

I nod before sitting down opposite him. Rafe and I belong to the same triad, but we connected because we were both raised by our grandmothers. Rafe lost his parents to suicide and murder. Mine were killed in an automobile accident. When our grandmothers passed away, the Jing San Triad became our new family.

“You here on business?” I ask him.

“Passing through. I’m headed to Europe. But what happened with you?”

To calm myself, I draw in long breaths as I listen to the crackle of the fire in the fireplace. Back when I lived in Heihe, China, a city on the border with Russia, where winter temperatures easily dropped below zero, the warmth of a fire was something to be savored. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where winter temperatures can soar into the seventies, fireplaces often seem more decorative than anything else.

“I had an unexpected setback,” I reply.

My latest endeavor was supposed to catapult me up the ranks of the Jing San Triad and make me a legend within the organization. But what was supposed to have been the pièce de résistance of my career slipped from me. The amount of money I could have secured from the sale of the artificial intelligence I had stolen from SVATR, Silicon Valley Advanced Technologies and Robotics, would have eclipsed all my previous arms trades combined.

It was bad enough that my prized take was stolen from me, but the salt into the wound was how long and hard Michael’s wife had sobbed when I had to break the news to her that her husband had been killed in the effort. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to inform a woman she was now a widow, but it didn’t get any easier. The women always remind me of how my grandmother cried when my grandfather passed away. I was just a small kid at the time, but I remember it more than I remember the deaths of my parents a few years before.

“Anything I can help with?” Rafe asks.

It had taken months and months of planning and thousands of dollars in bribery before we could break into the heavily fortified offices, hack into the SVATR server, and download the encrypted information onto a laptop equipped with SVATR security clearance. I’m not about to have all that effort go to waste.

Not wanting to trouble Rafe just before his trip, however, I reply, “It’s okay. I just need to regroup.”

Rafe only looks at me with those dark, intense eyes of his. He can probably see the truth, but he respects my boundaries enough not to question me. Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to confide in him. Rafe is like the older brother I never had. Though he doesn’t divulge much, I sense he has his demons, but he always appears suave and collected. His personality is the opposite of my friend Andrian Plotnikov, whom I partnered with on the SVATR heist. Rafe’s cautioned me about Andrian, and I know he wouldn’t approve of my working with Andrian on such a significant endeavor.

“You let me know if you need anything,” Rafe says before we turn to more banal subject matters.

After he departs, I text my right-hand man, Andy Huang, for an update. Even though Andy was injured in the ambush shortly after leaving SVATR, our guys were able to down one of the attackers before they made off with our laptop.

Who did this? And who could have betrayed our plans? I rub my temple.

Athena, a German Shepherd I rescued from the Tenderloin District when she was barely a year old, paddles into the room. As if she knows I could use comforting, she rests her head upon my lap and licks at my hand when I stroke her head.

Andy calls me back. “We got a name.”

I sit up. “Yeah?”

“He works for Liam Callaghan.”

“Liam Callaghan. Who the fuck is that?”

“Don’t know. I can continue with the waterboarding. Or we can switch things up and start pulling teeth.”

Noticing an incoming call from a blocked number, I say, “I’ll call you back.”

Without picking up the other call, I know it’s Andrian. We’ve known each other since we were boys growing up in the conurbation of Heihe and Blagoveshchensk.

“Dmitri didn’t make it,” Andrian informs me after I pick up the call. “He died from his gunshot wounds.”

“Shit, I’m sorry,” I reply in Russian, a language many residents in Heihe learned to welcome their neighbors from across the border. Dmitri, Andrian’s most trusted lieutenant, is a significant loss and a personal one.

Andrian pounds what sounds like a table and curses. “How are your guys?”

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