Page 19 of Mafia Made (Crowned Criminals)

Sawyer’s eye twitched, a sure sign that I was starting to piss him off. I suppressed a smirk at the thought. “Maybe you should,” he said. “Crime is obviously a problem in this city.”

I snorted. “You should know.” The O’Connors were one of the smaller crime families in the city. Unlike the Italians and the Russians, they hadn’t been able to scale up their empire.

Sawyer said nothing, but the twitch in his eye was getting worse, and my smile was getting larger. The best way to piss off Sawyer was to remind him of the fact that his family was nothing more than a group of low-life criminals. It made him insane.

“Maybe if you had been able to put Marco Blanchi away, then people wouldn’t be disappearing.”

I ignored the desire to point out that people disappeared in the city all the time and focused on the name Blanchi. The O’Connors hated the Petrovs and Blanchis almost as much as I did, but the other two families were often way too busy fighting one another to care about the O’Connors.

“What makes you think Marco Blanchi had anything to do with your cousin missing?”

“My uncle,” Sawyer corrected.

“Whatever.” I was no longer interested in which one of Sawyer's relatives was missing. Instead, I wanted to know why Sawyer thought that the Blanchi’s were involved. I’d never spoken this aloud but losing the Blanchi case had been like a knife in the gut, and I wasn’t sure that it was something that I could ever get over. “Why do you think Blanchi was involved.”

For a moment, Sawyer was quiet, and I felt my heart beating quickly in anticipation.

“You really want to get Blanchi, don’t you?” Sawyer asked.

I said nothing. The O’Connors might also hate the Blanchi family, but when it came to the mafia, I wasn’t interested in the old adage of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ They were all my enemies.

“Did you come here to tell me that your uncle is running for mayor? Because you’ve done it, so you can go about your night.” I wanted to enjoy another drink before heading home alone to wank off in the shower as I thought about my new secretary.

“I came to warn you that you don’t want the O’Connors as enemies.”

I laughed loudly at Sawyer’s threat. “Fuck off,” I told him. I wasn’t interested in the O’Connors half-assed attempt at intimidation. The Blanchis were the ones I wanted, followed by the Petrovs, and if time merited, I would be sure to get the O’Connors next.

“I mean it,” Sawyer said. “My uncle wants to be mayor, and I can assure you that he will do whatever it takes to make sure that that dream happens.”

Sighing, I grabbed the suit jacket that I’d folded over my stool when I arrived at the bar. “Tell your uncle to bring it.”

Sawyer shook his head. For a moment, I wondered why he even bothered looking as though he would actually be sad if something terrible were to happen to me. I had to give Sawyer credit, he was quite the actor.

“It’s a shame that you are in a hurry to end up like your father.”

Sawyer’s words stopped me in my tracks. I rarely talked about my father because when I did, I could feel my blood pressure rise in anger. Though I knew that Sawyer was just trying to get a rise out of me, I couldn’t let his words slide.

“My father was a good man,” I said, my voice low as I looked into Sawyer’s dark eyes. He was sorely out of his mind if he thought that I was just going to roll on my back because his uncle sent him to issue a threat. But I wasn’t going to do that. There was no fucking way.

Leaning down into Sawyer’s face, I made sure to punctuate my next words. I wanted him to feel every bit of the anger I felt. “I’m going to make sure that I destroy people like you and yours, so that good people like my father never have to worry about the shit you filth bring to our city. Feel free to tell your uncle that.”

I didn’t wait to see Sawyer’s reaction as I headed out. I was sure that he was laughing his ass off. Sawyer had always thought more of himself and his family than anyone else had. That was fine by me. They weren’t too small for me to go after, especially if Patty O’Connor was deciding to throw his hat into the mayoral race.

Grabbing my phone out of my jacket, I started crafting an email. It was one that I had not wanted to send. At least, not yet. But I didn’t have much of a choice. Things were heating up, and while I wasn’t worried about Patrick O’Connor, there were other things that I was worried about. For a moment, I hesitated to send the email I’d written. My mother had always been a cutthroat individual. She would gladly ruin someone in order to get what she wanted, and while I liked to ignore the parts of me that were like her, that desire to get what I wanted above all else, had stuck.

So, after I quickly weighed the pros and cons, I hit send on the email.

Things were in motion, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’d wanted this, and while I’d hoped to have more time to enact my plan, the entrance of the O’Connors changed things. Because while I wasn’t particularly worried, I would be a fool not to ensure that I was set for success.

Sighing, I dialed Marcel’s number. It was Friday night, but early enough that I was probably catching him before he fell into a den of hedonistic pleasure. He’d made it clear that I wasn’t allowed to be caught doing anything that wasn’t on the up and up.

“What?” Marcel asked.

“We’ve got a problem,” I told him. There was no beating around the bush here. Things weren’t shaking out the way we wanted to. Though I wasn’t worried that Patrick O’Connor was going to be a competitive opponent, the fact that Sawyer knew that I was running was an issue. If he spoke to the press, I’d lose control of the narrative of my candidacy, which was something I couldn’t afford considering the Page Six article that had come out about me.

“It better be bad,” Marcel said. “I was just about to head out for the evening.”

I looked down at my watch. “It’s barely 7:30.”

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