FULL NOVELXO Brutal Vows: Chapter 38
We spend the night there. We act out two more scenes from the book. I decline to participate in one scene Quinn found particularly fascinating, where the gladiator demonstrates exactly how the title of the novel was inspired.
I prefer not to have an ejaculate facial, thank you very much. My skin is quite moisturized already.
In the morning, I make breakfast from the single overripe avocado on the counter, the three eggs in the fridge of indeterminate age, and the loaf of sourdough bread in the pantry, half of which is moldy. I throw out the worst and pick off a few spots from the other pieces, then fry them up with butter in a pan.
“Avocado toast with fried eggs,” I say to Quinn, who’s sitting shirtless at the kitchen island. “It’s possible it will kill you. When was the last time you went shopping?”
“For food?”
“No, for uranium.”
“I usually eat out.”
“Ah. You and Declan must have big restaurant bills.”
“Oh, aye. We’ve got big…bills.” He grins, biting into his toast.
“Grow up.”
“You love it, viper.”
I do, but I won’t admit it. It will only encourage him.
His cell phone rings. Still grinning at me, he digs it out of his pants pocket and answers.
“Hullo.” He listens for a moment, then glances up at me. “We’ll be right over.”
When he disconnects, I say, “Who was that?”
“Declan. He’s got news about the break-in. Says you’ll want to hear it in person.”
We shower and change clothes, then head out to the palace Declan calls home. As soon as we’re seated in his office, Declan says, “Before we get down to business, Sloane made me promise to make another date for supper with you. So let’s work that out.”
“Oh. Supper.”
I glance at Quinn, sitting beside me with a bland smile. His digestive tract is probably more prepared to deal with Sloane’s culinary adventures than mine is, having most likely been subjected to them before.
“Actually, let’s back up a sec. Let’s talk about your promises.”
Declan lifts his brows.
Quinn warns, “Reyna.”
I smile at both of them and go right ahead with what I was going to say. “We need to remove the section in the contract about Stavros.”
Declan leans back in his chair and folds his hands over his stomach. He drawls, “Do we now.”
“Yes. And please don’t be patronizing. That’s literally my least favorite thing.”
He glances at Quinn, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else than in this room, then looks back at me. “The contract has already been signed.”
“But it doesn’t take effect until my dear husband here and I have both signed a wedding license and filed it with the county clerk. Until then, it’s just a bunch of paper.”
When Declan draws down his dark brows and glowers at me, I say innocently, “Or am I incorrect?”
Quinn’s sigh is heavy.
Declan gazes at me with a calculated look in his icy blue eyes. I’m sure if I were a man, he’d be terribly frightening, but right now, all I’m feeling is determined.
I want that section out of the contract, and I want to negotiate some better terms for my side, and I’m not leaving this office until both of those things are done.
“Look. Either you take that section out, or I’ll tell Sloane it’s in there. Your choice.”
In a clipped tone, Declan says, “I could just cancel the whole bloody thing.”
So he wants to play dirty. Well, I’m up for that.
I sit back in my chair, cross my legs, and shrug. “Okay by me.”
Groaning, Quinn leans over and drops his head into his hands.
“Does your brother know you’re making demands on his behalf?”
Holding Declan’s freezing blue gaze, I say calmly, “I’m making demands on behalf of my family and my new friend Sloane, not Gianni. If he had half a brain, he would’ve negotiated a better contract himself, but since I’m the one sitting here with a wedding ring on my finger, I’m the one you’re dealing with.”
After a long moment of silence, Declan smiles.
“All right, lass. We’ll take out the Stavros section.”
“Thank you. Now, concerning section twenty-four A. We’re going to need a better payment schedule on those overseas shipments.”
Into his hands, Quinn mutters, “Dear God in heaven.”
But Declan doesn’t seem at all surprised to hear I’m not finished making demands. He simply says, “Why don’t you put it all in writing and send it over? We’ll have the attorneys draw up a new draft and we can go over it then.”
Quinn lifts his head and stares at Declan as if he’s lost his mind.
“I’ll do that. Thank you.”
“Any other surprises you’d like to spring on me?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Can we get to the reason you’re here now?”
“There’s no need to be snippy.”
Declan looks at Quinn, who puts his hands in the air and shakes his head.
Declan takes the laptop sitting to one side of the desk and turns it around so the screen is facing us. He hits a button, and a video starts to play. It’s a black-and-white picture of what seems to be the security camera feed at an empty loading dock in a warehouse.
“What am I looking at?”
“Just watch.”
Frowning, I watch a white van back up into the dock. Its rear doors open. From somewhere off camera, seven men emerge. All of them are in identical black uniforms of combat boots, tactical pants and vests, and long-sleeved shirts.
They’re all also wearing black ski masks and carrying rifles.
The hair on my arms stands on end.
The men enter the van. The back doors close. The van pulls away from the loading dock.
I glance up to find Declan watching me closely. He says, “Notice the sign over the door in the background.”
I squint at the screen. There’s a door off to one side of where the van pulled up. The sign above it reads, “Caruso Industries. Employees Only.”
Something dark and ugly forms in the pit of my stomach.
I say quietly, “No.”
Declan doesn’t respond. He hits another button. Now I’m looking at a white van racing down a country road. It’s the same van from the video. The view this time is from above.
The screen splits into four different views, all of the same van speeding down roads, driving erratically.
In Scarsdale.
Away from the house.
Declan says, “Traffic cameras. Recognize the area?”
With dawning horror, I whisper, “He wouldn’t. He couldn’t have.”
“Look at the time.”
There’s a time and date stamp on the bottom right side of each picture. All show the day and time of the home invasion.
Declan hits another button. Now I’m listening to a recording of a man’s voice I don’t recognize.
“Mission Charlie Foxtrot. Oscar Mike.”
Declan says, “That’s military slang for the mission was a clusterfuck, I’m on the move.”
“Mission,” I repeat faintly, feeling sick.
“The message was left on your brother’s voicemail five minutes after the time stamps on the traffic cameras.”
“It can’t have been. Gianni has excellent encryption. All his communications, his email, everything is secure…”
I trail off when Declan hits the button again and a new screen shows up. It’s an email, dated two weeks ago. Sent to Gianni from someone named Hangfire. The body of the email says only: Funds received. The balloon has gone up.
“That means trouble is coming,” says Declan, watching my face. “That date at the end is when the op was to go live.”
It’s the same date on the videos of the white van.
The same date the men in black invaded the house.
My heart thudding against my rib cage, I say, “This doesn’t make sense. Why would Gianni set up an attack on his own home?”
Declan’s voice is level when he says, “Why does your brother do anything?”
He’s not asking a rhetorical question. And I don’t have to think very long before I come up with an answer.
I whisper, “Money. Oh God.”
“The plan was to kidnap Lili and hold her for ransom.”
“But he’d be putting up his own cash for ransom!”
“Unless I offered to pay it,” says Quinn quietly. “Which I would have.”
Declan says, “Then that money would’ve gone right back to Gianni. So either he made a calculated guess Spider would put up the money or he didn’t care if he did, because there was a bigger target.”
“What target?”
When Declan only stares at me in silence, I know what the target is.
Or rather, who.
And I’m truly sick now, because I know without a shadow of doubt what Gianni was after.
I close my eyes and try very hard not to scream.
“Enzo had a ten-million-dollar life insurance policy on me. I didn’t know about it until after his death. I kept paying the insurance premiums but changed the beneficiary to Gianni. At the time, Lili wasn’t yet eighteen, or it would’ve been her.”
Quinn says, “Ten million? Why would he go to all that trouble for only ten mil?”
I open my eyes and find Declan staring at me with the answer in his own.
He already knows.
“That was only the cherry on top. The real money is what I inherited on Enzo’s death.”
Declan says softly, “Two hundred and forty million dollars.”
In shock, Quinn turns to me. “What?”
“Aye, lad. Your wife’s rich.”
After a moment of pensive silence, Quinn says, “Except she’s not really my wife, is she?”
I can’t look at him. There’s a note of finality in his voice, as if he’s just now realizing that this non-marriage of ours is skating on very thin ice.
I say, “That doesn’t change anything between us, Quinn.”
Declan says, “What if you were named capo of the Five Families? Would that change anything?”
Stunned, I stare at him with my eyes wide and my heart palpitating. My brain starts to race.
I think of the strange meeting with the heads of the other four families that day in the warehouse, the way I sensed there was something more going on than what they said, and get a tingling feeling all the way down my spine.
I also know I have to tread very carefully here, because I have no way of knowing if this is a trap, if I’m being recorded, or how Declan O’Donnell came to have all this information in his hands.
When it comes right down to it, the Mob and the Mafia are still enemies. Without that marriage license, our relationship doesn’t exist.
I say, “What if is a dangerous question. And here is where I point out that I have no proof any of this information is real. All of it could have been easily manufactured by someone with very little skill.”
Gazing at me with the kind of cool composure that belies nothing, Declan says, “There was a vote this morning, Reyna.”
“Gianni said the vote had been postponed.”
“They told him it had been, but it went on without him.”
“Why?”
“Because they’d already decided he was no longer welcome in the family.”
My voice rising along with my anger, I say, “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means they were provided indisputable proof that Gianni has been funneling money away from the family operations for years, in addition to many other acts of disloyalty.”
I say flatly, “Let me guess. You provided them the proof.”
“Not me.”
“Who, then?”
“An interested third party.”
I can tell that’s all I’ll get there, so I change gears. “I need to speak with my brother about all this.”
After a pause, Declan says quietly, “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
It sounds like a threat.
The air goes static. My heartbeat surges. Every muscle in my body tenses.
Beside me, Quinn has also tensed, looking back and forth between us with his hands white-knuckled around the arms of his chair. Every cell in his body is ready to spring into action, primed to the crackling stress in the room.
It hits me with a blast like a nuclear explosion.
If Declan tried to harm me, Quinn would kill him.
His boss, his friend, a person he once described as the best man he’s ever known. He’d kill him to protect me.
The emotion I feel is so raw and overpowering, I have to inhale several slow breaths before I can speak again.
“Why not?”
“Because Gianni’s dead.”
When I leap from my chair, Quinn moves at the same time, jumping up to stand in front of me protectively with a blistering snarl and a threatening scowl in Declan’s direction.
Declan regards us with his eyebrows raised and a look of incredulity on his face. “What the bloody hell is wrong with you two?”
Quinn growls, “This woman could be carrying my child. If you want to get to her, you’ve got to go through me first!”
Declan’s laugh is short and astonished. He looks at me as if he’s wondering what kind of spell I’ve put on his friend, then looks back at Quinn. He shakes his head and exhales.
“Sit down, you barmy bastards. I wasn’t threatening anyone. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’ve got a mutiny on my hands. I knew today would be shite.”
He reclines back into his big leather captain’s chair with a sigh and waves a hand at us like we’re being ridiculous.
“Sit!”
Quinn looks to me for direction. I nod, and we both carefully take our seats.
Declan says crossly, “For fuck’s sake, lad, don’t be staring at me with such a black glower! Last I heard, I’m still in charge of you, so show some bloody respect!”
Grinding his molars, Quinn grudgingly settles into his chair.
Declan cuts his gaze to me and says accusingly, “What have you done with him? He’s even more strung out than usual!”
“He’s fine. Let’s get back to business, please.”
He mutters to himself, “I need a bloody drink and it’s not even ten o’clock in the bloody morning.” Then, overly dramatic, he says, “Now that we’re all civilized adults again, I’ll continue.”
He clicks around on the laptop for a second, searching for something. Then a video begins to play.
Gianni is tied to a chair in the middle of an empty room. His eyes are closed. His head lolls to one side. His face is bruised and bloody. More blood stains the front of his white dress shirt and the floor beneath the chair.
I lift my hand to my mouth, inhaling sharply.
Declan says, “I won’t show you the worst of it. Alessandro sent this over after he told me about the vote.”
A man walks into the frame. It’s Massimo, smoking a cigarette as he circles Gianni. He says, “So you stole money from us. Your own family.”
Gianni mumbles something incoherent. Massimo kicks the chair, and Gianni jumps.
“Yes. I did. But you have to believe me, I—”
Massimo kicks the chair again. Gianni falls silent.
“Don’t bother with excuses. We know about the money. We know about the stolen product. We know about the bribes you paid to try to keep everybody’s mouth shut. But somebody always talks, Gianni. You should know that by now. Somebody always talks.”
Massimo paces, shaking his head in disbelief. “And your own daughter? Ma dai! You set up your own daughter to get kidnapped? That’s just fucking sick. Who does that? I’ll tell you who. A big piece of shit.”
He kicks the chair again. Gianni moans, babbling apologies. Then Massimo looks right into the camera.
“Hey, shitbag. Tell your sister what you had in mind for her, eh? Tell her how you were gonna let a bunch of cowboys mess around with her before they slit her throat. How you promised them they could use her.”
A low, dangerous rumble goes through Quinn’s chest, but other than a deep sense of unreality, I feel nothing at all.
Massimo turns away from the camera, smoking and circling again. “We got that driver, by the way. Made him talk same way we did you. Mannaggia a te! Hope you didn’t pay them too much money. What a fucked up job that was. Ah, well. Any last words?”
From beneath his jacket, Massimo pulls out a pistol.
Gianni starts shrieking. “My daughter ran away with a Mexican! She’s useless! Nobody cares what happens to her! And my sister’s a bloodthirsty whore!”
I say softly, “Oh, Gianni. You always were a sad little prick.”
I reach over and stop the video. It cuts off just as Massimo is raising his gun.
I sit with my eyes closed for a while, listening to the silence in the room and thinking of my brother. Trying to remember a time when we were close.
The memory doesn’t come. Gianni and I were related by blood, but no other ties of friendship or love ever bound us.
As with Enzo, I was nothing more to him than a thing to be used for personal gain.
I feel Quinn’s touch on my arm and open my eyes.
He murmurs, “You okay?”
I’m not sure how to answer that, so I don’t. I look at Declan instead.
“My mother?”
“She’s on a plane home to New York.”
I nod, thinking. “So the bottom line, if I understand it correctly, is that my brother betrayed the Cosa Nostra and his own blood and was shot because of it.”
“Aye.”
I nod again. “And there was a vote for the new capo this morning.”
“Aye.”
“And you’re asking me to believe a male-dominated institution hundreds of years old just decided out of the blue they should have a woman as their leader for the first time.”
“The vote was split. Not everyone was on board.”
“Let me guess. Massimo.”
Declan lifts a shoulder. “Some lads still aren’t living in the twenty-first century.”
“Why didn’t they just elect someone else? Alessandro, for instance?”
“They can explain better themselves, lass, but you’re the one who stood up in front of four hundred witnesses and God himself and vowed to love and obey this nutty bugger here so you could save your niece from getting shot. You’re the one who also spared Juan Pablo from getting shot, and guess whose uncle Alvaro now only wants to make an accord with the woman who saved his dear nephew’s life?”
My lips curve upward. “That would be me, I take it.”
“That would be you.” His voice grows quieter. “You’re also the lass who withstood fourteen years of brutality without complaint—”
“As if anyone would have listened.”
“—and managed to pull the wool over every law enforcement official’s eyes when she surgically disposed of her abuser.”
I say automatically, “I didn’t kill my husband.”
Declan smiles. “And is a mighty fine liar, to boot. Why wouldn’t they want you in charge?”
“Oh, I don’t know. My vagina?”
He chuckles at that. “I did tell them I wouldn’t renew the contract with anyone else, so there’s that.”
My feeling of unreality grows bigger. I’m disconnected from my body, as if I’m seeing this all unfold from somewhere overhead. “But I haven’t signed the contract. Gianni did.”
Quinn and Declan just sit there and look at me.
“And you knew when I walked into this room that Gianni was dead. You only gave me the concession about Stavros and told me to send over the other changes because you already knew I’d been named capo. You even knew back at that meeting at the warehouse with Alessandro and the others that they were testing my loyalties. You knew the night we came for supper that the woman who agreed to marry this man next to me was a potential candidate for the most powerful position in the Cosa Nostra. You’ve known an awful lot all along, Mr. O’Donnell.”
He says evenly, “You can’t blame a leopard for its spots, lass.”
“Or a tiger for its stripes.”
Quinn’s tension is rising again. Even without breaking Declan’s gaze, I can feel him growing more agitated, and I know the reason why.
He just realized that if I’m capo, there’s no need for me to legally marry him at all.
We don’t need a marriage license to make the contract valid. If I’m the head of the Caruso crime family now, I’m free to negotiate my own contracts without selling my body as an asset to anyone.
I’m free to walk away from this non-marriage and still get everything I want.
I’m just…free.
I look at Quinn. He looks back at me, all of it written all over his face as plain as day.
In a gruff voice, he says, “I’ll have your things sent anywhere you like.”
He rises from his chair and stiffly walks out of the room.