My gaze moved over her shoulder to the imposing figure heading this way. “Soon,” I told my mother, and she didn’t press for more when my father came to stand by her side.
Malcolm Kilpatrick was a tree trunk of a man with medium-dark skin, a bald head, a salt-and-pepper beard, a patch over his left eye, and a vacancy in the other.
“Son, you’re here,” he said by way of greeting. It was as good as I was going to get. “Good. Let’s go. We have a problem.”
My father walked off and climbed into a Bentley Mulsanne, leaving my mother behind.
I escorted her to another and put my personal guard, including Abel, on her before joining my father in the back of the Bentley. Neither of us spoke until the motorcade started moving, heading north toward the outskirts of Black Veil.
“I received word that another one of our stables has been raided.”
“And that was enough to cut your vacation short? I could have handled it.”
“And who would have handled you?”
Smiling sharply as if laughing at my father wasn’t as dangerous as drawing on him, I said, “I wasn’t aware that was an option.”
“Balfour tells me that you defied my orders and skipped the sit-down.”
“Something came up.”
“What could have been more important than your future and the future of this family?”
“What’s even odder than having your father pick out the woman you’re going to fuck for the rest of your life is that the woman you’ll be fucking is your cousin. Keeping it a buck, I think it’s fucking hilarious that you thought I’d go along with that shit.”
“She’s your third cousin.”
I stared down my father—the Boss of theFola—with nothing but pure disgust. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“The blood’s diluted.”
It wasn’t. Not even close.
But then I realized what my father said, or rather what he didn’t say.
Enough…
Someone who wasn’t a sociopath might have said the blood was dilutedenough, but my father has always been careful with his words, which meant these unveiled his true and far more sinister intentions.
“I’m not doing it.”
“Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?”
“So then kill me,” I said to my father. “Kill me and let Julius take over because I’m not marrying Niamh. I won’t do it to her, and I sure as hell won’t let you do it to me. I can choose my own wife.”
TheFolawas made up of three families—the Kilpatrick, the Balfour-Young, and the Torrance. It went back to the start of my great-grandfather’s original crew. They called themselves the Brothers of Rory, and each wanted an equal piece of the pie, so James did to his sisters what my father is attempting to do to Niamh. What he already did to Priscilla. And what he’ll eventually do to Chiara.
“That’s not how this goes,” my father, the traditionalist, responded. “If you want me to abdicate my throne, if you want to be Boss, you will marry who I fucking tell you.”
Or option B: I could kill him.
And little did he know, it was my option A.
“What do you want to do about the raids?” I asked. “Black knows something. We need to question him more thoroughly.”
Michael Black was an old-school pimp who had been chased out of Chicago for reasons unknown, but my father wouldn’t listen, which only made me distrust the man even more.
There was only one explanation for why my father wouldn’t listen to reason. Black had something on him.
