One button-shaped nose.
When I turn to lay sideways with my legs making a pyramid over Clay’s thigh and my back held by his arm, it’s just the four of us in the slow-motion world.
Under the moonlight, it’s so still now. Everything elsemelts away. Clay’s blue gaze drops to take in his keening little boys, and perhaps for the first time since I met him, he has nothing to say. No praises. Or encouragement. No words of wisdom. The sweet sight of his sons has rendered him speechless.
“They did so good, Sir,” I say softly, while both boys quieten down, nuzzling into my sides. Barely feeling the aches through the endorphins and euphoria, I turn to face Clay so I can properly present him with his sons.
He accepts both boys, holding their heads in his palms, with their backs cradled along his tattooed forearms.
And just like that, he’s a dad.
Not the Don of theCosa Nostra.Not my Sir or the mayor or the most powerful man in the city, but something far more important and infinitely simpler.
Just a man.
A man holding his twin boys for the first time. A man with tears rushing over his chiselled jaw. With a smile—a genuine smile—the kind that lights up every inch of his face, that glows along each line. The kind that only comes around once in a while from a man like Clay Butcher.
“Madonna mia,” he finally says, his voice overcome as his gaze sweeps over his perfect little heirs. “Look what your magic made for me, little deer.”
her pretty little revenge
Book Three: His Pretty Little Collection
CHAPTER TWO
clay
The noisein this basement is riotous.
The referee barks, the bell clangs, fists thud against bloody flesh, and I watch from my elevated platform.
My brother Max ducks and blocks like he’s batting flies at a Sunday lunch—an initiative of my sister-in-law Cassidy to keep us men from the darkness of our empire.
She tries.
And I had to change my previous plan to host this meeting on a Sunday. Friday nights are perhaps better suited. After all, as a Catholic man, Sunday should be a day of respite. Here today, every member of our operation—Irish, Sicilian, Calabrian—all expected to fill this hall once a week where a member of each firm fights an opponent of my choosing. Last week, I had a disgruntled Capo beat his boss to a bloody pulp, and there has never been more respect between them.
We bleed here.
We are family here.
“That Tuscan fuck versing Maxipad sucks!” Bronson laughs from beside me. “It’s almost unfair.”
“Yes,” I agree.
Today, I took an overly enthusiastic knife-job casualty and gave him the greatest of honours: to be bloodied by a Butcher. See, he wants in—to be Made. This is how it happens. A beat down. The initiation. He’s outclassed in every way. In mass, in muscle, in motion. Max, all six-foot-four of him, floats across the canvas like he was born there.
And he practically was.
Max lures the guy in, lets him taste hope, then twists his torso, slips the punch, and counters with a right hook so surgical it’s a work of art.
Blood meets the air, its mist staining with my white shirt to mark the evening.
From up here, it seems choreographed, but Max has always scripted his violence. Unlike my other brothers, Bronson, who is unpredictable, or Xander, who leads with his heart, Max has always been meticulous.
We are alike in that way.
I sip my whiskey and then inhale my cigar, my vice, feeling the hiss of the ember as it draws closer to my lips.
