“Have you heard from Kosta?” he asks next, tight and abrupt.
I shudder hearing that name. “N… No.”
It slides out easier than the truth. Of course, I heard from Kosta. He’s an obsessed stalker who thinks he owns me.
The New York State Penitentiary system technically owns him.
“I will call you again next week.” My father disconnects the call, but the echo of his voice lingers.
I set the phone down carefully. After three steadying breaths, I glance at the kitchen across the courtyard to where Rhys stood. Now, there’s only a memory of him and how he looked at me.
I was robbed of my daily therapy of watching my boyfriend for hours in a towel.
Someone will pay for that.
Chapter 4
Rhys
Ares Zervas’s opulent office overlooks Wall Street. It smells like leather and cigar smoke with a trace of stale blood. I wonder if he gets laid in the same place where he lures his traitors. Eejits thinking they’ve scored a favor from the Greek king.
Only to have their throats slit by one of Ares’s lethal and unhinged guards. Or their gut carved open and left to bleed out on the carpet.
In a dark crisp suit, the head of the Greek Mafia leans back in his chair, a gold ring glinting as he taps a finger on his desk.
“I need someone killed,” he says, getting right to the point with the clipped precision of a man who doesn’t waste the air in his lungs.
Seated in a heavily upholstered chair across from his carved wooden desk, my jaw flexes at the idea of getting dragged into their darkness. I have enough of my own.
“Who?” I ask.
“Someone who thinks he can sell drugs and guns out of my club,” he says, his lips curling into a snarl.
“Why not take him out yourself, Zervas?” I ask him. “We know you’re quite lethal.”
With a wavy line of anger, he grits his teeth. “I don’t ask your cousin Griffin who should do the killing in yourempire.” He leans in. “Or did you just get here?”
I assume that’s rhetorical. I’m sure he knows I arrived shortly after Trace started guarding Balor O’Rourke. Before Quinlan Empire was formed and Trace became Enforcer, I worked for Eoghan O’Rourke, protecting his wife, a lawyer who killed the Las Vegas Cosa Nostra underboss.
“Don’t you always keep at least seven guards around you?” I ask.
Ares’s protection force are all code-named after deadly sins.
“Guards ‘guard.’ That’s what they do,” Zervas says. “I need them more than ever since I signed a deal with the city to help build them a new UN campus.”
And forced his sister to marry Griffin Quinlan, who also has guards and plenty of hitmen.
Efficient. Devious.
“Is this man a regular at your club?” I sit back, assuming that if the guy is one, he might have assaulted a waitress, and that’ll make it easier to kill him. “Any patterns I can rely on? I can’t exactly sit in your club every night waiting for him to show up.”
“Got better things to do? Like your neighbor?” He smiles and leans back.
I see red as fiery as Fallon’s hair. “How do you know about?—”
“I know everything about you, Quinlan.” His grin could get him on the cover of GQ, he’s that fucking handsome. “Let me be the bearer of bad news. It’s all your family talks about behind your back. Fuck the woman already.”
The image of Fallon’s eyes and how she’d look in my bed, naked and writhing beneath me, steals my focus. The amber light of the hallway that afternoon last week stopped hiding her beauty from me.
