“She’ll be fine,” I muttered and put the cigarette I was about to smoke back into its box. “Now, let’s get this over with so I can go to bed.”
If Alesso thought I was acting weird, he didn’t show it as he just shrugged and headed around to the back of the SUV to check the trunk for our supplies.
I stood for a moment, gathering my wits and hoping the other guys would leave me alone. Unfortunately, it seemed like my luck was pure shit today and Alesso wasn’t the only one who’d seen how weird I was acting.
“Bro,” my cousin Nico said, his dark brows drawing together as he stepped in close. “Are you good?”
“I’m fine, why?” I asked, biting the words out. I was never usually this easy to read and it was pissing me off that I couldn’t seem to get control over my emotions.
“Because you’re acting odd as fuck and you blew out of that party like a bat out of hell after I sent you to go look for Cini.”
I’d nearly forgotten that it was Nico who’d sent me to my fate in the first place and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hit him or give him a big hug. So I settled on neither.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, yanking the driver’s side door open and sliding inside of the SUV. Nico rounded the vehicle and got into the backseat and I thought that was that… except the other alpha kept staring at me like I was some kind of specimen.
His eyes, which were the same dark shade as mine, stayed glued to the side of my face as he fumbled with his seatbelt. “So absolutely nothing happened tonight?”
“What’s going on?” Ranieri asked suddenly from the backseat, making me curse under my breath as he poked his head in between the two seats to look at us. I hadn’t even heard him get in the car.
I really needed to get my shit together or we were all going to end up dead.
Sucking in a deep breath, I turned to look at him. “Nothing. Nothing is going on except this fucking job that we’re going to be late for if we don’t get our asses into gear. Dante, is everything accounted for?”
Dante, ever the silent presence in our pack, nodded from where he was sitting next to Ranieri, lifting his jacket to show me the shiny handle of his gun.
If shit went sideways, then there was no one that I wanted to have with me more than Dante-fucking-Morelli.
Even though he was one of my longest friends, the dude scared the shit out of me sometimes. Years of being taught and raised by the trio of old men that everyone had called the butchers had made him a bitdifferent.
Thanks to his upbringing, Dante could torture information out of a brick wall if he really put his mind to it and he’d saved our asses more than once with his weapons expertise.
I was just glad he was on our team.
“Everything but me,” Alesso said cheerfully as he slid into the passenger seat, tightening the shoulder holster he’d just pulledfrom the trunk. It was one of Alesso’s rules to never wear a weapon around his little sister—one he’d made all of us follow, so all of our guns lived in the floor safe in the back of the SUV.
Putting the car into reverse, I said nothing as they all continued to chat amongst themselves—well, Ranieri, Alesso, and Nico chatted at least—Dante sat silently in the back, staring out of the car window with an impassive expression.
Then, as we got closer to our destination for the night, a tense hush fell over the car.
“Do you think the Russians are going to be late?” Nico finally asked from the backseat, his voice holding the same anxiety I knew we were all feeling, we were just better at hiding it.
“Aren’t they always?” Ranieri shot back absentmindedly as he continued to stare down at his phone, the screen illuminating his face in the dark. “I don’t think Ivan Volkov or his men have been on time to a meet up since Y2K and that was only because they were paranoid about the world ending.”
Alesso rolled his eyes, making his opinion about the Russians clear. They were one of the five families that ran the seedy underbelly of the city, so there was no way we could go without working with them, but at least prior to a few months ago Alesso’s father hadn’t been interested in the skin trade that the Volkovs had to offer.
Something had changed. The Volkovs weren’t working solely with prostitution anymore—they had started to home in onotherthings and Amante Sr. had been more than willing to put his capital forward to work with Ivan.
Nothing good ever came from working closely with the Russians. The tutor that had been hired to teach us the history of the five families had once said that anytime there was an issue, the Volkovs were usually in the middle of it.
I also couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that tonight’s drop was going to go wrong, especially seeing as it was a shit ton of weapons that were going to be exchanged.
Amante Sr. was swerving us completely out of our lane and right onto the toes of the Irish who had a monopoly on all weapons sales in the north-east.
If Alistair Keane ever found out what we were doing it would mean war and war meant that the most vulnerable amongst us was in danger.
Cini’s face flashed into my mind again. I hadn’t meant to kiss her tonight… or maybe I had. I wasn’t really sure.
She’d been sitting in the little solarium setting up her gift. It was where she spent most of her time despite there having been an entire set of rooms that belonged to her. She always claimed she didn’t like all of the space, but I was pretty sure that it was because she felt she didn’t deserve it.
