“Oh, didn’t your middleman tell you?”
I swipe open my phone and pull up the photographs I doctored earlier, then I flip the screen around.
“They’re useless. Whoever packaged them was careless to say the least.”
The pictures show the rifles and grenades badly packaged, dented, parts missing. A mess.
“What about the sellers?” he asks, his voice pitched with nerves.
“They’ll receive a lesson in operational risk.”
A long, tense silence follows.
“You realize you’re about to make some serious enemies,” Miles says quietly.
“I already have enemies,” I reply. “What I’m offering is containment.”
“What do you mean exactly?”
I see him before anyone else does. The Floridian who tried to reach for his gun earlier does so again. But he’s a rookie and I’ve been at this for forty years.
“You son of a?—”
My own gun whips out and sends a bullet through his skull before he can finish his sentence.
“If I don’t release the goods, they come after me. But I’ll be expecting them. I take the risk, not you,” I continue without missing a beat.
Todd sways against the bar.
Minutes pass as the men exchange glances, attempting to communicate wordlessly.
“I don’t believe that photograph is real,” the Brit says, eventually. “I think the goods are fine. You just don’t want the heat that might come your way once our partners have the firearms in their possession.
Ah shit. Rumbled.
“This deal is making us extremely rich, Zanotti. We’re not just going to let some Italian fucking asshole ruin that for us. If you don’t release the goods, we’ll?—”
My eyes turn on him whip fast. “You’ll what?”
Miles steps forward. “Use leverage.”
I arch a brow but my blood is thickening fast. I want to kill this motherfucker if he’s thinking what I think he’s thinking.
“Where’s your ‘wife’ Zanotti?”
There it is.
I step right up to him, close enough that I can smell the fear rolling off him like rain.
“Why do you want to know?”
He purses his lips. Swallows. “Because she might come in useful.”
Thunderous rage rattles my skull but I force calm into my words. “If anyone in this room dares to find my ‘wife’ useful, they will discover that I am far less patient when my personal interests are threatened than when my commercial ones are.”
Some of these men have never killed another.
Yet, they’ve all seen how fast I can fire a gun and how many dead bodies I can step over without a second glance. I won’t hesitate to put bullets in them all if one person dares to mention Erin again.
