Luca steps forward, one hand shoved in the pocket of his suit, the other holding a glass of bourbon. “No. I’ve spoken with many of my contacts in Europe, where he was lurking before he moved over here, and if we take him out, his entire organization will come down on us with all the force they can muster. It won’t be good, and they won’t stop until a river of blood runs through New Orleans. Hawke blood…”
Kennedy scowls at him. “Then what the hell do we do, Luca? We sit and wait for him to make a move? I feel like that’s all we’ve been doing for years.”
Me, too.
There has always been a reason to hold back, to allow that man to keep breathing when each breath he takes only causes us more pain, but we’ve reached a breaking point. Or at least, I have.
“We’re not just sitting.” Gabe pushes off the edge of the couch where he’s been leaning, making eye contact with everyone in the room. “We’ll get people trailing him, and we’re already looking into this McDonald guy. As soon as we know what they’re up to, we can move.”
I throw up my hands. “Move how? If we’re not going to kill Satriano, and we’re not going to partner with him, then what the fuck options do we have?”
“We find leverage.” Savage’s voice cuts through the tension, and his eyes zero in on Allegra. “You’re right about what you said, Coen. About him not just walking away from his grandchild. So, we use that.”
Coen snarls at him. “The fuck we do! You’re not using my baby to negotiate with a fucking monster!”
Allegra flinches, tears rolling down her cheeks.
Savage holds up his hand, and Stone looks from his brother to his son.
“He’s right, Coen.” Everyone looks at Stone and waits for him to expound upon what he just said. He twirls his cane in his hand, staring at it. “He won’t walk away from his child any more than any of us could, and now that he has a grandchild…” He offers a slight shrug. “We need to meet with him. We need to figure out if there’s a way that we can get him to back off whatever plans he has. And we use his access to Allegra and the baby as a means to negotiate.”
“Dad”—Coen’s voice breaks—“you can’t be serious!”
Isaac looks to his younger brother. “The truth of the matter is, you have something he wants, and this might be the first time that’s ever happened since we’ve been facing him. We have to seriously think about how to handle this, but from where I’m standing, I don’t see any way we make it through this without some sort of negotiation and concessions.”
He flicks his gaze to me, then to Dad. “Until then, you keep the security tight. On everyone. And Allegra stays in the penthouse. We’ll figure out what he wants, beyond his grandchild, and we see what we can give him without any of us suffering.”
That’s the key that not everyone in this room seems to understand, or maybe they just don’t want to accept it because the reality is too painful.
Satriano lives to make the Hawkes suffer.
He likes to watch us squirm and bleed.
And he’s going to milk every fucking drop from us before this is all over.
It would be so easy to simply take the man out, to lie in wait and put a bullet in his fucking head and end all this. It’s what I’ve wanted to do for a long fucking time. The only thing preventing me from acting has been Luca’s insistence that Satriano’s organization would step up to avenge him in a way that would put us at just as much risk—if not more—as we already are under the man himself.
It’s all one giant quagmire there is no way out of.
And I feel like I’m drowning in quicksand…
My eyes drift to Gage, the only one in the room who hasn’t been affected by what Satriano has done. His tense gaze travels over all of us and then meets mine, and I see the resolve there.
He told me he couldn’t sit back when there was a threat, and now, I know he won’t walk away.
Even if I ask him to.
He isn’t going anywhere.
11
BISHOP
What the hell am I doing?
I follow Gage’s motorcycle up the cracked driveway of the small, two-story building. The word “mechanic” across the top of the garage door, barely visible in peeling paint, is the only sign that this must be his shop.
And apparently where he lives, too.
