Page 125 of Sins of Arrogance

Even so, keep­ing her here will use Darakov’s re­sources. A strate­gic pos­i­tive.

“Why does he want to marry her?” I ask.

“He wants an heir, but ne­go­ti­at­ing the mar­riage al­liance gave him the chance to get in­for­ma­tion he wanted.”

Bleedin’ feckin’ hell.

Did my da tell Darakov about the Bunker?

And Bro­gan is prob­a­bly the big­mouth who told Kelly about the Bunker. Or at least the tun­nels used to hide Shaugh­nessy mob sol­diers back in the day.

On the pos­i­tive side, it sounds like Darakov’s in­tel is both vague and in­ac­cu­rate. He has no idea how close to pro­duc­tion on the Vanta we are.

“Did your in­tel in­clude in­for­ma­tion on the Bunker, or just the tun­nels?” I ask.

“The tun­nels. He as­sumed if you had tun­nels un­der the city, you had store­rooms too.”

Gjon’s com­ment that Darakov wanted the whis­per gun pro­to­type and any­thing stored with it makes more sense now.

He doesn’t know about the lab.

And be­cause of the way we played with Gjon’s brain, he doesn’t know any more about the Bunker than he did be­fore send­ing a team in to steal from us.

Chap­ter 31: La­bor Day Am­bush

KARA

The air smells like bar­be­cue, the beach, and the sweet but dy­ing blooms of the last of the sum­mer roses.

The fa­mil­iar scents of the an­nual La­bor Day pic­nic on the grounds of the Shaugh­nessy man­sion.

A hol­i­day ar­guably big­ger than Christ­mas for us, La­bor Day is the one time a year that the en­tire Shaugh­nessy mob con­gre­gates.

Sol­diers. Wives. Chil­dren.

Any­one and ev­ery­one con­nected to our clan’s syn­di­cate comes to rub el­bows with the boss and his fam­ily.

Even Fiona and Zoey shared our pic­nic blan­ket to eat be­fore my sis­ter dis­ap­peared into the boathouse, locked against en­try for any­one with­out the code for the door.

Heav­ily in­volved in the unions, es­pe­cially the Long­shore­men’s As­so­ci­a­tion, the con­nec­tion be­tween the mob and La­bor Day goes back to the be­gin­ning.

Shaugh­nessy mob­sters were at that first pa­rade in 1882, or­ga­nized by the Cen­tral La­bor Union. We played our part in it be­com­ing a fed­eral hol­i­day a lit­tle over a decade later af­ter the Pull­man strike.

To hear my fa­ther tell it, La­bor Day ex­ists be­cause of the Irish mob. But then he also claims that Hal­loween started in Ire­land, which okay…there are def­i­nite roots in the an­cient Celtic fes­ti­val of Samhain.

But ac­cord­ing to Bro­gan Shaugh­nessy, if it’s some­thing good, it prob­a­bly started with the Irish.

Laugh­ter rolls across the lawn like mu­sic, car­ried on the breeze as chil­dren who see each other once a year chase one an­other through the grass and splash to­gether in the pool.

I sit on a pic­nic blan­ket with my knees bent, my feet to one side, like the mob princess I’ve been trained to be. His long legs stretched out, his sexy feet bare, Mick sits be­side me, look­ing re­laxed.

We made love for the first time in over a week this morn­ing. I needed his near­ness and reached out for him. He ac­cepted my tiny over­ture with a vo­ra­cious hunger that left me spent and feel­ing much more re­laxed.

He’s in a bet­ter mood than he’s been in days. And so am I.

Fitz races past with the twin sons of one of our dock work­ers, his smile full of mis­chief.

“Watch, da!” he crows as he leaps over a di­a­per bag on a nearby blan­ket.