Page 153 of Don’t Say Mafia

I cast one look back at Eden. She’d shifted but hadn’t woken up, and I slid out of bed and crossed the room, answering only once I’d stepped into the bathroom and closed the door quietly behind me.

“What happened?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

“O’Dalaigh got our message,” Cruz snapped.

I glanced at my reflection in the mirror and frowned. I looked like death warmed over. I needed to take a shower before Eden woke up and saw me like this. The last thing I needed was having to explain that I’d had a dream about my ex-girlfriend wearing Eden’s face. The girlfriend who, in a roundabout way, was one of the reasons I’d ended up a psychopathic mobster in the first place. One who had eventually killed Eden’s husband.

I really couldn’t explain any of that.

“And?” I prompted.

“And he sent one back.”

I leaned a hip against the counter. “That was quick.”

“One of the security guards just found a body,” Cruz said evenly. “It happened to be one of our judges.”

Shit. It had taken a lot of work to get in with the local judiciary. Even losing one made everything infinitely harder.

“Where was the body?”

“In the middle of the casino at Paradise,” Cruz snapped, and I almost grinned, imagining how frustrated he must look right now having to handle this without me for once.

“I mean, that is bold,” I murmured. Just like us delivering Claudia’s corpse, leaving a dead body was him saying he could reach into our house, rearrange the furniture, and leave without asking permission.

“How long ago did he find it?” I asked, making a note that the guards needed raises.

“About an hour ago. Security locked it down immediately before the media could sniff it out.”

It was only a matter of time for that. Judges couldn’t exactly drop dead on casino floors without some questions. And O’Dalaigh would no doubt be putting pressure on all the right people to ask them.

“He left us another little present,” Cruz said.

Of course he did. The man loved a signature.

“What was it?”

“A coin with an Irish crest stamped on it.”

I stared at my reflection again, watching the slow shift in my own expression. Now I wasn’t even impressed, because that wasn’t subtle at all. O’Dalaigh wanted escalation. He wanted spectacle. He wanted to see if we’d blink.

The dream flickered through my mind again—Eden in that chair, looking at me like I was supposed to fix it.

I exhaled slowly and straightened, my gaze still locked on my reflection. “We’ll be out first thing in the morning,” I told Cruz.

There was a brief pause on the other end of the line, one that meant Cruz was weighing something. “Did it go well?” he finally asked, the edge in his voice softening just slightly. “With her.”

“Yes,” I said, but it came out distracted. “It went well.”

“Just well?” Cruz pressed, because he’d known me long enough to hear the difference.

I dragged a hand down my jaw, annoyed at myself for letting anything show. “I’ll talk to you about it later,” I told him, “when we don’t have a dead judge to deal with.”

“Fair,” Cruz muttered.

“See you tomorrow,” I said before hanging up.

The phone hit the counter with a dull clack. Something was clawing at the inside of my ribs, a dark, irrational certainty that if I walked out of this bathroom right now, she’d be gone. That somehow she’d slipped away while I was on that call.