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That level of investigation would have taken weeks. Surely? I’d written a lot of pieces in my time. So much that I probably couldn’t even remember half of them.
"Because I wanted to understand you," he stated calmly.
My brow furrowed as I shoved my toast away and leaned deeper into the table. The marble surface dug into my belly, but the cold seeped through my shirt and actually made me feel better because I was burning up as if I had a fever.
"What’s to understand?" I whispered, trying to figure out his true game here. "I’m so confused," I admitted. "I don’t understand why what I’m researching has led to this."
"If you’re going to darken the mafia’s door, then you should be prepared for the fallout," was all he said.
"I’m looking into your family ties. That’s it," I spat. "Nothing about your business."
"I spoke with a friend of yours from college too," he mused, his finger moving around the rim of his cup. "She said you were obsessed with the mafia in the city."
I blinked. "Everyone has a hobby. Which friend?"
"It doesn’t matter. What matters is if you have the mafia as a hobby, then it’s bullshit that you don’t know the repercussions of messing with things you should leave well alone." He arched a brow. "You know the Five Points’ rep, and I’m sure you know what family means to my old man. Family is all," he intoned grimly. "You mess with the family, you mess with the Firm."
My stomach twisted into knots as I cut through the bullshit entirely. "Your uncle’s dead." Padraig O’Donnelly had purportedly died at the hands of an Albanian mobster. "How is that a threat? I was trying to figure out what happened to him. That’s all."
"And that, as you can imagine, is incredibly delicate ground," Aidan pointed out. "My father loved his brothers. To the point where he barely talks about them with us, never mind in public. You start messing with their memories, then that’s just inviting a ton of bricks to fall down on you."
I flinched at the imagery, and as much as I hated to admit it, I was scared.
Scared.
Me.
Something about Aidan O’Donnelly Jr. set my nerves on edge.
Maybe it was his calmness? His acceptance of the situation? His ease with discussing death and an in-depth stalking into my past? I didn’t know, but this was serious.
So serious that, fangirling aside, I could feel the ticking of a clock in my head that was warning me my time on this planet was running out…
"If I tell you something, will you listen?"
A furrow appeared between his eyebrows. "If I wasn’t here to listen, Savannah, then I wouldn’t be sitting opposite you. I’d just have ordered—" His lips twisted. "Well, I’m sure you understand."
I knew he’d paused on purpose, deliberately evading those two words that my heart heard regardless of whether or not he’d uttered them.
The hit.
Jesus.
"My intention wasn’t to piss off your father," I admitted. "It was to curry favor with him."
That shocked him.
His reaction was stark. He sat back, his eyes wide, his mouth slack. Flummoxed was the word, one my mother would use and which few Americans would ever understand. Stunned, bewildered... that pretty much defined flummoxed.
"Curry favor?" he repeated softly. "He’d like that. Sounds like what a commoner does with a king."
As much as he could be deliberate with his words, I could be too.
"Yes. I intended topleasehim. Not agitate him."
"Explain," he commanded, his tone stern.
"You’re right. Your... research into me was right as well." Although, I’d like to know which so-called friend would tell a fucking mobster that I was obsessed with the mafia. Talk about a frenemy. "People in your line of work have always fascinated me."
