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“Are you not joining us?” Enzo interjected, frowning at my father. At the man who’d quickly become the closest thing Enzo had to a father as well. Theirs had been an uneasy alliance at first, but Cullen had done his best to accept Enzo into the family, for Brianna’s sake. She’d never have spoken to him again if he’d rejected her husband, and few things meant more to my father than his little girl. In time, though, he’d softened to my new brother-in-law. He’d gotten to know Enzo and realized he was nothing like his father. The man who’d ordered the death of my mother and youngest sister.
“No, no. I think I’ll leave the young bucks to the party. I’ve got a date with a single malt.” Cullen smiled, but there was something behind his expression. He looked exhausted, which wasn’t unusual these days, but today it was something more.
“Are you alright, Da?” I quizzed as we all moved out from the table and headed towards the exit. There was a stoop to his walk now, a thinning in his hair. For the first time, I saw my father as old.
“Just fine, son.” He gave me a cracked smile as we exited and his driver opened the car door. “Enjoy your night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Enzo and I stood on the sidewalk as his town car merged with the traffic. “I’m worried about him.” I told Enzo, still staring after my father’s car.
“I am too. He took the Russian news very hard.”
We turned away from the curb and walked down the block to where Enzo had left his car.
“Do you know what happened?”
“Why don’t you just focus on your wedding for-”
I stopped short, interrupting him. “Enzo, this is my family we’re talking about. I need to know what’s going on.”
He turned, re-pacing the few steps he’d taken without me. With a sigh, he pulled me off to the side, out of the flow of foot traffic. “Conor and a few of the underlings got into it with Viktor and a few of his guys. Word is, Conor overheard them talking about ridding the Big Apple of Irish scum.” He said the last part with finger quotations.
Viktor was Igor Aleskov’s, the Russian Boss in New York, right hand man. He’d roamed these streets almost as long as my father had, and we’d always trusted they had the city’s best interests at heart.
“If Viktor knew, that means they’ve been planning something for a while.”
“We don’t know if it has anything to do with the Cazadores yet. Slowly but surely, they’ve been growing on the edges of our territory, surrounding us, like they’re building an army to invade.” Enzo shuddered. “But with Russian help, we’ve been able to keep everything well guarded. Problem is, now they know everything.”
“And they could take that knowledge to whatever fucker they liked and bring us down. Including the Cazadores.”
“We’ve got ears to the ground, trying to find out if and why their alliances have shifted. Maybe it’s just about money…”
“Because without us in the way, they could make one hundred percent of the cut, not just forty.” It made sense. I’d had it in the back of my mind for a while that they might get shifty. Why make a small amount when you could make a big amount, but we’d always been on the same page about keeping the Cazadores out. Neither of us wanted them driving down the cost of drugs with their shitty blends that would land you in the hospital, and we especially didn’t want them funneling trafficking victims into our territories either. Not just because it would impact the margins we got from our own clubs, but because it was fucking wrong, although I doubted Igor cared much about the moral side of things.
“I think it’s about more than that. Keeping those assholes out of New York has always been the one thing that linked us, which means they’ve either found someone else to team up with-”
“Or they don’t care about the Cazadores anymore.” Enzo finished my thought.
“Those cheap ass drugs and those women are worth more than our weapons. The stuff we import is five times the quality.”
“But our profit is less because of that.”
“Exactly. But if Igor forms an alliance with them, they’ll lose money on their own stuff, but they will earn a fortune on the other shit.”
Shit. It all made sense.
“Look, let’s not worry about it tonight. Your dad is right, you’ve got a lot of time later to deal with this. Let’s just enjoy tonight.” Enzo clapped me on the shoulder.
He was right. We couldn’t do anything about it now. Meanwhile, I was on the final countdown to marrying the girl of my dreams, after seven long years.
Cait.
Fuck, I missed her.
I only had a few hours before the bachelor party, and I had to see her again before tonight. There was no way I would last until she walked down the aisle the day after tomorrow.
I grabbed my phone from my pocket and shot Cait a text to let her know I was coming.
“I’m going to go and get Cait from the gym. I’ll see you at Charm’s later?”
