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Hanging up without saying goodbye is definitely rude. It might be something he does with his men, but I doubt he has ever hung up on his mother without a proper word of parting.
It should not make me feel so pleased to have gotten under his skin. But it does.
Chapter 18
New York City, New York
Five Families
SEVERU
After the strange, but exhilarating conversation with Catalina, I get another unexpected phone call.
I slide my finger over the phone's screen to take the call from the New York Irish mob boss Brogan Shaughnessy.
"I hear that someone attacked your bride-to-be," he says without a greeting.
Rage brings everything in my office into laser focus. "Brogan, you bastard. You think your family is safe after that?"
"It wasn't my mob."
"Convince me."
"A team hit one of my betting establishments."
"I care why?"
"Because although they wore masks, they were speaking Italian."
"None of my guys would be that sloppy. When I hit you, my men won't be hiding their faces and the only speaking done will be the bullets from our guns."
"I know."
"The fuck you do. You just accused me of hitting your betting shop."
"No, I said it was hit by a team who spoke Italian. Badly, as it happens."
I stay silent, my mind whirling, because blaming the Irish for what has been happening is too easy.
"We've held a truce between our families for more than a decade," Shaughnessy says. "Someone is trying to get us to go to war."
"To what end?"
"I don't know, but we have a better chance of figuring it out if we cooperate."
"What do you want?"
"We work together to figure out who the bastards behind this shit are. They've got someone in my outfit feeding them information."
That's a big thing to admit. I don't take the bait and say I believe the same about my own syndicate. "You've got a relationship with one ofmypeople, or you wouldn't know about the attack against Catalina and Carlotta."
"I spy on you; you spy on me. It's the way it's always been done."
I can't deny that. It's why I'm unconvinced the would-be arsonist is part of Shaughnessy's mob. My information says otherwise.
"But ask yourself this: if I've been spying on your syndicate since I signed that truce agreement in blood with your father, why aren't my hits more successful?" the mob Boss asks. "If I'd gone after your fiancée, I'd have her."
His style is to hit and hit hard, just like my father's was. Like mine is. Shaughnessy would have sent two teams after the women, and they would have been taken, regardless of Catalina's abilities with a gun.
