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“What the fuck are you doing, Leo?”
I blinked and realised I was pointing my gun at my brother’s forehead. With a shaking hand, I lowered the weapon.
“Shit, Tam. What are you doing here?”
“Coming to find you. Good thing I did, too, by the look of it. Put the fucking gun away before someone calls the police.”
Begrudgingly, I placed the gun back into the holster and covered it with my jacket once more. “They’re all on our payroll anyway.”
“One day we’ll come across a police officer we can’t bribe or threaten and then we’ll be fucked.”
I hadn’t met anyone who didn’t have some kind of Achille’s heel, be that money or a loved one they wanted to protect. I wasn’t sure there was anyone who couldn’t be made to do what we wanted in the end.
The bloke with the champagne was long gone, probably needing to change his pants after pissing himself, thinking he was about to get his brains blown out. The girl had also made herself scarce, perhaps believing she would owe me something after I’d ‘saved’ her. The truth was that I wouldn’t have wanted anything from her. I had zero interest in other women. All I wanted was my Jodie back, and that was never going to happen. I was lost, floundering in my new reality.
Tam gave me a shove in my lower back, nodding towards the rear of the bar, where my office was located. The place had cleared out—unsurprisingly, considering I’d been waving a gun around—and it made our progress across the floor easy enough. I pushed open the door, and we stepped into the corridor out the back. Walls were lined with boxes of bottles to stock up the fridges with and promotional materials the alcohol companies sent in to promote their beverages. It was probably a fire hazard and needed to be moved to the cellar, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I couldn’t bring myself to care much about anything these days.
We went into my office, and Tam slammed the door shut and spun to face me.
He folded his arms over his chest. “You need to quit this, Brother.”
“Why? It’s not like you’ve ever acted any differently, or is it because you’re all loved up now? I didn’t get to have that, remember? I lost the woman I loved.” I stopped myself and shook my head. “No, that’s fucking bullshit. I didn’t lose her. I knew exactly where she was, right at my side, and she still ended up dead.”
“People lose people they love,” Tam said. “It happens every day. We just have to learn to get on with things.”
“Like you have, you mean? Did you forget we lost Harvey, too? Doesn’t it mean anything to you anymore?”
His dark eyes narrowed. “How can you say that?”
“Well, we still don’t know who killed him, do we? You seem to have given up on that. You’re more interested in playing happy families with Hallie.”
“I haven’t given up on finding out who killed Harvey, but yeah, I’m allowed to be happy. You’ll be happy again, too, one day, even if it doesn’t feel like it now. You’re still young. You’ll meet someone else.”
My mouth dropped open at the insensitivity of his words. “Are you fucking joking with me right now? I didn’t get dumped. The woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with was killed by the fucking Estonians. This isn’t something you just pick yourself up over and go and find some fresh pussy. They need to pay for what they took from me.”
“No, Leo. We’re equal now. We killed Kaspar Valk even though it had been Sly who’d betrayed us, and the Estonians took their revenge on us.”
“Bullshit. They killed an innocent girl. If it had been Hallie who’d died, you’d have gone back to Estonia and captured Rasmus and tortured him to a point of insanity.”
I could tell by the thinning of my brother’s lips that even the thought of Hallie dying was enough to tear his heart in two.
“We can’t keep warring with them,” Tam said. “We have more urgent business right here in London to deal with. The Gilligans are making noises again. You know they’re not going to be happy sticking to their own patch.”
“Now we have this alliance with the Wynters, I thought the Gilligans weren’t going to cause us any more problems.”
“They’ve been sniffing around the drop-off point for our next shipment, so I’m pretty sure they’re planning to cause us some. Which is why we can’t afford to spread ourselves too thin. We’ll be leaving ourselves open for the Gilligans to creep onto our turf.”
I scowled. “You’re saying our business is more important than Jodie.”
“I’m saying Jodie never would have wanted her death to weaken us.”
I shook my head. “You have no idea what Jodie would have wanted.”
I was consumed by my fury towards the Estonians. Perhaps I would have coped better if they’d paid for killing Jodie, but their leader, Rasmus, had slipped out of police custody and must have returned to Estonia on a fake passport. I suspected whichever police officer had tried to apprehend him had been open to taking a backhander, and that was why he’d made such an easy escape. A couple of the men he’d been with hadn’t done so well and had gone down for the shooting. As long as someone had been apprehended, it took the heat off the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police as they were able to reassure the general public that the shooting in London was swiftly dealt with.
Still, it didn’t seem right to me that Rasmus had been able to come to London, murder the only woman I’d ever loved, and return home without even a smack on the back of his hand.
I didn’t want to keep having this conversation with Tam.
