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I roll my eyes. “Hard no.”

Cenzo groans. “What’s the point of having a brother with a pilot’s license if he refuses to enable me?”

I’ve had the license since I was a teenager and still fly whenever I can out of a semi-local airfield.

Precise instruments and gauges? Mandatory pre-flight checklists? Zero tolerance for improvisation?

Yeah, turns out flying planes is catnip for a guy with pathological control issues.

But I’m still not entertaining Cenzo’s fuck-off idea for a bachelor party.

“So Kodra is really this much of a big swinging dick, huh?”

It has less to do with Bashkim Kodra himself and a lot more to do with Bella and I having killed his son.

Maybe I should back up.

After the car my father sent for me pulled up right behind Bella's, and her father Hades unceremoniously dropped that little tactical nuke of a bomb right there on Central Park South, we went upstairs to the sprawling Drakos estate, where all the cards got put on the table.

Those cards are not great.

First, an important piece of information I did not have that night at Carl Bigsby’s place, when Bella and I first crossed paths and a body dropped off the roof of a burning building to splatter itself at our feet: that unfortunate fucker's name was Gaz Kodra. And unfortunately for Bella and me, Gaz Kodra’s father is Bashkim Kodra.

Yeah, that Bashkim Kodra.

Bashkim runs the Vëllazëria e Hekurt aka the Iron Brotherhood, an Albanian organization with its fingers in half the pies of Eastern Europe.

When it comes to organized crime, the Italians have rules.

The Russians have rules.

The Irish have rules.

Bashkim and his Iron Brotherhood…not so much.

When you fuck up, they don’t threaten your business. They burn your cousin’s house down while his family is asleep upstairs.

They don’t put a bullet in the guy who owes them money, they put one in the guy's mother. Then his brother. His mailman. The guy who owns the coffee shop where he gets his fucking espresso every morning.

Long story short, they don’t give a shit about proportional response. Which is why even people with significant firepower tend to give Bashkim Kodra a wide fucking berth.

And that’s the guy whose only son died at Bella’s and my feet.

In his head, we killed his son, because we were responsible for starting the fire.

How Bashkim knows about any of that night is still being worked out. But I’m fairly certain it was from a security camera outside the bodega down the street that happened to be angled the right way to catch Bella and I outside with Gaz’s puddled corpse.

I am livid that I fucking missed that. But that’ neither here nor there. Bashkim has it in his head that Bella and I murdered his piece of shit son, and now he wants blood.

It doesn’t matter that my family and the Drakoses can field more men than The Iron Brotherhood. Neither my family nor the Drakoses have the stomach for the sort of war that Bashkim is ready to start.

Again, we’re not talking stealing business deals, or knocking over merchandise warehouses, or even street fights. With Bashkim and the Iron Brotherhood, nothing is off the table. No sin is too vile. No violence is too much. No innocent is off-limits. And the problem is, both of our families simply have too much to lose these days. Too many kids. Too many soft, vulnerable places where Bashkim could twist his knife to exact the greatest amount of pain.

If this goes to war, no matter our families' individual strengths, Bashkim will manage to weasel his way in and divide and destroy us, and even if we “win”, it’ll be a pyrrhic victory filled with more death and horror than either of our families can bear.

Luckily, my father and Ares Drakos—Bella’s uncle and the head of the Drakos family—have a solution.

Unluckily, I fucking hate it.