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“No chance. I was always one of your best men.” Two of his henchmen flank the elevator, both flash me a grin and clap me on the shoulder as we step inside. I stab the button marked ‘P’, and turn my attention back to Donnacha. “Which is why you guys now pay me millions to do what I used to do for free.”
He lets out a low whistle, eyes still glittering. “Millions? Fuck me, I’ll have to get Orna to check the accounts, sounds like you’re gonna make us bankrupt.”
“The price you pay to not get your hands dirty. What’s this meeting about, anyway?”
He shrugs.
Donnacha Quinn. Former boss turned mentor turned acquaintance. Some would even call him a friend. Head of the Quinn family’s team of henchmen, I worked directly under him for five years, ever since his brother and head of the family, Lorcan, claimed his stake on me when I was just fourteen.
Donnacha showed me how to shoot my first gun. How to kill a man with my own hands, and what chemicals you need to buy from the store to clean up blood so good it won’t even show up under blue light.
He taught me everything I know.
The elevator dings, doors slide open, and we’re in the hub of the Quinn Ventures building. Keyboards click, boardrooms burst with over-enthusiastic sales pitches, and the telephones never stop fucking ringing.
As we reach Lorcan’s glass office at the end of the corridor, Donnacha puts his hand out in front of me. “Before I forget, my men cleared out the penthouse.”
I nod. “Appreciate it.”
His voice lowers. “I already told you it’s none of my business. But just watch your back. My contractors did a real good job and I know you’re stealthy as shit, but the Diamond Duo is more than, well, a duo. Keep a pair of eyes in the back of your head, yeah?”
“Got it.”
I push past him into Lorcan’s office. He’s got his back to us, staring out of the glass wall and to the streets of Boston below. He’s not alone. Never is these days—he’s got a redhead wrapped around his hip.
Donnacha claps his hands and says, “Is that my pretty little girl?”
Valentina Quinn twists around and spots Donnacha. She flashes him a gappy grin, then looks at me. Her big, amber eyes grow even wider and she stretches her arms out, struggling out of her father’s arms to reach me. Donnacha groans, hoists her from under her armpits and pushes her against my chest. “Here,” he grunts. “I don’t know how you’re her favorite. All you do is scowl at her and hold her at arm’s-length. I’m the one who suffers throughPeppa-fucking-Pigwith her every night.”
“Swear in front of my daughter again and I’ll snap your neck,” Lorcan Quinn says in a light-hearted, sing-song voice, turning to pin Donnacha with an ice-cold glare.
I look between them both, shaking my head. What is it about kids that can turn even the most feared men on the East Coast into children themselves? I look down at the kid I’m holding awkwardly in my arms. She’s dribbling, staring up at me with fascination and curling a sticky, chubby fist around the fabric of my cashmere sweater.
Objectively, she’s a cute-ass two-year-old. Poppy’s red hair, the Quinn’s wolf-life eyes. But aside from women and emotion, I also don’t do children. Too messy. Too unpredictable. Likely to shit their pants and smile as they watch you clean it up.
I gently put her down on Lorcan’s desk and rub the drool stain on my chest. “I’ll send you the dry-cleaning bill.”
Lorcan swoops her up, plants a kiss on her forehead and sinks into his desk chair, his daughter wriggling about on his lap. He jiggles his beefy thigh, which makes her settle down against his chest. “It’ll be your turn next, kid.”
Kid.It’s been eight years since I earned my freedom from Lorcan, and he still calls me kid. I’m now a twenty-seven year-old man, on top of my game, and a universe away from the scrawny fourteen-year-old he kidnapped.
He’s changed too. There’s always a baby in his hand instead of a whiskey glass, for one. But sobriety and parental duties aside, he’s unrecognizable from the man who stood at the front of the church in Boston and made me watch as he buried my father. Alive.
I should hate him, but I don’t.
My father, a low-life, wannabe gangster that could never pull himself up from the gutters of Boston, had a hand in helping the Italians make the bomb that killed his father and two brothers. He hoped it might finally get him on the rung of a ladder within a crime family, instead of just always watching from the outside. The plan failed—everything my father did failed—and he was caught by the Quinns. Lorcan was cruel, twisted, and drunk back then. He wanted revenge, and that came in the form of me.
He had no idea he wasn’t kidnapping me. He was saving my life.
I earned my freedom because five years later I saved him in return. When the Quinns went to war with the Bratnovs, the Russians that ruled New York, his second-in-command, Antoin Quinn, set up a plan to betray him. He wanted to become Boss and maintain a good working relationship with the Bratnovs. He thought because Lorcan had taken me against my own free will, that I’d be privy to helping him carry out his plan. I saw it as an opportunity to save his life and gain my freedom.
Yes, Lorcan Quinn is a changed man. But you’d be a fool to think he was a softer one. He’s still the most-feared boss on the East Coast, this time for different reasons. He’s more than a gangster with a heavy trigger-finger now. He’s a cold-blooded businessman.
And he has help.
“Oh good, you’re here,” a voice breezes into the room, followed by the click-clacking of stilettos. I tear my eyes away from Lorcan and meet Poppy Quinn’s dazzling smile. She reaches down, plants a brisk kiss on my cheek, then rounds the desk and perches on the arm of her husband’s chair. Instinctively, he snakes a protective arm around her waist, rubbing his daughter’s back absent-mindedly with the other hand.
Poppy Quinn. She’s changed beyond recognition too. Nothing like the quivering girl from the funeral or the kidnapped teen whose screams could be heard from Lorcan’s museum. Now she’s the CEO of Quinn Ventures in a bright pink suit, diamond rock on her ring finger, and long, red hair braided down her back. Between getting married, popping out a kid, and traveling Europe in search of antiques, she and Lorcan have become Boston’s ultimate power couple. Lorcan takes charge of drug supply and trade routes through Boston, ruling it with less of an erratic nature than he used to, while Poppy runs the legit side of the business—funding start-ups and investing in property. Which is why I’m surprised to see her in this meeting.
