“No, there are other places that make cannoli that aren’t on their territory,” he said with a huff.
“Not many, and not between my building and yours,” he hissed. “Goddammit, Kid. Get your ass up here. We need to have words.”
Conor rolled his eyes. “I can hardly wait.” Then, he shot me a cheeky smile. “I’m excited about dinner though, Aela. Thank you for inviting me.”
Before I could tell him I hadn’t invited him to anything, he was already in the elevator and heading up to the penthouse.
I twisted around to glower up at Dec, who pulled a face. “I can order in.”
Grunting under my breath, I trudged away from him. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Conor, I just wasn’t in the mood for being around Declan’s family. When they were involved, shit hit the fan, and we’d already been splattered in enough of the brown stuff for one day.
When I made my way into the kitchen, I saw Seamus was still sitting there.
At the same time as we’d bought his uniform, we’d grabbed him a desk and a chair for studying. While he had a perfectly fine computer, Dec had also bought him an iMac, which had arrived yesterday along with his uniform.
How they pulled the moves they did, I’d never know.
So, with his room furnished for the most part, and until we really settled in and started changing things up which we’d have to do because I couldn’t live with paper screens for walls forever, or alternatively, move, I’d anticipated him to be glued to his bedroom.
But he wasn’t.
He was here. At the kitchen table, studying.
It made me happy to see though, so I didn’t comment on it. If I did, he’d probably stop doing it.
Damn teenagers.
Without saying a word because he was typing away on his laptop, and I didn’t want to disturb him, I headed for the fridge, peered inside, and decided there wasn’t enough to feed an extra mouth. Nor could I be bothered with dealing with the dishes, so I grabbed my phone and started scrolling through the options.
“Want Korean tonight, Shay?” I asked when he’d stopped typing.
He hummed. “No. Pho?”
I hummed back as I sank into my seat and made my selection. When I heard mumbling in the hall, I decided Conor had arrived and Declan was telling him why entering another territory for dessert when the Five Points was at war was a bad idea.
Cue eye roll.
Like he needed to be told.
Conor was one of the smartest bastards I knew. Whatever he did, he did it for a reason, which told me if he’d been on Italian turf, then it was for a purpose.
Though I was curious, curiosity wasn’t something that could be nurtured in the life. I’d never get any answers to the ins and outs of their business, and to be frank, I didn’t want to know either.
Mostly, I just wanted to make sure that we were all safe.
That was the extent of the shit I needed to know.
As the guys walked in, Declan heading over to the fridge to grab some drinks, I presumed, I asked, “I’m ordering pho for Shay and me. Want some? Or do you want something else?”
“Pho?” Conor echoed, nose crinkled.
My lips twitched. “Yeah. Pho. You still only eating Irish, boys? There’s far more to this world than just stew and potatoes.”
Declan caught my eye over Seamus’s head, and though he didn’t have to say a word, I felt his heat, his intensity in that narrow-eyed stare as he silently told me eating Irish was the best and only dish on his personal menu.
Sigh.
I couldn’t wait for him to go down on me again.
“Be still my heart,” Conor was teasing, drawing me from thoughts of oral sex and my man. For shame. “You mean there are more staples out there?”
His gasp had me laughing even though Dec had just reduced me to a melting hot pot of hormones. “Shock shock, horror horror, no?”
His eyes were twinkling, but he grumbled, “I wanted a home-cooked meal.”
“If you wanted that, then you should have probably stayed at home,” Shay retorted, making me laugh. “That’s where you tend to find that kind of thing.”
Conor groused, “Hey, I thought we had an understanding. I’m the cool uncle. That means you have to be nice to me.”
Shay snorted. “Yeah, that might have worked when I was five.”
“How old are you now?”
“Not five.”
I laughed at my kid’s dry rejoinder, and with a patience that was earned by Shay giving his uncle crap, I queried, “What do you want to eat, Conor?”
“Why are you even here?” Declan groused. “You have plenty of food at home.”
Before he could grumble much further, the buzzer rang. He looked at me, and I looked at him and shrugged. “I don’t know who it is. Not like I know anyone here anymore.”
Well, I did, but I highly doubted Mom would feel comfortable coming to an O’Donnelly’s penthouse. Even if her daughter and grandson were living in it.
He heaved an impatient sigh, which amused me as my patience was increasing as his decreased, and he stormed off.
“Fuck’s sake,” I heard a couple of minutes later, before he returned and said, “Brennan’s here.”
I shrugged. “He should be actually. It should be a rule. You can’t eat dinner alone if you’ve been shot.”
Shay bit his lip at that, and while I knew I shouldn’t be joking about it, I had to.
People did things like that in this world. They got shot, had the shit kicked out of them, and came back with black eyes and stab wounds.
It was violent.
It was dark.
It was grimy.
He needed to get used to that. Even if I wished I could keep him squeaky clean for an eternity, it just wasn’t possible.
Conor arched a brow at my levity, but commented, “I didn’t think you’d have told him.”
“Like he said, he isn’t five,” I said softly, sharing a gentle smile with my son.
Clapping him on the back, Conor remarked, “Don’t worry. Dec was telling me in the car the other day that you want to be a lawyer. If you work behind a desk like me, you don’t get shot.”
Declan called out, “Bull.”
Conor’s nose wrinkled. “That was a mistake.”
“Almost shot himself in the foot,” Declan shared dryly, as he grabbed his beer and tossed it back, taking a deep gulp.
Shay’s eyes flared, but he twisted to face Conor, his curiosity clear. “You shot yourself in the foot?”
“Now, Seamus, the key to being a lawyer is getting the facts straight then twisting them,” Conor chided. “The key word there is almost. I missed by a whole eight inches.”
Declan smirked, then peered out into the hall which clued me in to the fact that the elevator doors had whirred open.
When he dangled a beer in the doorway, a hand grabbed it, and Brennan took a deep pull before sighing. “Damn, I needed that.”
Seamus frowned. “Are you supposed to drink when you’ve just been shot?”
“Or cracked your head on the steering wheel?” Conor grumbled, his tone disapproving.
“No better time to drink,” Brennan replied with a wince as he moved deeper into the room and slumped at the table. “Christ, what a day.”
That about summed it up.
“Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”
Brennan shook his head, but his lips twitched at the unease in Seamus’s voice. “No, it was only a flesh wound.”
That had me arching a brow because I knew the bullet had gone through his arm. He had a flesh tunnel—bicep style.
Still, who was I to argue? They were probably used to being human sieves.
“I’m ordering in because I refuse to cook for you all,” I interjected, before Seamus could get into a discussion about only God knew what. There were hospitals, guns, shootouts, and mafia wars on the table, and I’d prefer for there to be actual dishes of food.
Suddenly, I was ravenous.
; And after the way I’d spent most of my afternoon, it was an honest hunger, that was for certain.
Brennan’s eyes lit up. “What are you ordering?”
“Pho.”
He snorted. “You’ll never get Conor to eat that.”
“It’s good,” Seamus protested.
“Hates anything with much flavor,” Brennan said wryly. “I’ll have it though.”
I dipped my chin when he gave me his preferences, and I looked at Declan who shrugged. “I’d prefer a steak.”
“Oh, I can deal with that,” Conor chirped.
Rolling my eyes, I ordered the pho for the three of us, then set up another order with another restaurant that I remembered was popular with the Five Points’ members for the steaks.
The fifty minutes passed swiftly, but the rest of the evening blurred too.
I had to admit, I’d never thought I’d ever be close to Declan’s family, because why would I? I was a gofer’s kid. I never should have mixed with the lofty upper ranks of the Five Points, but they were around my table, eating and drinking, laughing and joking, making my kid one of them.
Seamus lit up around his uncles, and I knew, then and there, that he’d been missing this. Even without knowing what he’d been missing, it was this.
Male company. Family.
It had always been just the two of us against the world. That was changing, morphing, and even though not all of those changes were good, even though there was danger here, even though… even though… even though…
It was all a ‘what-if?’, wasn’t it?
But seeing him laugh, knowing he was with people who instinctively accepted him because he was blood, it filled me with warmth. There was a promise of family here. Sure, his grandparents, on both sides, were a disappointment, but his uncles would more than make up for that.
I’d seen it before, but tonight just reaffirmed it.
Seamus was safe with his uncles, he had a family, he had a wider reaching support system, and I couldn’t be anything other than joyful about that.
Twenty-One
Aela
I grimaced through another hymn, trying to remember how long this would go on for.
The last time I’d been in St. Patrick’s Catholic Church was Deirdre’s funeral, so the memories weren’t great. That wasn’t my last time in church, more’s the pity. My grandparents had insisted on it when I lived with them. So it had been at least a decade since I’d attended a Sunday service, and in my opinion, a decade wasn’t long enough.
Seamus was in total agreement.
I’d managed to get him here on two conditions.
One, he could mess around on his phone throughout the sermon. Thank God Conor sat beside us. He looked as bored as Seamus and me, and together, the two were splitting a pair of AirPods and watching what looked to be some guy making mozzarella from scratch. Go figure.
Two, he was ‘owed’ a day. That meant we’d go wherever he wanted, eat whatever he wanted, and do whatever he wanted.
I was actually looking forward to that part because he wanted to go to Coney Island, and it had been a lifetime since I’d been there. I knew it would be a blast.
Mostly, I was touched he wanted to go with me at all. I figured that would be something he’d do with friends from school when he stopped psychoanalyzing them long enough for them to become friends, of course.
Barely refraining from yawning, and contemplating buying myself a set of AirPods to get through the sermon from the ever difficult Father Doyle—a man who astonished me by still breathing, because he’d been ancient when I was a kid—I put some of my weight onto Declan and tried not to tip my head onto his shoulder.
If I could have napped, I would have.
Man, if this wasn’t an order from up high—and no, I wasn’t talking from God—I’d have cut and run from today, but we were heading straight from here to the O’Donnelly’s house, and the kid inside me who’d been blushing and enamored of their power still found it hard to wrap her head around the fact she would be breaking bread with the rulers of our little kingdom.
I wished we could have gone straight there. I’d actually murder a Sunday roast, because I hadn’t had one in years, and from how Conor had waxed poetical about his mother’s cooking, I knew I was in for a treat.
Deciding to rest my eyes for a while, I thought about last night and the night before.
I was still sneaking out of his bed to get back into my room for Seamus’s sake, but damn, the man had learned some moves since I’d been gone.
I couldn’t even find it in me to be jealous, not when I thought about what he could do with his dick now.
Sheesh.
Just the thought started to get me a little horny, which was gross in church. Hell, even I had standards.
Before I could think about how perfectly his cock filled me, all around us, people started to move. I opened my eyes, widened them a few times to wake them up and make sure I didn’t look like I’d been sleeping, and watched as the rows in front filed out.
I knew, point blank, this had to be one of the busiest parishes in the city. Simply because of Aidan Sr. It was a part of the life to come here every Sunday, whether you were a believer or not. He didn’t care. His men had to go to confession too, because that was as integral as having loose morals where crime was concerned.
The hypocrisy never failed to amuse me.
But, as a result, the pews were full. Every single one of them. From left to right. Jam-packed like sardines in a can. Even the two naves were. I was pretty sure it was a damn fire hazard!
It helped that Aidan Sr. had his guys on a short leash. The first row filed out, followed by the second and so on. It was anal enough that the pews themselves walked out from left to right like it was some kind of simple dance.
Because we were in the second row, I nudged Seamus with my elbow, and taking the hint, he quickly turned off his video and muttered, “I’ll send you the link later, Uncle Conor.”
I smiled at that, not just at the fact he’d called him ‘Uncle,’ but that Uncle Conor wanted to finish watching the mozzarella video.
It fit that the two of them got on well considering Conor was an oversized kid and Seamus was an undersized adult.
Shay managed to tuck his phone into his pocket just in time for us to leave the pew. My ass was numb, and it was fucking freezing in St. Patrick’s as we moved down the aisle.
I kept my gaze locked and loaded on the back of Declan’s head, well aware that the masses would be watching Shay and me as we exited the church. With no desire to catch my parents’ eye either, I had no doubt that the women of the Five Points, and the Old Wives’ Club—the wives of fallen Pointers—would be chatting up a storm about me. It was a wonder my ears weren’t burning already, because I had to reason that they’d be calling me all kinds of crap behind my back.
It took a while, because Father Doyle stood and said farewell to every parishioner. At least, he did to the ones in the front pews which seated the most powerful members of the mob.
When it was our turn, he turned his focus on me and reached for my hands, sighing. “Aela O’Neill, how long it’s been since last we met.”
There was no point in pulling my hands away, even though I didn’t like the old bastard. There’d never been any funny business with him, but he was quick with a ruler to the palm if you didn’t obey fast enough in Sunday School.
Bastard.
In my mind, I told him it hadn’t been long enough ‘since last we met,’ but I just shot him a pained smile. “No, quite a long time, Father.”
He cut a glance at Seamus. “An unwed mother—Declan…” He tutted. “It’s a sin, child. I hope you’ll be rectifying that soon enough. We don’t want the wee lad to be feeling his illegitimacy now, do we?”
I narrowed my eyes on him. “It’s 2020, Father. I don’t think anyone even notices—”
Doyle raised a hand, which immediately pissed me off because he expected me to obey, and with Aidan Sr. hovering abou
t, I knew I had to. Goddammit. “The Father sees all. Knows all, Aela. He’s well aware that you acted in a slatternly manner, and when I see you next in confession, we’ll be sure to discuss how you can atone for your sins.”
My jaw clenched, especially because this was not a conversation I wanted to be having in front of my kid. Not only that, I knew the people behind me could hear. Sure, that was mostly Declan’s brothers and his family, but the family would be the ones who agreed with Doyle!
“I won’t be attending communion, Father.”
He blinked at me, and the man’s arrogance, as well as a position that was reaffirmed by Aidan Sr., not the Father himself, had him braying with laughter. “I shouldn’t laugh, child, I shouldn’t, but that was mighty amusing. I didn’t realize you were such a funny lass.”
“I’m not joking,” I murmured, and I felt Declan tense up at my side.
I didn’t shoot him a look because I didn’t need his backup to stand tall and proud.
I’d deal with this farce of a service once a week, but I wouldn’t be laying myself prostate in front of Doyle or anyone, and I had a voice in my head that would let me tell the dick that.
“You have to be joking,” Doyle sputtered. “Once a week. That’s the rule.”
“Maybe in your world, but not mine.”
Declan cleared his throat, but he surprised me by not saying a word.
I’d almost expected him to pacify Doyle, and the way he kept looking at my man told me Doyle expected it too. But he didn’t. He stood tall, shuffled every now and then from foot to foot, but otherwise, he let me have my voice.
I wasn’t sure there was anything else he could have done that would have made me so damn happy.
He wasn’t cowed, wasn’t scared of the consequences. No, he just knew I could handle it. He was there with Kevlar vests and guards when danger came, but Doyle was just a snippy old bastard who needed to meet his Maker to get a life.
“We must discuss this some other time,” Doyle rumbled, his gaze dancing between the three of us. “This is most concerning, Aela. I’m truly worried for your immortal soul.”
“I wouldn’t bother, Father, it’s been a lost cause for nearly a decade and a half.”
Filthy Dark: A SECOND CHANCE/SECRET BABY, MAFIA ROMANCE (THE FIVE POINTS' MOB COLLECTION Book 3) Page 28
