Ace in the Hole: A Mafia Romance

by Nicole Fox

  “Hello, Miss O’Rourke.” I hold out my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.” I might as well get this done properly. Maybe if I do it well the boss won’t make me do it again. But can I really say I’m only here for the pay packet? This lady really is something else.

  She takes my hand. She’s cold and clammy and trembling slightly. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Moretti.”

  The mother beams behind her and then steps forward. “Has your employer given you all the details?” she asks.

  “Yes, miss. He has. I’ve got the address of the restaurant …” neutral territory “… and the time she must be back …” unless I want to cause a war “… and the other instructions …” which basically boil down to no sexual contact at all. Look, but don’t touch: that’s the rule for today.

  “Okay, then! Have fun!”

  I offer Colleen my arm and she takes it, and then I lead her down to the car. I catch our reflection in the window: me standing six feet and as strong as a man can get running jobs and occasionally lifting weights, which is pretty damn strong, with slicked-back black hair and a gray suit. Some women say my nose is endearing, since it’s broken and slightly crooked, and others say that my dark blue eyes are captivating, but I never keep them around long enough to take the compliments seriously. Even so, in the reflection, Colleen and I almost look like a couple.

  I decide to toy with her a bit on the drive to the restaurant, since she’s fidgeting and sighing like a prisoner.

  “I didn’t know you were going to be so fine,” I say, as the car silently coasts through the falling sleet.

  “Ex—excuse me?” she mutters.

  “You,” I say, sensing her embarrassment. I don’t have to just sense it, though; it’s plain in the growing redness in her cheeks. “I didn’t know you were going to be so fine. My boss didn’t show me any pictures.”

  “Uh … thank you?”

  “Is that a question, or are you actually thanking me?”

  “I’m thanking you,” she murmurs, turning away from me to hide the redness; now it’s creeping down her neck, toward her hidden breasts.

  “That dress is something else, too. Classy as hell.”

  “Um, you look very handsome as well.” She bites her lip, letting it go a moment later. A gesture like that shouldn’t drive me so crazy but it’s her shyness that does it. Shyness coupled with freckly, pale legs, legs that make a man think of where they lead. Up and up … right to that tight pussy; goddamn, I wonder how it feels. I block the thoughts; pointless, since I’m not allowed to act on them,

  “Are you allowed to drink?” I ask as I pull into the parking lot of the pre-approved restaurant. I’ve got no doubt that the Irish are watching it. If not, then they trust the people who own it trust that they’ll report on me if anything untoward happens.

  “Of course I am.” She curls her upper lip. “I’m twenty-one years old. What about you?” She asks this as I open her door for her, offering her my hand. “How old are you?”

  I lead her into the restaurant. “How old do you think I am?” I ask.

  “Thirty something.”

  “Thirty-five,” I tell her.

  “You’re much older than me,” she notes.

  “Is that a problem?” I ask, holding the door open for her.

  She walks through it, head held high. “I don’t have any problems.”

  The restaurant is a quiet Irish place with a flag on one wall and a framed photograph of Conor McGregor on another. Old folk-style tunes play on the jukebox and the man behind the bar wears a name-tag that reads Paddy.

  “I see why they chose this place.” I laugh darkly. “All you’d have to do is shout and there’d be a hundred Irishman on me. Not a goddamn Italian in sight.”

  “Are you scared?” She tries for a brave glare, but her eyes betray her. They’re full of nerves.

  “Is this the first date you’ve ever been on?” I throw back, as the greeter leads us to a table in the corner. It’s the most private one in the house, but it’s not a booth. A lamp sits right next to us, throwing shadows everywhere. Before she can answer, I tell the greeter, “Two beers, please.”

  “I don’t drink beer,” Colleen says quietly.

  “They’re for me. What do you want?”

  “I’ll have a glass of red wine.”

  The greeter leaves us and Colleen shakes her head slowly. “Two beers, really?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I’ve been ordered to be on my best behavior. I thought they’d at least tell you the same.”

  “Oh, they did.” I laugh, leaning back. “But what fun is that, Colleen O’Rourke?”

  “And by the way, this isn’t the first date I’ve been on.” She folds her small, pale hands on the table. My mind races ahead: those hands, wrapped around my cock. I need to get rid of these thoughts. Impossible, undoable, and yet she’s so damn fine, and so damn shy, I can’t.

  I hold my hands up. “Fair enough. So you play the field, eh? How many dates have you been on? Ten? Twenty? More?” I grin at her. Maybe this is cruel, but it’s fun more than anything. “You don’t have to lie to me. If our people had it their way, we’d be fucking married before the end of the month.”

  “Do you have to swear?” But she’s smiling. Her mother’s veneer is already fading away. She glances around; there’s nobody nearby. “Isn’t it enough to know this isn’t my first date? God!”

  “Is there something I could do to make you feel more comfortable?” I rest my elbows on the table and stare at her. I’m forgetting myself here, forgetting the skipper’s orders, but the way I see it there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun. “You don’t seem very at ease.”

  “Well …” She lets out a long shaky breath. “We’re on a date, aren’t we? Since when are women supposed to feel at ease on a date? Do you think this dress is comfortable?”

  “I could always get you out of it, if it’d make things easier.” I can’t stop myself. That look on her face is just too interesting, too sexy, too shy. And there’s something else, too: excitement, it seems like. I’m almost sure of it.

  She holds my gaze for a moment and then turns away. “Are you serious?” she whispers. “What do you think would happen if I told my mother what you just said?”

  “Bad things, I imagine.” I shrug. “But people are always trying to do bad things to me, Colleen. More often than not, bad things end up happening to them. Anyway, I was just being polite. Is it so bad that I want my date to be comfortable?”

  “You really are a joker, aren’t you?” She brushes down her dress with a small smile. “You really do say some silly, silly things.”

  “There’s nothing silly about how sexy you look right now,” I blurt without thinking. My teeth hurt from where I’m grinding them. I force them apart. “Where are our damn drinks? Wait here a sec, eh? I’ll go and get them. Never let it be said that I’m not a good date.”

  I go to the bar to tell the waiter to hurry the hell up. As he’s sorting out the drinks, I glance back at our table, across the other side of the restaurant. Over the heads of the other patrons, I spot it: Colleen, fiddling with something in her cleavage. A glimpse of silver. It looks like a tin of some sort. But what’s in it? And why would she be fiddling with it now? Drugs, maybe? She doesn’t seem like the drug-taking type, though, and how would she be, with that hound of a mother breathing down her neck?

  Then another idea occurs to me. It’s an idea that makes little sense, but then, a lot in this life makes little sense. But it only doesn’t make sense if I assume she wants to do this, that she had any part in it. No, that’s naïve. It’ll be Shane O’Rourke. This whole thing: is it a damn trap?

  I take the drinks to the table.

  “Excuse me. I just need to use the toilet.”

  “Oh, sure.” She smiles at me shakily. “Okay.”

  I go to the hallway that leads to the bathroom and watch her secretly. For a minute or so, she wavers, taking the tin out and putting it back
in her cleavage. She must be so nervous, she doesn’t know how obvious she’s being. Since the dress is high-cut, retrieving the tin is no easy feat. But eventually her hesitation goes away. She’s an Irish girl, after all, and what’s a strange Italian man to her?

  She opens the tin and pours the powder into my beer, stirring it with the handle of a fork. She then wipes the fork on a napkin.

  Chapter Three

  Colleen

  I shove the tin back into my cleavage and take a long, deep breath. The tin presses into my bra, cold against the parts of my skin it touches, ice-cold, searing into me, a constant reminder of what I just did. I try and make myself smile as Gabriel walks back to the table from the bathroom, but it’s difficult. Despite his cockiness, despite his impropriety—both things which Mother hates—I find myself liking him. I don’t want him to die or get sick or whatever that powder is going to do to him. I don’t want to hurt anybody.

  He sits down and goes for the drink—the non-poisoned beer. He looks devastatingly handsome as he drinks it, like a man from a billboard for cologne. His hair is jet-black and shiny under the light, slick, and his face is all carved, clean-shaven features. He doesn’t have a tattoo that I can see, unlike Father’s men who are mostly covered from knuckle to neck. My body responds to him even as my mind wills it quiet. My palms moisten, my tongue feels heavy and dry, but most of all my heart thumps in anticipation for when he drinks that second beer. I have to stop him … but that means going against Father, which I’ve never once done.

  “Is something wrong?” he asks.

  “No,” I answer far too quickly, smiling at him as convincingly as I can. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you’re about as red as an Irish cherry.” There’s a glint to his voice, like metal, and it’s not entirely unpleasant. He takes a long sip of his beer, draining it to almost half. I wish he would drink slower!

  “Is that redder than a normal cherry?” I ask, trying for a laugh.

  He shrugs. “I’ve got no clue, come to think of it. What is it men and women do on dates, Colleen? You need to help me out on this one. I’m not exactly the dating type. Maybe you can tell.”

  I giggle. It’s a real giggle. He smiles at me. Then the moment passes and guilt and regret stab into me. I have to warn him before he touches the second drink. But Father gave me specific instructions and Shane O’Rourke is always obeyed, no matter what. Shane O’Rourke has not tolerated disobedience since he became the boss, before I was born. I’ve only ever known him as the king. He might beat me, imprison me, sell me. I want to tell myself that he’s my father and he loves me and he’d never do something like that, but it rings hollow. The fact is, I don’t know. And Mother, well, she’s probably worse.

  “I wonder what they expect from us,” he goes on, slowly sipping the beer. Not slow enough, though; soon he’ll drain it. “Maybe they want us to fall in love.” He grins, ear-to-ear. He seems different than when he left for the bathroom. He’s joking, but there’s something else there, too, a sinister aspect he didn’t have before. Suddenly I can easily imagine this man doing bad things for the Italians. What’s even more disconcerting is that the chill which runs through me is not wholly negative. “What do you think?” he presses on. “Would Shane and Lorenzo be happy if the Italian hitter and the Irish girl fell head over heels, eh? Or would it piss them off, because then we’d have minds of our own?”

  “Minds of our own,” I whisper, eyes fixated on the poisoned beer now. He’s almost done. “I’ve never had much of one, to be honest.” I laugh, oversharing, but it only seems polite after what I’ve done. “I … I don’t mean that. I do have a mind of my own, of course, but Mother would prefer it if I didn’t.”

  “You’re her doll,” he says, nodding. “And she dresses you up and pulls your little string to make you say anything she wants. Is that about right?”

  I sip my wine so I don’t have to answer, but when I’m done he’s still staring at me. “You don’t have to be a jerk,” I whisper, not meeting his eye. It’s not every day I call an Italian mobster a jerk! “I just … Mother really would prefer if I was a doll. She’d like it even more if I was battery-powered, because then she could turn me off if she felt like it.”

  “So you just do what they say, anything?” His dark blue eyes bore into me. “Don’t you ever ask yourself what you want, Colleen?”

  “I …” That intensity, the way he leans in to hear my answer. I swallow, wondering … How subtle was I when I put the powder in the drink? Idiot! I didn’t even try to hide it, I now realize, I was so consumed with what I was doing, I gave no thought to how. “I ask myself all the time,” I mutter.

  “But you rarely get to act on the answer, is that it?”

  “What is this?” I suddenly blurt. “Why are you interrogating me? Are you always this rude?”

  “Rude?” He laughs harshly, finishes his beer, and then rests his hand near the second. My heartbeat almost thumps out of my mouth now as I watch his fingers brush against the glass. He’ll drink it soon, and when he drinks it … my mind races ahead. What happens then? Does he keel over? Does he choke? I don’t want to hurt him. I can’t stand the thought of him getting hurt, in fact, which hits me with surprise. I find myself wishing that this was a different life and we were just a man and a woman on a date, not an Italian and an Irish on some kind of mission.

  “Rude?” he repeats, his fingers leaving prints on the glass. “That’s a funny word, Colleen. Rude. Maybe I am rude. Maybe so, yes, I can see that. I do lots of things that would be considered rude in polite society, if I ever bothered to enter polite society. But even if I’m rude, I understand respect, honor, and loyalty. There’s nothing more important in this life. Men might die, but there’s a reason for their deaths. Men might run, and there’s a reason for that too. I might fight, kill … but there’s always a reason. And when you shake a man’s hand and tell him that he’s safe from any backstabbing for the time being, well, then, he’s safe. Or at least he’s supposed to be.” He looks down at the table as he talks, but on the last, he glances up at me.

  I bite down on my lip. His expression is ice. It sears coldly into me. “I …” My mouth is dry; my tongue sticks to my teeth. I force it open and say, “I don’t know …” But what don’t I know? I can’t finish the sentence, because there’s nothing to finish it with.

  “I know,” he says quietly. “Looking at you, Colleen, I don’t see a lady who’s eager to enter into this life. Not like some women. You get those, you know, hanging around the bars and the clubs, hanging off the made men like they think they’re going to leave their wives for a stripper. It never works, but there it is; they want it. But not you. Looking at you, I see a lady who’d be better served in a warm, comfortable home someplace, baking a fucking apple pie and bringing her boyfriend a beer or two. Not this shit.” His face twists, and he makes as if to knock the beer from the table. Then he glances around and remembers himself: an Italian in a sea of Irish. But he looks relieved that nobody approaches the table. We’re alone, even if we’re not. Nobody is watching us close enough to sense that everything is about to change.

  “Do you have anything you want to tell me?” he asks, his voice dead quiet.

  “What do you mean?” I say on instinct, but I know and, looking at him, I see that he knows as well.

  “I’m going to ask you one last time.” His voice is as taut as a hairband tied around too much hair, stretching almost to the breaking point, and soon it’ll snap. His gaze continues to burn. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  I should call for help. That look in his eyes is nothing good. Father would want me to call for help, but I don’t. It’s not even that I can’t—that my voice does not work, or anything like that—just that I don’t want to. I felt bad enough putting that powder into his drink. If the Irish get hold of him after he’s threatened their princess—I hate thinking of myself like that, but they don’t—who knows what they’ll do to him?

  I let out a sigh, hal
f relief and half fear. “I put something in your drink,” I admit.

  He listens closely when I tell him about the powder, Father giving it to me and telling me to put it in as discreetly as possible.

  “I guess I forgot that part,” I say, trying for a joke.

  “Hmm.” He takes out his cell phone and leans back in his chair, looking at me with coldness now. Jokey Gabriel is gone. “There’s been a change of plans, skipper,” Gabriel says. “That bastard Shane ordered her to put something in my drink. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what do we … A change of plan? Okay, skip. I’ll check in soon.”

  He hangs up his cell phone and then leans forward, placing his forearms on the table. “There are two ways this can go,” he whispers. There’s violence in his voice, just waiting to be unleashed. “Either you can come with me quietly and none of your Irish brethren have to die, or you can make a fuss and I’ll kill as many bastards as I can before they take me out. And they will take me out. I’m not crazy. I can see that. But not before I do some real damage. Or … you come with me, you don’t make a sound, and I don’t have to hurt anybody. What’ll it be, Colleen O’Rourke?”