Deadly Seduction

by Selene Chardou

  “Yea.” Cricket glared at Ronan and nodded.

  It was not a surprise Ronan had sponsored the sociopathic asshole since they’d been close their whole lives and he wasn’t too far from being one himself. Ronan’s only saving graces were his strong love for the Club, and a beautiful girlfriend who kept him on an even keel.

  “I got proxy ‘Yeas’ from Kaz and Jaden so the deal goes through.” Cillian looked at his father and nodded.

  Dizzy’s eyes, so much like his son’s, nodded back before he slammed the gavel down. “This meeting is over.”

  Everyone began to get up and leave with the exception of Cillian who remained seated. Cricket closed the double doors and the two men were finally alone together.

  “What’s up, son?” His father’s blue eyes were filled with worry while he looked like an older version of his son. “You’re obviously distracted and your head is so far up your own arse, you seem to be slippin’. You earned that VP chair when I could have given it to Sean or Brendan. They’ll remain loyal soldiers regardless who is President of the Club. Plus, it’s you who I want to pass on the legacy of this Club to...don’t make me regret my decision.”

  Cillian shook his head and ran his hand through his silky brown hair. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Da. But I sure as fook know that Brianna isn’t helpin’ the situation. I need to get rid of that woman.”

  Dizzy swigged from his Irish whiskey and set the glass down with a thud. “I knew it, but I can’t say I blame you son. No man wants to be married to a slapper who can’t keep her knickers on. I’m sorry it didn’t work out but don’t you dare go thinkin’ about women that don’t belong to you. And you can’t go back to the past either.”

  “What are you talkin’ about Da?” The angrier he became, the more Cillian’s own Irish lilt came out.

  He’d spent five years in Belfast from the age of sixteen to twenty-one. He’d lost his first love there and met a new woman who would become his old lady and mother to his son and daughter. That didn’t mean their life together had been easy, and Brianna continued to deteriorate and had gotten worse over the years. She didn’t act like an old lady, she acted like Saint Slapper and that’s exactly what she was, even if she did have the title of Mrs. Cox. She also had the respect from being the wife of the VP garnered her—reverence she certainly didn’t earn or deserve for the matter.

  “What about my grandkids?”

  “They stay here. She goes.” Cillian stood and refilled his glass of whiskey along with his father’s. “Besides, they’ll just slow her down. I don’t want Declan to know he has a whore for a mother but he’s already at an age where he’s no dummy. He’s almost ten, not five, and he’s not stupid. Caitlin…she’s young, and she’ll get used to her being gone. It’s not like she sees a whole lot of her now as it is.”

  “’Tis true, me son.” Desmond sighed and looked at the oak table with the symbol for the Lucifer’s Saint’s carved into the beautifully polished wood. “I suppose all of this is my fault, eh? You would have been better off with Gisela and…all this shit wouldn’t have gone down with Misty and Drake. Maybe it still would have but…I only wanted what was best for you.”

  The thought of Gisela made Cillian’s throat burn with unshed tears. He hadn’t cried since he was sixteen and the one person who united them was snatched away. They both knew it would happen even if they’d lived in a state of denial until everything fell apart. Their son was now a strapping young lad being raised in a good, Irish Catholic household in Boston. The situation certainly didn’t make him feel any better. Yes, their son was fortunate enough that he’d stayed within the family but an uncle of his who was a Cox by birth but on the straight and narrow.

  Kian Cox and his wife, Alannah O’Brien-Cox, wanted nothing to do with the vast crime syndicate Desmond was involved in but they also couldn’t have any children. He and Gisela’s son, Conan O’Brien-Cox was a strapping young lad of thirteen with his mother’s dark brown, almost-black, hair and his father’s crystal blue eyes. He also had a perfect peaches and cream complexion though he could tan very easily, and was tall for his age. He would be a lady killer one day but never be privy to who his biological parents were.

  Cillian didn’t want to start crying about a life that would never be; it would get him nowhere and besides, the boy was probably better off. He didn’t wish this life on his children but it was the only one he could offer them because it was all he knew.

  What exactly could a kid with a high school education who was a mechanic by trade do with his life and bring in the kind of money he did that was legit? Exactly nothing. Besides, Kian was a cop—technically, a homicide detective—and what a more perfect upbringing for a child whose parents knew the ins and outs of crime?

  Gisela might not have broken the law the way he did on a constant basis; instead she played with it and used laws to her advantage to get clients who were both guilty and innocent off on all crimes with which they were involved. It kept her in designer shoes and handbags, but it also kept her at a distance from his world, and for that, he was mildly content and relieved. It would kill a small part of him to know that he’d trapped her into a life she’d been trying to escape.

  He stood and put on his cut. He knew what he had to do and the night before he had to kill someone, he had a ritual, which he never deviated. He needed to get fucked up and then fucked by a professional. Brianna’s subpar skills wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good.

  “Off to Reno?” His father didn’t look up from a stack of papers he’d pulled out and were slowly going through.

  “Yep. You know me.”

  “Well, be careful, son, and try not to get into any trouble.”

  Cillian smiled and it was one that would have dropped panties all over the world had there been any lucky women to see it. “You know me, Da. Trouble is me middle name.”

  Chapter Two

  Gisela

  “Are you going out tonight?”

  I looked up from the stack of files on my desk before I met Kyra’s blue eyes. “I don’t think so. I need to get some work done and I’m not really up to hanging out and getting hit on, know what I mean?”

  Kyra shook her head. She had the most gorgeous auburn hair with burnished gold highlights, light freckles on her face, which she used cover-up to conceal, a patrician nose, slightly full lips and a tall, slender athletic build.

  We were complete opposites in every way except we were both considered beautiful women.

  I was barely 5’4” although I wore heels to make up for my short stature. I knew my olive skin with a hint of caramel was perfect and without a blemish. My long, naturally curly yet silky dark hair took quite the beating between flat irons and wearing it in a chignon or a French Roll when I was in professional mode.

  I had my father’s amber eyes but the rest of my face belonged to my exquisite mother and her strong, Teutonic genes. A face that was feminine but precisely perfect in proportion in terms of my features. I didn’t inherit any of her height but I did have her figure with the exception of 32-C breasts, which were the result of an overly zealous boyfriend during my high school years who did nothing but caress and feel on them every chance he received.

  Ugh, don’t think about Cillian now…that’s a road you don’t wanna go down, I chastised myself before I looked up to see Kyra staring at me quizzically.

  “Everything all right?” she asked.

  I sipped from a glass San Pellegrino and smiled. “Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “We have a couple of paralegals to sort through all that shit, you know. Why did you ask for all those old case files anyway?”

  I shrugged nonchalantly. “It keeps me on my toes. Besides, I haven’t had one case go to court that I haven’t plead out before it went to trial.”

  “And that is a bad thing why?” Kyra sat in front of my desk in one of the two outrageously expensive office chairs we had for clients.

  Jackson and Hughes was a classy law firm worthy of L.A.
or New York yet we worked in Lake Tahoe, which was considered upscale and neutral territory for all the criminal elements of Northern Nevada. The whole office was decked out in classic law chic with a beautiful reception area and our offices, side by side, were understated yet elegant. Designed by my mother who’d studied to be an architect, she settled for interior design after she married my father because it was far less taxing and she could do it with her eyes closed.

  She’d designed our home before she worked closely with her sister, who actually studied interior design, to outfit the place. Although my parents spent a great deal of their time in Reno and Las Vegas, they also had homes in Pine Bluff, Southampton, Lake Tahoe when they were entertaining elite friends, Los Angeles and a gorgeous penthouse on the upper Eastside of Manhattan.

  “It’s not a bad thing but…would it be wrong to say I wish I had gone to court? I mean I would like to prove my skills as an attorney and let my parents know they didn’t waste over two hundred grand on my education at Stanford and law school at Harvard.” I touched a few wisps of hair, which had managed to escape my perfect chignon.

  “Of course they didn’t waste their money. You have kept some of the most influential people—and the wayward youth they call their children—out of jail.” Kyra searched through her black leather Birkin, her pride and joy she’d spent three years on the waiting list to purchase, and opened her cigarette case.

  She knew how much I hated the smell of cigarette smoke—even if I did indulge in that and marijuana—from time to time. However, so many of our clients smoked, we allowed them to due to the industrial strength air conditioning unit we had installed. It was the same manufacturer most of the casinos used and actually sucked the cigarette smoke into the vents before supplying clean, filtered air.

  The law firm always smelled fresh and clean but that still didn’t mean I wanted her smoking in my office. I always smoked outside, whether it was a cigarette or a joint.

  Kyra lit up and I supplied her with a clean ashtray I kept in one of my many desk drawers.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to have fun and live a little? Our fathers, being who they are, they don’t define us. Isn’t that what we’ve always said?”

  “Yes, you’re right of course.” I smiled and pretended for the sake of conversation that was true.

  If my father, Raymond Jackson, was the original gangster with his expensive Italian and French suits, not a hair out of place and youth personified then her father was the opposite. Tom “Jonesy” Hughes was the head of an MC with a beautiful, cultured daughter who’d attended and graduated the same schools I did. The fact that we’d grown up in Northern Nevada and went to the same elite private school cemented our friendship. We’d known each other since we were five. Our fathers’ were business partners after all and we were well aware they skirted the rules of the law, but in most cases, outright broke them.

  I knew my father had murdered associates, friends and even some of our own family members. His beginnings were humble, the son of a sharecropper and his half-Choctaw wife, who were both from some shithole, redneck town in Mississippi.

  They’d come to Nevada hoping for a better life. All the move really earned my grandparents was an early death for my grandfather due to cardiomyopathy. My grandmother lost her eyesight and half her right leg due to diabetes before succumbing to death several years after my grandfather.

  My father learned early that he wouldn’t be able to play by the rules and get ahead. He was from the original school of hard knocks but he’d still polished himself and became an elite, though not so legitimate, businessman. He was an avid reader who’d educated himself about the finer things in life, and knew more about art, culture and history than most blue-bloods usually received at a prestigious university.

  He soon became good friends with Angelo Abandonato, and their friendship blossomed more into a quasi-family than mere business associates. Mr. Abandonato was still a family friend to my father and since he belonged to one of the most powerful mafia families in Nevada, they formed a partnership that was unbelievable, at least to most of the outside world.

  My father built casinos with the Abandonato family and he also branched out into the lucrative brothel trade. My father owned five brothels and supplied women to all the top hotels in Reno. His new mission was expansion and he had his eye on Vegas. Of course he had the perfect way in: my mother.

  Ingrid Krieger-Jackson was a force to be reckoned with but she also came from an elite German family, and she had three very wealthy and powerful cousins. She was first cousin to Rory and Severin Krieger. She also had helped her sister design Vogue Hotel, Casino and Spa, Rory’s multi-billion dollar hotel that reaped him rewards year after year.

  He wanted to start providing women to big spenders and he’d come to his cousin—my mother—first. My father, Rory, Severin and Karl Schmidt had already met numerous times, and the deal was already set into motion. By the beginning of 2014, there would be high class escorts working under both the umbrella of my father and the Krieger family at Vogue Hotel and Casino.

  “Earth to Gisela…goddamn, I hate when you go off on your own little private trips. Are you listening to me at all?” Kyra stood and continued to drag from her cigarette before a trail of smoke was left in her wake.

  “Yeah, I’m listening…what did you say?”

  She stopped pacing and glared at me. “I knew you weren’t listening!” She pointed her two fingers that clasped her cigarette in my direction. “Ugh! Anyway, I said, Evan wanted me to pass a message on to you. He really enjoyed the date you two had and wants to see you again.”

  Against my better judgment—my hot-shit Stanford and Harvard education be damned—I was laying down with dogs because I couldn’t help loving the flea bites. It was either that or some Mafioso my father tried to set me up with because I would never get a classy man; my parents needed me to stay grounded into this life if I was to survive.

  My brother Drake, regardless of his indiscretion of stringing Maeve “Misty” Cox along and knocking her up, was now engaged to a beautiful German socialite. Meanwhile, I was stuck with the criminal element because it’s all I truly knew from the inside out.

  My dad liked Evan, he was available, though a consummate ladies’ man, and VP of the Demon’s Bastards. The fact that I’d already had a forbidden, hot and heavy relationship with Cillian from the Lucifer’s Saints when we were teenagers didn’t seem to bother anyone but me.

  Fuck, I could play it cool all I wanted but I was still in love with the fucking guy.

  I knew how much he hurt me, and I also knew he was married—though that was on the rocks—and had two kids. However, none of that meant a damn thing to me because I would always be the mother of his first child. A child neither of us knew except that he was being raised as a Cox and bore no resemblance to me but plenty to all the European blood flowing through his veins. All he had was my dark hair but he possessed his father’s arresting crystal blue eyes. Eyes I had gotten lost in more times than I could count.

  Evan was a great guy, sexy as hell with his ginger brown hair and trademark blue eyes all the Hughes children had thanks to their stellar parentage, but he wasn’t Cillian.

  Cillian, who looked like he walked off the set of a Calvin Klein underwear photo shoot. He was model perfect, tall, lean and a body built for sin.

  So far, his tats were limited to arm sleeves and the Lucifer’s Saints symbol on his back. His chest was still perfect and free of the ink I so despised but it didn’t stop me from getting branded by him when I was only fifteen. A tramp stamp that merely said “Cillian’s Property” in fancy cursive. I’d always meant to get it removed or maybe even turned into something else but the fact was I didn’t want to change anything about it. It reminded me of the good times we had together and no one could take them away.

  Much to my dismay, I ended up at Kyra’s place. Neither of us wanted to be near Pine Bluff, Birch Tree or Black Oak therefore we both owned condos in a high tech building in L
ake Tahoe. The views were brilliant and we were on the same floor one below the penthouse condos, of which there were only four.

  At least if I drank too much, I only had to wander down to my own condo and despite our ages and professions, we both could put away a serious amount of booze.

  I stuck to an outrageously expensive bottle of Pinot Noir while she opted for Macallan 30, a very strong and gracefully aged scotch that would have you on your ass before you could say “hello.”

  “So, is it on for this Friday night?” Kyra rattled her crystal glass, which only contained ice and the remnants of a scotch and soda. “Evan can have any woman he likes, you know. You should be flattered he’s paying this much attention to you.”

  “I don’t know what would be worse.” I sipped from my red wine and clutched the stem with both hands. “I don’t want to be anyone’s old lady, Kyra. I don’t want to be part of some mafia family either. I’m not ready to move on. Not yet.”