Burning for the Bratva: A Russian Mafia Romance Novel

by Maura Rose

  Could Doyle have been skimming off the top and it was discovered by the brothers? Shane mentioned in the report that he’d tell his father in more detail in person, but the report was dated only a day or two before the shooting had taken place on the way to the club. Shane might not have had time to talk to his father in more detail before he’d been hit.

  A drive-by shooting seemed a lot more like Doyle’s style as well, brazen and bold, risky.

  Perhaps the two lieutenants were in it together? Doyle could’ve gone to O’Malley, knowing O’Malley was pissed and suggesting a team-up. One of them would hire the hitmen and the other could play the distraction for the brothers.

  But there was something throughout all of this that didn’t sit right with Ivan.

  He sat back, staring idly into the middle distance.

  Every mobster knew that their phone was being tapped by the boss. So who would be stupid enough to hire a hitman over one of those phones? Surely it would be easier to create a Gmail account or something like that using a computer at the local library and use that for correspondence, or buy a burner phone, or even just conduct everything in person. That’s what Ivan would do it he was planning to, say, put a hit on Pavel and didn’t want Pavel to have any suspicions about it.

  And killing someone after they were accusing you of skimming off the top, that only made you the prime suspect. The smart thing to do—and Doyle for all of his temper had to be smart or Sean wouldn’t have kept him as lieutenant even through the transition—would be to then find someone else and make them the scapegoat, make it seem like they were the ones skimming.

  Two trails of clues, both of them convenient—too convenient, found only after a few hours of searching.

  Ivan considered this whole case. The two heirs of a mob boss are attacked. One dies, one survives but in critical condition. The whole thing is hushed up by the father so that the organization doesn’t become unstable—but the father immediately starts looking into his lieutenants. And what does he find? Two of them with convenient clues, suggesting they were cheating him or had hired hitmen.

  It was the perfect recipe for a schism within the O’Gill family.

  But who had put the idea of it being an inside job to Sean in the first place? If Ivan was attacked his first thought wouldn’t be that he’d been betrayed, it would be that another family was moving in on his territory and wanted him gone.

  He checked the records of the assets that the O’Gill family had. They were most powerful in the docks area, where their main rival was the Murphy family, another Irish mob. The two of them had been circling one another like wolves for years, from what Ivan had heard.

  He had been looking at this all wrong, thinking of it as an inside job because Sean had been convinced that it was. But what was the reason for eighty percent of hits against a high-ranking member of the mob? An outside enemy wanted the territory. Oh, sure, that outside enemy might be calling itself the government on certain occasions but really the principle was the same: get rid of the competition.

  It looked like the Murphy family was the biggest competition that the O’Gills had, and vice versa. The docks were an important asset. If the Murphys could get a hold of the entire docks, they could squeeze other families and make them pay huge fees for using them because they’d have a monopoly.

  Right now, with two families controlling the docks, they had to keep their prices relatively low. If they jacked them up too much higher than the other family, people would switch to the competition and use their side of the docks instead. It was a whole racket, the docks. You provided bribes to dock workers, helped people move shipments, provided protection, informed about police raids… it was crazy powerful. It was probably what had kept the O’Gill family’s head above water all of these years.

  Ivan wouldn’t be surprised if the Murphys thought it was the perfect time to take over. Especially if, their men working side by side like this, some bad blood hadn’t developed—some real personal shit that turned this from just a business venture into a chance for revenge against year of petty little digs.

  What could be more convenient for them than to arrange to take out the heirs and blame it on various lieutenants? The entire leadership of the O’Gill family would be at one another’s throats. After all, just taking out the heirs was pretty bad but there was always a lieutenant or two to step up and take their place if necessary. But if all the lieutenants were also being implicated… the entire family would fall apart from the inside and all the Murphys would have to do would be to sit and watch.

  Ivan gathered up the papers.

  Time to do some first-hand investigating.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kelly dropped the papers off at the Bell and Motley where Ivan was apparently taking up residence while he went over everything. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do when she saw him. Punch him, maybe, although she didn’t even know why.

  But when she got there she saw that Ivan was far more interested in the paperwork than in her, so she let it lie. He was pumping Sal for information, as if Sal was just going to give him everything after knowing him for two seconds. Sal had been running the bar for three decades. He wasn’t going to just start blabbing to someone, no matter what kind of endorsement they came with.

  Still, no harm in letting Ivan think that he knew all the answers.

  After all, she had to keep him off the trail while she did her own homework.

  She let him have most of the papers, but she’d made copies of a few for her own purposes and had kept a few others back for herself only.

  Unlike Ivan, she already had a suspect.

  Growing up with these five lieutenants, she’d gotten to know them well. Hell, Flannery was her godfather. She’d called them all ‘uncle’ when she was little, and still did sometimes. She knew out of all of them who was capable of betrayal and who wasn’t.

  Back in the day, when the transition was happening—or so Sal said—there had been one lieutenant who, until her father had set foot in New York, had been convinced that he was going to be named the heir. He’d even been willing to change his name in order to carry on the tradition of an O’Gill being in charge of the O’Gill mob.

  This person had reasoned that the ties that we create were more powerful than simple ties by blood. After all, what was blood except for circumstance? There was nothing earned about a blood connection.

  She’d heard the lieutenant say this himself over the years, usually when she’d been younger and going to him for advice because her brothers or father were pissing her off again.

  “You don’t have to take shit from them just because they’re family,” he would tell her. “You stand up for yourself. Everyone has to earn a place in your life, including your parents and siblings. Real family is shown through actions, not through circumstances of birth.”

  Such a man who was passed over for heir, watching someone who was related by blood but had no place in the organization beforehand, who hadn’t earned it, watching that man be named heir… such a man would easily see it as the deepest betrayal.

  It would take patience to formulate a plan like this. To reach out to the Murphys or let them reach out to him. Because it was the Murphys—or at least, that was what this report was telling her.

  It was a report done by Connor, showing that for the past three months, the Murphy family seemed to know exactly when and where in the docks the O’Gill shipments were coming in and were sabotaging them, reporting them to the police. Connor had at first thought it was someone within the O’Gill family itself, a mole put there by the police, but had learned through his investigation that the Murphys were responsible.

  Families would do that to one another, using the police as ways to get at one another. If only those cops knew how they danced at the end of strings, puppets in the hands of larger forces.

  The only way the Murphys could be reporting the shipments before they came in was if they had a mole—and the mole had to be the person in charge of organi
zing the shipment schedule.

  Bates.

  Bates, the most patient lieutenant, the one who told her that family had to earn their place in your life just like everyone else, the one who’d had a massive fight with Father when he’d been named heir—to the point of it coming to blows, or so Sal said.

  Kelly could feel her hand curling into a fist as she studied the reports. She’d like to track him down and beat him into a pulp. Nobody—nobody messed with her family. Nobody did this to them.

  Along with the anger, however, came a sense of sickness, a hot curling lump in her stomach. She’d grown up calling this man Uncle Bates, for crying out loud. How could he have done this to them? He’d loved Connor and Shane, had been the one to teach them how to fire a gun when Father was too busy brokering a deal with the Caparellis. Her brothers had looked up to him. Her father, she knew, relied on him for his patience and cunning.

  Now it seemed that patience and cunning were being turned against them.

  She had to get down to the docks and get some physical evidence, find out how much the Murphys knew. That group was fanatical in their desire to control all of the docks—they’d been trying to move in on O’Gill territory for years.

  First, however, she called their accountant.

  Ben was a tall imposing looking guy, not the sort of person you’d think would be a mob accountant. Or any kind of accountant, actually. He looked like he should be lifting boxes over at the docks or shaking people down to settle their debts or being a bouncer at a club or something.

  But he was an accountant, and a great one too.

  He answered almost immediately after the phone rang. “Miss O’Gill.”

  “Ben, hi,” Kelly said, smiling. Ben was a reliable guy. Several families used him—good accountants were hard to find. “Listen, I was hoping that you could run some numbers for me, and maybe send me some info on a few bank accounts?”

  “Of course, just give me the names.”

  “I’d like you to look up the work accounts for Bates, and his personal records if you have them as well. And then could you pull up the accounts of lieutenant salaries for the last five years, and the margin of profits for the same period of time?”

  Five years should be far enough back to notice any discrepancies. Unless Bates was a long-time mole, and Kelly didn’t know any reason why he should be, this whole agreement with the Murphys had started fairly recently. That meant she should be able to compare the reported salaries and margins of profit from the last year or so to those of the years prior.

  Also… well, it was a risk, but there was no harm in asking, was there?

  “Ben?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You do the accounting for the Murphys as well, don’t you?”

  Ben sighed into the phone, creating a burst of static. “Miss O’Gill, you know I have a strict nondisclosure policy on all of my clients. If I give you the information on the Murphys, my reputation is ruined.”

  “I understand, of course, Ben. But I don’t suppose you could tell me where they have you do their accounting? I know you don’t do it out of your office.”

  Ben ran an up-and-up accounting firm to maintain appearances and so always did his accounting for the various families at a location of their choosing where he could access their records and do his work out of that office until he was finished.

  “…Miss O’Gill.”

  “You just have to tell me where the office is, Ben, that’s all. I theoretically could get that location from anyone.”

  There was a pause, then Ben said, “I’ve just sent the information to your email account so that you can read it over. I’ve locked the PDFs with an encryption key, you ready for it?”

  Kelly grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper. “Okay, ready.”

  “23483, lowercase r, lowercase d, the ‘and’ symbol, capital L, exclamation point.”

  Kelly wrote it down, then paused. Looked at the code again.

  “You got that, Miss O’Gill?”

  2348. 3rd. &. L.

  Kelly’s breath caught in her throat. “Yes. Yes, I’ve got that Ben, thank you.”

  “Of course ma’am, I hope it’s helpful.”

  Ben hung up, and Kelly stared down at the numbers.

  2348, that was obviously the name of the building. 3rd & L, that was the corner. Lexington? There were a few streets whose names started with L that intersected with 3rd street. Not as many that would have a building numbered 2348 on them, though. That ought to narrow down her search.

  She pulled up Google on her computer, along with the email from Ben, and then called another trusted source: an old flame of Shane’s.

  “Kelly?”

  “Hey, David. Sorry to bother you. Remind me how much you charge for a hacking fee?”

  “Uh… Shane told you about that?”

  “He’s the heir to a mob kingpin, yes he told me about that. Figured it might come in handy some day and what do you know. It has.”

  There was a pause. “Does Shane know about this?”

  David and Shane, from what Kelly remembered, hadn’t ended things on the best of terms. Nothing worth sending a hit out on each other for, but enough that they weren’t going to be inviting one another to birthday parties any time soon.

  “No, he doesn’t. I’m not asking you for Shane or anything, this is something for myself, to do with the business.”

  She held her breath as she waited for David’s response. She’d always liked David, and he’d liked her. They got on well. She wasn’t holding out hope that he and Shane would get back together or anything, it wasn’t some great love story she’d been witnessing, but she’d enjoyed his company enough to knock back a few beers with him at the apartment after he and Shane were finished and she’d stopped by.

  “Okay,” David said. “But only if you don’t tell Shane, okay? He’s an entitled prick—no offense.”

  “None taken.” Shane’s track record with his boyfriends was not good. Probably had something to do with keeping them a secret from everybody.

  David gave her instructions that he’d send her an encrypted email. She’d reply to that with the information she had and what she wanted him to do. The email would send, and then both the sent and received email would vanish from her inbox.

  “So if you’ve got something to say, say it all in that one email, because you’re not going to get a second chance.”

  “Gotcha. And how soon do you think you could have this for me?”

  “Depends on the difficulty. Hopefully by tonight, you’ve caught me in between jobs. And no offense but if this is against another family… you guys don’t have as good security as you think you do.”

  “Neither does the Pentagon,” Kelly pointed out. Nobody’s security was as good as they thought it was.

  David laughed. “Fair enough. All right, signing off.”

  He hung up, and a moment later Kelly had her encrypted email.

  All right. So she had the PDFs from Ben that should give her the paper trail on Bates from the O’Gill end of things. David would get her the paperwork from the Murphy side of things. Now all she needed was to get down to the docks and have a look around. The Murphys were notorious about those docks, they practically had their entire operation stashed down there so they could watch over it like an overprotective chicken with her eggs.

  Time for a little field trip.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ivan moved quietly through the darkened docks, taking care to stay out of the pools of light and stick to the shadows.

  Pavel had not been a fan of this plan. “If you go out there and die, who will take over? The family will crumble.”

  “You’re named heir,” Ivan had replied. “There you go. You take over.”

  Pavel had thrown his hands up in the air. “See? See? That, that is what I am talking about, that sort of independence is what will get you killed.”

  “You’re the one who told me to go out and find a mentor.”

  “And you s
tumbled into one when you went to the wrong bar and are now looking into the possible beginnings of a gang war, sir, forgive me but this is not exactly what I thought we had in mind when we decided we were going to rebuild the family name.”

  “I’m still your boss, Pavel. If I decide I want to do this, I get to do this.”

  Pavel had folded his arms, glaring as Ivan had put on his holster and double-checked his ammo. But he hadn’t offered up any more objections—not verbal ones, anyway.

  Now Ivan was at the docks, and decidedly on the Murphy side of them.

  If he was caught, he’d have a hell of a time talking himself out of this one, and that was if the guards patrolling decided to ask questions first and shoot later. Not likely. Most people wouldn’t recognize him as the new head of the Sokolov family, but all they needed to see was that he was a guy who was creeping around, and they’d draw their own conclusions.

  The Murphys were kind of fanatical in their single-minded goal of owning the docks. But then, Ivan couldn’t judge, most mob families were out to get whatever power they could and squeeze everyone else out of the picture. It was convenient, in this case, because a lot of the Murphy operations like some of their offices were located right on the docks.

  It was a bit of a risk, but if he could get in and get a copy of some papers, it could seal the deal and tell him who the Murphys were using as a mole to stir up trouble with the O’Gills.

  He heard a noise to his left and ducked back further into the shadows, pressing himself up against the wall.

  For a long moment, he didn’t hear or see anything. It could be an animal or just his imagination. In the dark maze of shipping crates, small sounds became louder, pinging off the metal. The scuttle of a rat could turn into the scratching of a monster in the twisting shadows and corridors that the crates created. It was a simple trick the human mind played, and Ivan knew it, had been taught it almost from birth just as he’d been taught how to hold a gun, how to fire, how to break a man’s jaw. If you couldn’t see, your other senses would go into hyperawareness, but coupled with the paranoia of darkness, it also meant that each little sound was turned by your mind into something much more than it actually was.