Mafia Romance

by Aleatha Romig, Skye Warren, Annika Martin, Natasha Knight, Kaye Blue, Michelle St. James, Renee Rose, Parker S. Huntington, Alexis Abbott, Willow Winters

  She tousled his hair. “Hey, loser.”

  He gave her a lopsided grin. “Fuck you.”

  Bridget relished the distorted words. Someday he wouldn’t be able to speak at all.

  “Language!” their mother shouted.

  Bridget looked at the TV to see what Owen had been watching. Superman—the old one.

  “Where’s Dad?” she asked Owen.

  She forced herself to keep asking these questions, to wait while Owen answered, to maintain the sibling dynamic that made Owen feel like nothing had changed between them. Giving up their conversations, however stilted, would be a capitulation to the disease eating away at the neurons controlling his muscles. It meant leaving him alone in his mind, perfectly functioning and aware while his body stopped working bit by bit.

  “Working,” Owen said slowly.

  Bridget nodded. At least four days a week their father left his job at Reynolds Machine Shop and spent the next eight hours picking up fares for Uber to help pay for Owen’s treatments and medicine. It wasn’t nearly enough, but with the money Bridget earned getting Seamus O’Brien’s men out of trouble—money she said came from her salary at BRIC, Boston Refugee and Immigration Center, they managed everything Owen needed to be comfortable.

  She walked into the kitchen, inhaled the scent of pot roast, and kissed her mom’s cheek. “Can I help?”

  “You can sit down and put some meat on those bones,” her mother said, stirring green beans in a frying pan on the stove. “I thought you were going to miss dinner.”

  Bridget laughed on her way to the cupboard for the plates. “First of all, I’ve gained ten pounds since high school. Second, when have I ever missed dinner?”

  Her mother bent to remove a large serving bowl from one of the lower cupboards. “You were too skinny in high school, and you’ve missed dinner plenty.”

  Bridget resisted the urge to object. Her mother liked to have the last word. And besides, she was right: Bridget had missed dinner more times than she could count, first when she’d been working her way through law school and lately when she had to run out to spring one of Seamus’s men from jail.

  Bridget pulled a glass from the cupboard and filled it with tap water, watching as her mother moved around the kitchen, preparing dinner like she did every night of the week unless they ordered pizza or Chinese. Eileen Monaghan was still a beautiful woman, with shiny strawberry blond hair and a figure that was still proportional in its fullness.

  But she was tired. Bridget saw it in the downward slope of her shoulders, her eyes glazed with all the things she had to keep track of—the medication schedules and doctor’s appointments and the notes on Owen’s condition they kept for the specialists trying to staunch the advance of Owen’s disease.

  “Can I do anything to help?” Bridget asked.

  Her mom looked over and offered her a weary smile. “No thank you, love.”

  “Do I have time to change?”

  “Plenty of time.” Her mother pulled the roast from the oven. Bridget’s mouth watered and she realized she’d forgotten to eat lunch. “This needs to sit for ten minutes.”

  “Great. Be right back.”

  She returned to the living room and looked at Owen, his eyes glued to the TV where Christopher Reeve was flying through the sky, holding the dark haired woman who played Lois Lane. “Need anything before I change?”

  The shake of his head was almost imperceptible, but she’d gotten good at identifying his smallest movements. She touched his shoulder on her way to the stairs.

  The staircase was identical in every row house in the neighborhood—narrow and steep, built for function back when Irish families were immigrating to America in droves and a house like this one was considered a mansion. Her father had worked three jobs when he’d first come to Boston in the 1970s as a teenager, and he continued working three jobs until he had enough to ask Eileen Milligan to marry him with the deed of the house in his hand.

  Bridget could see them—young and full of hope, her father handsome and vital, her mother blushing and innocent—as she trailed her hands along the faded floral wallpaper leading to the second floor.

  She continued to her bedroom, at the end of the hall because, to hear her father tell it, he’d known even when she’d been born that it would be next to impossible for Bridget to sneak past her parents’ bedroom when she became a teenager. She’d laughed about until she’d gotten to high school and realized he’d been right.

  Her parents were progressive for their generation, but they were still Irish, and they hadn’t given a second thought to the possibility that Owen, his bedroom at the top of the stairs, might sneak out, an injustice Bridget would happily have traded for the one they were dealing with instead.

  There would be no sneaking out for Owen. No midnight liaisons with a girl from the neighborhood, no embarrassing returns to the front door by Paddy O’Sullivan, one of the neighborhood police who sometimes did locals a favor by returning their errant kids with just a warning.

  Bridget shut the door to her room, stripped off her skirt and blouse, and sat heavily on the bed. She knew a lot of people would consider it sad to be living at home at the age of twenty-seven, but Bridget wouldn’t have it any other way. It wasn’t just Owen’s illness, although she could never leave her parents to deal with it alone.

  She liked being at home. Liked her mother’s food and the camaraderie with Owen and her parents, liked the way she sometimes woke up after falling asleep on the couch to find that one of her parents had covered her with the old blanket on the back of the sofa.

  Nolan had liked it too. She’d been surprised by that, by him. She still remembered the way he’d looked the day he’d first introduced himself at the park. He’d carried himself with the kind of confidence only someone with a lifetime of money and privilege could have, the kind of confidence that said he knew he’d always be okay, knew he walked through life with the kind of safety net most people couldn’t even imagine.

  She’d thought he was a jerk—a gorgeous, articulate, confident jerk.

  But he hadn’t walked away even when she’d feigned disinterest, and eventually she’d discovered that underneath his good looks and golden-boy swagger was someone with a wicked sense of humor, one that he was more than happy to aim at himself. His self-deprecation had made her laugh, and before she knew it she’d spent her whole break sitting across from him at the Southside Diner, drinking bad coffee and picking at a cold grilled cheese sandwich while he talked about the perils and privileges of being a rich kid.

  It was only after two hours had passed that she’d realized he was nervous, that his stories and jokes and observations were just a cover. She’d waited for him to finish a story involving his mother, his stepfather, and an unfortunate incident involving the tap water in Mexico before asking a question of her own.

  Do you always talk so much to avoid really talking?

  He’d looked at her with surprise, stopped cold in the moment before a slow grin broke across his face. She closed her eyes, seeing him in her mind’s eye as he’d looked then, covering his chest with his hands as if he were wounded by her observation.

  Do you always make observations about relative strangers that make them rethink every one of their life choices?

  They’d both laughed and it had been like the clouds parting after a long rain, the sidewalks scrubbed clean, the air washed of its pollution until all she could smell was the salt of the sea blown in off the bay.

  She’d been lost to him then and there, she just hadn’t known it.

  It had begun an obsession that lasted nearly three years. Three years of fevered meetings in between her shifts at Southside and night classes at Suffolk University. They’d walked the streets of the city, stayed in the parks when the weather was nice until the cops kicked them out, rode the city bus into neighborhoods neither of them had ever seen just to keep talking.

  He’d taken her to visit his grandparents two streets over and they’d shaken their heads at
the surprise of it, the fact that they’d never, not once, run into each other in the neighborhood. She could only laugh when he introduced her to his best friend and she realized it was none other than Billy—who now preferred to be called Will—MacFarland, neighborhood clown and troublemaker.

  After that the three of them had been together more often than not, drinking cheap beer at The Chipp and engaging in debates at Southside that went long into the night. Nolan had loved her parents and Owen, had seemed perfectly comfortable in the tiny house filled with the smell of her mother’s cooking.

  Bridget had only met Nolan’s mother once, a brief and inauspicious meeting that’d lasted all of ten minutes. Bridget hadn’t known how it would end, but watching Nolan’s mother eye her with barely concealed disdain, answering her questions, designed to highlight what Moira Adams (nee Burke) already knew—that Bridget Monaghan of Southie was in no way good enough for her son—Bridget had known it was the beginning of the end. She just hadn’t expected it to end nearly a year later with a check for five-hundred thousand dollars and a promise never to see Nolan again.

  Bridget’s heart still constricted just thinking about it, and she stood, forcing herself to move, to pull on a pair of jeans and a sweater before walking to the mirror over her dresser to take down her hair.

  She could still see Nolan’s mother the day she’d appeared at Southside, could see the look of determination on her face as she offered Bridget a check she had no way of knowing Bridget needed to keep her brother alive.

  They’d found out about Owen’s illness two weeks earlier. It was the only secret she’d ever kept from Nolan, kept because she knew he would insist on helping, and because she hadn’t figured out how to navigate the waters of a rich boyfriend and a terminally ill sibling and money that would only become a wedge between them.

  She’d been sick after Nolan’s mom left, had gone to the bathroom and thrown up her lunch before returning from her break to continue her shift.

  She hadn’t taken the money right away, but in the end, she had taken it. Of course, Nolan’s mother assumed she was a greedy little gold digger who wanted the money for herself, but by then it hardly mattered what Moira Adams thought of her.

  A week later Bridget had convinced herself that Nolan was better off without her. They’d begun treatments for Owen, had begun to understand how devastating—financially and emotionally—his disease was going to be for their family. It had been easy to convince herself that however much she might have held Nolan back before, it was nothing compared to being chained to someone with a sick relative who was going to rack up millions in health care costs and years of emotional turmoil.

  And Nolan wouldn’t take no for an answer. She knew that about him already. Knew he would empty his trust fund to help her, would sacrifice everything, even his relationship with his mother and stepfather, to take care of her and Owen and her family.

  It was something she couldn’t allow. Something she didn’t want.

  She’d told him it was over the next day. Had told him she didn’t love him anymore for good measure, both to shut down his objections and to ensure he wouldn’t try again. She’d gone home and cried until her eyes were almost swollen shut, the ache in her chest like quicksand, threatening to bury her.

  When the sun finally came up, she’d showered and gotten dressed, stopped by the bank to deposit the check from Nolan’s mother, and gone to her shift at Southside.

  And that had been that.

  “Bridget! I said ten minutes not ten hours, love!”

  Her mother’s voice drifted up the stairs and down the hall. Bridget blinked, surprised to find that she was still staring at her reflection in the mirror. Surprised to find she almost didn’t recognize the tired, thin, sad-eyed girl staring back at her.

  She stepped away from the mirror. “Coming!”

  There was no point feeling sad. No point feeling guilty or tired or anything but determined.

  Her family—taking care of Owen—was all that mattered.

  Sorrow was a luxury she didn’t have.

  Chapter Three

  Christophe kept his jacket buttoned as he walked into the Black Cat. As always in these situations, he thought of Julien, his best friend and underboss, dead nearly three years. He should have found someone else, someone to watch his back, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Julien had been like a brother, had understood Christophe in a way few people did. Most importantly, he’d died protecting Charlotte, a gift Christophe would never be able to repay.

  He could have asked one of the other men to accompany him. Nico, Luca, and Farrell were out for reasons already discussed, but the Syndicate had thousands of men in their employ on the East Coast, hundreds of whom Christophe would have trusted to watch his back.

  But it hadn’t felt right. After months casing the Boston territory, instinct told him Seamus O’Brien would be even more threatened by a show of force from the Syndicate, that O’Brien might want to prove a point on principle.

  Confronting him alone was a risk, but Christophe was more than equipped to defend himself if the situation called for it, and O’Brien must know there would be hell to pay if he were to off one of the Syndicate’s leaders.

  All eyes turned his way when he stepped into the bar. He’d tried to dress for the occasion by wearing jeans and an old pair of shoes, even forgoing his usual four-hundred-dollar tailored shirt for a T-shirt, but some things couldn’t be changed. His shoes were still crafted by hand in Italy, albeit years ago, and the jacket was still custom made for him by one of the best tailors in Paris. He was still a Frenchman, born and bred, with a useless title and a boarding school education that had him rubbing elbows with the monarchy of several countries. People seemed to smell it on him, especially people like the ones in the Black Cat.

  He headed for the bar, ordered a bourbon from a middle-aged man with thinning hair and suspicious eyes, then started for the back of the long, dark room.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” the bartender called after him.

  Christophe ignored the question, continuing toward the back of the bar until a hand landed on his arm.

  He stopped walking and looked down at the hand, tracing it to its owner, a meaty man of about thirty with thick red hair and a pockmarked face.

  “You’ll want to remove that now,” Christophe said.

  “And you’ll want to turn around and walk the other way,” the man said.

  “I have an appointment,” Christophe said.

  “What’s your name?”

  The man’s hand was still on his arm. Christophe looked down at it before returning his eyes to the man’s face. “I’ll be happy to answer your questions—just as soon as you remove your hand.”

  The man’s laugh was abruptly cut off when Christophe smashed his glass into his face. He twisted the man’s arm behind his back and sighed as the man howled.

  “I don’t enjoy fighting,” Christophe said calmly. “But I’d prefer to honor this fine establishment’s no weapons rule, and there was the matter of the drink in my hand.”

  “Who are you?”

  The question was spoken with an Irish accent from the recesses of the bar, a smaller room off the larger one with faded red curtains that flanked the doorway.

  “Christophe Marchand.” His captive was twisting in his grip and Christophe had to resist the urge to unholster his weapon and point it at the man’s head, simply to get him to stop moving. “I’d like a few moments of your time, if you don’t mind.”

  A long pause descended over the bar, its patrons seeming to hold their breath as they waited for the reply from the back room.

  “Get his weapon, Mick,” said the accented voice.

  There was the scuffle of chair legs on linoleum and a second later a muscled man in jeans, a T-shirt, and a track jacket emerged from the shadows of the smaller room. His hair was shaved close to his scalp, his face round and flat.

  He studied Christophe. “Lift your arms.”

&nbs
p; Christophe gave the man in his arms a shove. He stumbled toward the bar.

  Christophe considered declining the order. It was insulting given his station, an affront to the manners the Syndicate worked so diligently to instill in their men as they remade the organization, turning it from the thuggery of years past to a new model of honor and intelligence.

  But it wasn’t worth the trouble. By all accounts, O’Brien was a prideful man. Christophe had taken great pains not to offend his ego up to this point, a strategy that had been calculated based on his research of the man and his own instincts about O’Brien’s psychology. Throwing it away now would only be in service to Christophe’s own ego, the truest mark of an undisciplined man.

  And Christophe was nothing if not disciplined.

  He lifted his arms and allowed Mick to pat him down. Mick removed the gun from the holster strapped to Christophe’s side under his jacket, then took a step back. “He’s clean.”

  “Come on then,” the voice said from the back room. “You’ve kicked up a bunch of shite. We may as well see it through.”

  Christophe glanced at Mick, then continued through the curtained doorway.

  The room was bigger than it looked from the front of the bar. Five tables were set up in the space, two of them littered with an assortment of beer bottles, half-filled drinking glasses, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and ash.

  Christophe forced himself not to grimace at the smell. Like many Parisians, he enjoyed a cigarette from time to time, but he disliked the smell that seeped into indoor surfaces and fabrics, and he saw the need to smoke indoors as indicative of a lack of willpower.

  Seamus O’Brien stood at the very back of the room, behind the largest of the tables, his back to the wall. On the face of it, he looked very much like his photograph—an unremarkable man in his sixties with the flared nose of a lifelong drinker, a full head of silver hair, and the form of someone valiantly trying to fight the onslaught of old age.