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

  Sometimes you had to fight for what you wanted.

  Sometimes you had to bleed for it.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Bridget stared out the tiny window near her cubicle at BRIC, thinking about her conversation with Nolan at the park the night before. She still wasn’t sure telling him how she felt had been the right thing to do, that it wouldn’t cause him more pain when he learned about the money she’d taken from his mother. The time they’d spent together over the past few weeks should have made her less conflicted about the issue. She knew Nolan loved her, knew he understood how much Owen meant to her, but she’d also seen the pain in his eyes—four years of pain that had been caused by her. It would be naive to think that that would just go away, that Nolan would just forgive and forget the decision she’d made that had caused him so much suffering. She had no doubt he’d say he forgave her, but she was less sure than ever he would actually be able to forget.

  She looked at the streets beyond the window, wondering whether or not Seamus had aborted the robbery at Harbor Trust. As of the night before, it was still on, and she’d spent another sleepless night tossing and turning, worrying about Will and praying Seamus would call the whole thing off. In a perfect world he would run, but at this point she would settle for a cancellation of the bank robbery and the knowledge that Will was safe.

  Nolan had told her that the people he was working with to overthrow Seamus would make an anonymous tip to BPD if Seamus hadn’t called off the job by this morning. If that happened, BPD would set up a sting at Harbor Trust. They would be waiting for Will and the other men Seamus sent to do his dirty work, and while Nolan promised Will wouldn’t be charged if he was picked up, she knew that assumed he made it out alive.

  She’d wanted to call or text Nolan, or even Will, that morning for an update, but that would have been dangerous given Seamus’s outburst the day before and what they now knew about his understanding of technology. She didn’t believe he had the knowledge to hack their phones himself, but she was no longer certain he wasn’t smart enough to hire someone else to do it.

  She stood, grabbed her coffee cup, and walked to the tiny break room for another cup of coffee. She should have made herbal tea instead but she was torn between exhaustion and nervous energy that made her want to crawl out of her skin.

  She poured coffee into her cup and walked back to her desk, returning her eyes to the window.

  “Hey.” She looked up to find Sheridan standing next to her cubicle. “You should go home.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Sheridan smiled. “You look like shit, and I say that with love. Take your work with you if it’ll make you feel better, but get out of here. We all need a day now and then. You’re not doing any good to anybody, especially yourself, by being here today.”

  Bridget checked her instinct to object. Blowing off work wasn’t her style. She was a plodder, a buckle-down and pull-up-your-bootstraps worker. But the thought of spending another six hours under the fluorescent lights at BRIC, her mind turning circles over everything that might be happening with Will, made her want to sleep for a thousand years.

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t be here today.” She rose to her feet and gave Sheridan a quick hug. “Thanks.”

  “Of course,” Sheridan said. “Call me if you need anything.”

  Bridget loved Sheridan for her unconditional support. She was a great boss, but she was a friend too, the kind who didn’t ask too many questions and didn’t take it personally if Bridget didn’t spill her guts, unlike Rachel who would dig and dig until Bridget felt like one big open wound.

  Bridget gathered her things and headed outside. She stopped at her car and fed the meter with the rest of her change. She might get a ticket anyway, depending on how long she was gone, but she couldn’t worry about that right now.

  She crossed the street and headed downtown, tucking her chin into her scarf. Christmas was less than two weeks away, the first significant snow due to fall any minute now. She said a silent prayer that the situation with Seamus would be over by then, that he would be on the run or removed, that her debt would be cleared.

  Do you think these sacrifices are fair?

  She finally knew the answer: they hadn’t been fair—to her or to her family, who would be left to deal with the fallout if she were hurt or arrested or forced into indentured servitude at the Playpen because of her work with Seamus.

  She would find another part-time job, one that didn’t put her behind the eight ball every day. It wouldn’t bring in as much money, but every little bit helped, and she owed it to Owen and her parents—not to mention herself—to limit their exposure to more crisis.

  She came to Millennium Tower and entered the building. A different guard was behind the desk this time, and she gave her name and waited while he called up to Nolan’s apartment. She hadn’t even been sure he was home, but she had a feeling he was as anxious as she was about the robbery and Will’s safety.

  The guard hung up the phone and handed her the sign-in sheet. “Need you to sign in.”

  When she was done, he pulled the clipboard behind the desk. “You can go on up.”

  She took the elevator to the fifty-third floor and headed to Nolan’s door. She knocked and he opened the door a moment later.

  “Hey.” Concern colored his eyes. “Everything okay?”

  “As okay as it can be,” she said. “I just… I couldn’t sit around at work waiting to find out what was going on.”

  He seemed to hesitate in the moment before he stood back to open the door wider. “I understand. Come in.”

  She stepped into the hall and waited for him to lead the way into his living room, shining with harsh December light at the end of the corridor. The first thing that struck her when they emerged into the expansive room was the wall of glass, the view of the city, and beyond it, the water.

  The second was the man standing near the window.

  His dark hair was thick and full, his face striking, with an elegant nose and a full mouth. He was wearing gray trousers, a crisp white button-down visible beneath a navy jacket that fit like it was made for him.

  He walked toward her and extended his hand. “Christophe Marchand. You must be Bridget.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Nolan read the look of surprise on Bridget’s face as she shook Marchand’s hand. It wasn’t the way Nolan had expected to introduce Bridget to the people he’d been working with to bring down Seamus, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

  “Christophe is a member of the Syndicate,” Nolan said. “A partner in its leadership actually.”

  Bridget looked at Christophe. “I thought the Syndicate was dead.”

  “It is, in a manner of speaking,” he said. “My partners and I have remade it, reorganized it you might say.”

  “Reorganized it how?”

  She was still in her scarf and coat, her bag slung over one shoulder. Nolan moved toward her, took the bag, and helped her slip her coat from her shoulders.

  “The old model was one of thuggery,” Marchand explained. “We like to think the new model is more… refined.”

  “A refined mob?”

  A smile touched Marchand’s mouth. “A bit of an oxymoron, I know, but doing away with the old terminology is part of the strategy. Organized crime, as I’m sure you know, has always been in existence. Some would even argue it’s been made legal in certain sectors.”

  Nolan thought about the corruption in politics and the financial sector, both of which allowed for practices that were ethically questionable but made legal by those who sought to protect their own interests.

  Was it any more palatable because the immorality had been made lawful?

  “You’re the ones working with Nolan to get rid of Seamus,” Bridget said.

  Marchand nodded.

  She looked at him a second longer, as if she were filing away the information for later, then turned to Nolan. “What’s the word?”

  �
��None.” He was relieved she was willing to table the conversation about the Syndicate, but he wished he had better news about Will and the bank job. “BPD has men stationed around the bank, but it’s been quiet so far.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Are the BPD guys staying out of sight? Because Seamus’s guys won’t go through with it if they think they’ve been compromised.”

  Nolan wanted to believe it was true, but he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. He’d expected Seamus to cancel the job after he found out his informants at BPD had been outed, but last Nolan had heard from Will the night before, the job was still on.

  “BPD understands the situation,” Christophe said. “They won’t make a move on the bank until O’Brien’s men are inside and the robbery is underway.”

  “Any word from Will?” Bridget asked Nolan.

  “He’s been incommunicado since last night.”

  She nodded. “I guess that’s no surprise. Seamus might even have confiscated their phones. He was off the rails yesterday. He’s going to be more paranoid than ever, especially if he’s ballsy enough to go through with the job.”

  “I thought the same thing,” Nolan said. “All we can do is wait. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water? Vodka?”

  She smiled. “I’ve had enough coffee to keep me up for a week. Vodka sounds good, but since it’s only eleven in the morning, I should probably take the water.”

  “Have a seat and make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I’ll get it for you.”

  He went into the kitchen for the water and returned with it a minute later. He handed it to her and watched as she studied Marchand with naked curiosity.

  “Nolan said Will would have a place with you if Seamus runs,” she said. “Is that true?”

  “We attempt to retain all of the men prepared to adhere to our model,” Christophe said.

  “Which is?”

  “A movement away from violence and towards new sources of revenue and a total cessation of anything involving the trafficking of humans, among other things.”

  Bridget looked horrified. “Seamus is involved in trafficking?”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Christophe said. “But organized crime as a whole has engaged in trafficking, as you know from your work.”

  Nolan knew Marchand was referring to the immigrants Bridget represented who paid a small fortune to escape their violent countries only to be forced into slavery and prostitution. Nolan could tell from her troubled expression that she hadn’t considered the possibility that Seamus was involved in such sordid business.

  “How do you eliminate violence in organized crime?” she asked.

  Nolan almost smiled. This was his Bridget: her mind always turning, digging for more information, filtering and sorting, categorizing it for use later.

  “Violence will never be entirely removed from the business,” Christophe said. “It seems to be a byproduct of both the people who gravitate to it and the revenue streams required to keep it running. But the majority of violence results from the more unsavory practices that have historically been cornerstones of organized crime. We hope that by replacing some of them, by instituting new expectations, we can limit the violence as well.”

  She was opening her mouth to ask another question when Nolan’s phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket, read the breaking news from a local station, and cursed.

  Bridget stood. “What is it?”

  Nolan clicked on the article and skimmed the short news story, an alert at the bottom of the page reading THIS IS A BREAKING STORY AND WILL BE UPDATED AS IT DEVELOPS.

  He looked up. “A robbery has been reported at the Harbor Trust on Seaport.”

  “Seaport?” Bridget shook her head. “What about Broadway?”

  Nolan looked at Christophe. “Good question.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Bridget waited for the light to change from red to green and pulled through the intersection, resisting the urge to pull over and be sick. She’d spent the last twenty-four hours in a state of panic, her heart racing, stomach in upheaval.

  The men who’d robbed the Harbor Trust branch on Seaport Boulevard had been wearing masks and had gotten away with over eight-hundred-thousand dollars. It wasn’t the money that bothered her—banks were insured against robbery—it was that a guard had been shot in a gunfight with the perpetrators. That and the fact that a gunfight meant the possibility of others being injured, namely Will. Nolan hadn’t heard from him since the night before the robbery. Neither had Bridget.

  The only upside to the call she’d gotten from Seamus demanding her immediate presence at the Cat was the possibility that she would see Will and finally know he was okay.

  She hadn’t called Nolan to tell him she was on her way to the bar, both because of their agreement to stay off their phones and because she didn’t want him to worry, or worse yet, argue that she shouldn’t go. The situation was volatile enough as it was.

  She pulled into the Cat’s parking lot and stepped out of her car. She’d already run down all the possible reasons Seamus wanted to see her: he knew she’d been collaborating with Nolan and Will, he was going to call in her debt to teach her a lesson, he was going to put a bullet in her head then and there to make a point that no one was above retribution if they were rats.

  Running would only make things worse. In the event that she was wrong, Seamus would come for her, assuming her guilt. And he wouldn’t stop until she was at the bottom of the harbor.

  It was okay. Whatever happened, it would be okay. Nolan would make sure Owen and her parents were taken care, and she’d be dead and unable to object.

  She was rounding the corner of the building when a cop almost barreled into her turning the same corner. She stepped back and three more uniformed officers followed, their faces grim.

  That was when she heard the shouting.

  “You mother-fecking maggots are going to regret this! I’ll have every one of your badges when this is all over. Every fecking one!” Seamus screamed.

  She was so shocked by the display playing out in front of her that she could only stand and stare as two officers hauled Seamus out of the Cat to a black and white by the curb, its lights spinning red and blue, three more cars cordoning off the street in front of the bar.

  There were more uniforms than she could count, not to mention several men wearing black windbreakers, FBI spelled out in white on the back, all of them coming and going, carrying boxes out of the Cat to the waiting squad cars.

  Seamus caught sight of her, his eyes bulging. “Monaghan!” he barked. “Get your ass to the station and get ready to bail me out. These feckers don’t have shite on me!” He glared at them. “You hear that motherfeckers? You don’t have shite! I’ll be back here having a cold one by tonight.”

  They stuffed him into one of the squad cars with expressions that varied from boredom to fear, and Bridget stepped back to let one of the Feds by with a box in his hands.

  “You his lawyer?” one of the cops asked her.

  “I don’t… I don’t know.” Seamus was in the car with the windows rolled up, probably unable to hear over the police activity.

  “He’s going to D4 for processing,” the cop said.

  She nodded and backed away, tearing her eyes from the scene to walk to her car.

  A cool voice in her head, her lawyer voice, was telling her this was all wrong. She should go inside the Cat, see if any of Seamus’s men were there to tell her what had happened, what the cops and Feds had been doing and whether they’d violated protocols, things Seamus could use later to fight any charges against him. She should approach the car where Seamus was still sitting by the curb, tell him not to say a word.

  But her mind was spinning, running though her own culpability and the fact that Will was nowhere to be seen. It was all she could do to get to the car and shut the door.

  She leaned her head against the steering wheel and forced herself to take deep breaths. Then she did the thing she’d wanted to do but hadn’t
done in the weeks since Nolan had reappeared in her life, since he’d turned up at the Cat.

  She called him.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Nolan sat at the table in the back room of the Cat. It had been four days since Seamus’s arrest and release on bail, three since Will had finally contacted him to say he was alive and well.

  The robbery hadn’t gone as planned. Seamus’s strategy—to hit another branch of Harbor Trust in case his plans had been compromised—had been sound. Corporate banks tended to follow the same procedures for storing their cash and dealing with robberies, allowing him to make use of the information he’d gathered while casing the branch on Broadway.

  But the strategy hadn’t accounted for the fact that the security guard at the Seaport branch was an off-duty cop with a history of bad conduct and something to prove. He’d tried to prove it by turning the bank into a firing range in spite of the customers on the floor, screaming in fear for their lives.

  The guard had lived, but just barely, a fact that had done nothing to soothe the BPD’s bloodlust for Seamus.

  It didn’t matter that Bridget doubted the charges against Seamus would stick—plans to rob one bank didn’t make you guilty of robbing another, and no evidence of the robbery had been found in either the Cat or Seamus’s house. The laptop hadn’t been in residence, probably a product of Seamus’s paranoia after his informants at BPD were compromised.

  Bridget said she doubted the DA would bring it to trial without new evidence, a legal assessment Nolan shared.

  It was hard not to feel like they were back where they started, but Christophe had assured him the Feds were still working on the data Nolan had gotten off Seamus’s laptop. Nolan didn’t doubt they wouldn’t hesitate to bring federal charges against Seamus if they had even a shot in hell of making them stick—the division between local cops and Feds tended to disappear when one of them was injured or killed—but it was anybody’s guess how long that would take. In the meantime, Bridget was still between a rock and a hard place, Will and Nolan tiptoeing around Seamus, who was more volatile and paranoid than ever.