Consequence

by Rachel Higginson

He nodded. “Yeah, there’s a chance they could get out, but I’m pretty confident they’re hoping that chance is you.”

  “Are you ever going to tell me what your meeting with them was about?”

  He shook his head. “Never.”

  I couldn’t help but flinch at his bold honesty. Hadn’t he just had the conversation with me about wanting us to work? And he was still keeping secrets from me.

  Okay, maybe it was my fault for asking in front of a group, but something told me he would more likely tell a room crowded with people than ever let me find out. I had two options at this point. I could beat this dead horse. Or I could move on.

  Since my daughter’s and my life were at risk, I decided to move on.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “If we don’t get involved, the pakhan are likely to be sentenced for life or longer. So maybe we should spend less time on how to get them out and more time on how to keep them in?”

  Gus’s eyes grew huge. “A double cross? Are you serious?”

  “What’s left of the bratva? Nothing, right? It’s all but dismantled. There are a handful of loyal men that the FBI hasn’t touched yet. Maybe they don’t want them. Maybe they don’t need them. But either way, there has to be a way to get them out of our way and go on with our lives.”

  “You’re talking about getting people killed?” Frankie asked uncomfortably.

  “I’m talking about us not getting killed.”

  “You’d have to keep the pakhan convinced you were working for them,” Sayer added, thinking over my solution. “Until everything is finished, they’d need to be under the impression that you were still on their side, that things were still going in their favor.”

  Gus nodded and leaned forward. “If they got one whiff of what you were up to, you’d be dead. Juliet would be dead. We would all be dead.”

  “Give me something else then. I don’t even care if it means they get out and I’m stuck working for them for the rest of my life. If you have a solution, I’d love to hear it. The way I see it, this is our only option. We either figure out a way to lock them up for good or we’re going to end up there with them.”

  “This could work,” Sayer decided, his voice soft with conviction and the first signs of hope. “It’s nothing more than a long con.”

  I met Gus’s eyes and then Frankie’s, saving Sayer’s for last. “We’ve all done one or two of those before. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “When’s the last time you completed a job?” Gus asked, fear making his voice angry and tense.

  “Crenksy’s. Before Sayer did his stint.”

  “That was almost six years ago. You’re crazy to think you still have what it takes. A job like this is going to take finesse. Under perfect circumstances it would still be impossible to pull off and this is anything but perfect. You have a child to think about for god’s sake.”

  Leaning forward, I slapped my hand against the table and glowered at my friend. “I lied to you just now. About the job. It wasn’t six years ago, and it wasn’t Crensky’s. The last time I pulled a job was two days ago living in fucking Frisco, Colorado. The last five years of my life have been nothing but long con after long con. I live in a white-collar apartment and send my daughter to pre-kindergarten. I’m on time to dentist appointments and have a running tally of how much yogurt we have in the refrigerator constantly in the back of my mind. I work nine-to-five, fixing broken hot tubs and smiling politely at all the wealthy, ignorant assholes that come through Maggie’s. Does that sound anything like me? Does the Caroline from your memories smile politely and wave at other driver’s and give a flying fuck about small town politics? No, Augustus, the answer is no. Am I out of practice? There’s probably a good chance that I’d struggle to pick a lock the first go around. But I can lie my face off whenever I need to. That skill I never quit practicing. That’s a skill I’ve been honing, mastering, and taking control of since I left this goddamn city five years ago.”

  Gus pulled his hands back and mumbled a surprised, “Yeesh,” under his breath. “I get it. You don’t have to bite my head off.”

  “Let’s do this then,” Cage grinned, enjoying the tension at the table. “Let’s take down the rest of the Russian mafia.”

  His enthusiasm wasn’t exactly contagious. Mostly we just looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Yes, it was a decent plan—the best one we had—but it wasn’t going to be easy. We all had ties to the brotherhood. Especially Frankie and Gus. Even my dad would eventually be a problem.

  But it was more than that, harder to accomplish than it sounded. The brotherhood was our family too. We’d pledged our allegiance and wore the tattoos and scars to remind us. We’d looked up to Roman, Dymetrus, and Aleksander for most of our lives. We’d relied on some of these people, especially Atticus, to have our backs, to keep us alive.

  And now we were truly going to backstab them. We were going to promise security and freedom and loyalty—and deliver wrath instead.

  I turned to Sayer. “What do you think?”

  He knocked his knuckles on the table and gave me a slow, cocky smile. “I say, let’s burn this motherfucker to the ground.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sayer

  Ten Years Ago

  Mine.

  The word soared through my head, taking root in my chest and spiraling down to some unknown, hidden place inside me. My soul maybe? Was there a deeper, more permanent place inside the human body than the soul? A place that couldn’t be destroyed, even in death?

  Okay, that was overly dramatic, but that’s what she did to me. That’s what she’d been doing to me since I was thirteen years old. She made me an idiot. A dumb, mushy idiot.

  I smiled at her across the room. A happy idiot at least.

  Gus sat down next to me, a tumbler filled with vodka and ice in his hand. I glanced at him, noticing the pissed off expression on his face. “What’s with you?”

  He took a sip of vodka and pinched his eyebrows together. “I’m working on my scowl.”

  “You’re doing what?”

  “I’m brooding.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He took another sip of vodka and shrugged. “I’m brooding. I’ve heard it works with the ladies.”

  “I’m so lost.”

  He gestured across the club with his vodka. “It worked for you, didn’t it?”

  Realizing he meant, Caro I ducked my head to hide my smile. “I’m not broody.”

  “You’re the broodiest of all the broodys,” Gus accused. “You’ve got that smolder down to a science. You smolder, they come running.”

  I nodded at Caro who was deep in conversation with Frankie, arms waving wildly in front of her as they discussed something serious. “She did not come running.”

  Gus grinned, agreeing with me. “Because she was the long con. She didn’t run, but she walked straight into that trap.”

  Smirking at my friend, my brother, I said, “That’s the whole point, yeah? Finding the long con. The one that’s worth the time and effort and ground work.”

  He had no idea what I was talking about. His eyes were blank with confusion. “I’m pretty sure no girl is worth all that trouble.”

  His doubt made me smile wider. “You just haven’t met the right one.”

  “Listen to you,” he scoffed. “You sound like an old married guy.”

  What I didn’t tell him was that I had been waiting to be an old married guy since the day I met Caro. He knew I’d been after her for a while, but he had no idea how long the game had gone on. But now she was mine and she knew it too.

  We’d made things official the night we found incriminating evidence at Jack’s house. That had been the single best night of my life.

  Although now that things were solidified between us, I anticipated many more of those nights to come.

  Glancing at my wrist watch, I noticed how late it had gotten. I jumped to my feet and rolled my shoulders. Everything inside me wanted to go to Caro, wanted to sit with he
r the rest of the night, talk to her, touch her, look at her. But I had shit to do.

  “Where are you going?” Gus asked, seeing me make a move to leave.

  “I got a thing.”

  “What do you mean, you got a thing?” His eyes narrowed with suspicion. Gus saw too much for his own good. “The girls are here. The night is young. You have a thing here.” He pointed at the floor. “Right here.”

  I smiled at him, defusing whatever tension was brewing between us. “Relax, man. I’m coming back. I just need to step outside for a minute.”

  Gus looked around at the crowded room and acknowledged that it was busy. Since the first day I had met Gus, he’d understood that I needed space from crowds, that I was easily overwhelmed by a lot of people and most of all if thrust into a situation where I felt stressed out, I would need to remove myself from that situation until I cooled off.

  All lies. But we were all liars. All of us. Thieves, liars, and criminals. It was true that I kept to myself and my circle of friends was small. It was also true that I didn’t like a lot of people touching me, or the stifling, acrid air of bars or parties, but I wasn’t crippled by any of those things. They didn’t bother me so badly I needed to run away from them. They were more annoying than anything.

  It wasn’t a breath of fresh air I was after, it was an appointment. And I was already ten minutes late, on purpose obviously.

  I said goodbye to Gus and pushed my way out of the club onto the stifling summer streets of DC. A good friend would have felt guilty for lying, but Gus was just as bad. For instance, he led everyone to believe he was a party guy that loved to booze and smoke. He hated both things. He barely tolerated any kind of alcohol and I had never seen him truly drunk before—although he pretended as often as he could.

  He also pretended not to give a shit about generally everything. That was, of course, a carefully crafted illusion. Augustus Usenko cared about everything more than anybody I knew. It was going to get him in trouble one day.

  Until then, I’d let him have his lies. And he’d let me have mine.

  Casting a look over my shoulder to make sure nobody had followed me out, I shoved my hands into my pockets and headed for the corner. People were everywhere on this Friday night in July, filling the bars and taverns on either side of the street. Tourists and locals mingling together in a press of sweat and alcohol and carefree fuckery.

  I weaved through the clusters of drunken revelry, bumping hard with my shoulders when they didn’t get out of my way. These people stuck to the sidewalks and reputable establishments plying their refreshments this evening. But there were darker streets in this part of town, seedy alleys and scary side streets that herded them this way. They stayed under the neon lights, but I was part of the shadows. I was the wrong side of the tracks walking among them.

  If Caro was with me, she’d take her time picking pockets on the walk. She’d glide through the crush of the crowd, never seen, never noticed, and would come out the other side with enough money to pay rent with this month plus some.

  I didn’t have the patience or the dexterity to do what she did. Her graceful fingers were light as a feather and quick as lightning. I was all muscle and force, punching my way through things. I admired her skill, the absolute resourcefulness she survived on.

  The pakhan had called her The Fox. Not just because she could break into anything and not get caught, but because she had a playful side to thieving. They admired her penchant for souvenirs and taking something for herself. She amused them with her growing collection. Although she had no idea they paid so much attention to her.

  I turned down an alley not unlike the one where I’d first met Caro all those years ago. Ivy had spread along either side like a choking sickness, covering the rough brick altogether. It blended with the smell of dumpsters, the cloying scent overwhelming the too-humid air.

  My contact stood at the end of the alley, next to a ten-foot chain-link fence that had been cut and peeled back at the corner. Conlan O’Donnell waited for me, his hands tucked into his pockets like mine. His gaze darted around manically, looking for anyone possibly following me or eavesdropping. His shoulders were bunched up around his ears giving the lanky Irish giant the look of insecurity.

  He was anything but.

  “Where’s Luca?” I asked as way of greeting, my voice low.

  “Here,” Luca called from the shadows.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Conlan hissed with a lilting Irish accent. “How long ya been standing there?”

  “Long enough to know you whistle like a fuckin’ woman,” Luca snickered.

  I should have broken them up before they really got going, but I found them amusing. “Whistling, huh?”

  “Aye, sure, get it all out now,” Conlan growled. “When you two bastards make me wait for as long as I have, what d’ya think I’m going to do?”

  Luca and I shared a look. Neither of us had an answer, but we were entertained nonetheless. “Let’s get down to it then,” I suggested. “Since we’ve apparently taken up enough of your time.”

  Conlan’s top lip pulled back, revealing white, straight teeth that gleamed in the darkness. “Word on the street is that Yakuza are going to make a power play sometime next month. They want a stronger foothold in the city. They want the ports. They want a piece of the pie.”

  Luca turned his head and spit on the ground. “They can want it all they want, doesn’t mean they’re going to get it.”

  “There is someone,” Conlan went on, ignoring the angry Italian. “If they get what they want, it could be worth reaching out to him. He’s like us.”

  Conlan meant a future boss.

  Luca and I glanced over our shoulders at the same time, anxious that the subject of our meeting was out in the open. This city had spies everywhere, eyes and ears on every corner, down every alley. We couldn’t trust anyone.

  Not even each other.

  “What’s his name?” I asked, curious about this Japanese kid I’d never heard about. Although I’d been busy lately. Jack wasn’t the only traitor in the brotherhood that had needed sniffing out. The FBI were coming down hard on the Russians. It was a precarious time in our organization.

  And a perfect time for Yakuza to move in to the city if they were going to.

  “Ryuu Oshiro,” Conlan explained. “His friends call him Ry.”

  “Three pieces,” Luca reminded us. “The pie has three pieces. Italians, Irish, Russians. We each get a slice. And we keep the peace for as long as we last. Business works better together, but also with people you know. We don’t know this guy. We don’t know what he’s about.”

  Conlan raised his hands in surrender. “I’m just giving you my report. I didn’t suggest we take him out for coffee for Christ’s sake.”

  “We’ll see what happens with the Yakuza and then decide,” I told them, my voice suggesting they shouldn’t argue with me. “If we need him, we’re not going to be stupid about it.”

  Luca nodded, seeing reason. “Yeah, all right. We’ll see what happens.”

  That meant the Italians were going to do whatever it took to keep Yakuza out. We’d see how that panned out for them. They’d tried to keep the Russians out too. And the Irish.

  It was time for the Italians to learn how to share.

  “What else?” I asked. We moved onto more technical details. The three of us were working our way up the ranks of our respective families with one goal in mind—to take them over. Conlan was the farthest along, already a member of the small inner circle with his boss. Luca and I were getting there. Slowly, surely, we were working our way through the ranks of soldiers and underbosses and men that would try to kill us someday, but we were getting there.

  I loathed working with either of them. We weren’t necessarily friends. Friends gave a flying fuck about each other.

  We didn’t. I had real friends. And I had real enemies. These two men were more like the necessary evil I tolerated to get what I wanted.

  We filled in the remaining
ten minutes with updates and job details. The Irish were taking on double the shipments of guns and working with Cubans coming down from New York. The Italians had internal problems with another family wanting a piece of DC. And I shared our latest infiltration of FBI informants.

  “The FBI have a hard-on for your bosses,” Luca snickered. “They won’t leave you alone.”

  “It’s because you went after the politicians,” Conlan concluded. “They were corrupt enough before you decided to pull the puppet strings.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I remembered watching Fat Jack die, seeing a kid named Ronnie dragged away by the two spies and beaten to death. I repressed a shiver and kept those details to myself. “Maybe we let Yakuza have what they want? Take some of the pressure off us.”

  “Off you,” Luca clarified. “They’re not taking anything of mine. If you want to let them in, be my guest.”

  Conlan shrugged. “Like you said, we’ll let it play out. See what happens.”

  I took a few steps backward, ending the meeting. When we started repeating things it meant there was nothing new to say. “Next week.”

  Luca followed me, falling into pace with me. He raised a hand to Conlan who disappeared through the hole in the fence. “I’ve heard there’s a new agent that blames the Russians for his sister’s death. It’s personal for him. He’s not going to let it go.”

  “What’s his name?”

  We paused at a nearly hidden, rust red door. “Payne,” Luca offered. “Mason Payne. I’ve heard it said he’ll do anything to bring the Russians down.”

  “I don’t like to hear that,” I told him honestly.

  Luca nodded sympathetically. “You’re not really Russian anyway.”

  I understood what he meant. I wasn’t tied to the Russians in the same way that Luca was to the Italians and Conlan to the Irish. They’d been born into their families. They had blood in the game. I didn’t.

  If I belonged anywhere it was with the Irish. Only I had no interest in them. I’d handed them over to Conlan a long time ago. And he would lead them well one day. Sure, they didn’t know it yet. But that was all part of the plan.