by V Vee
A soft smile came to my lips as I thought about Carrick.
I’d been in love with him for as long as I could remember. I mean, as the only McCarthy daughter I’d pretty much spent much of my time growing up in love with one or more of the men under my father’s—and now my eldest brother’s—employ. They were all “bad” men who all had a sliver of goodness within them. I wasn’t saying they were knights in shining armor, knights who killed but had a heart of gold deep inside, simply waiting for the right woman to show them they were worthy of love and affection. No. I’d grown up around men who had a pool of darkness inside of them so deep there was no bottom. And while they had a sliver, and I do mean a sliver of good resting in their black hearts, it was a fraction that they devoted wholly to the people of Baltimore. The ones whom the clan deemed worthy.
I was one such person.
It hadn’t taken much for me to know I was adopted when I was growing up. I mean, I was the only black person in my family. Among my eight brothers, only Bailey had skin that looked as if it had a permanent tan. Bailey and I were the two youngest and though seven years separated us, he’d always been my closest friend. He’d stood up for me more than once as a kid, telling people he was just as black as I was, but that he’d had a horrible accident with some bleach when he was five and that was the only reason his skin wasn’t as dark.
The crazy thing was, more than one person had believed him.
My brothers had always protected me. Almost to the detriment of my love life. They’d watched over me. Guided me. Cared for me. Instructed me. Scolded me. I couldn’t have asked for better siblings. And yet…
I’d suffered tragedy and horror in spite of all their hovering.
Uncle Lennox—though I didn’t want to keep thinking of him that way, not with the things he’d said over a year ago, just before Drew killed him—had been family. He’d been trusted. Him and his sons. No one had known, least of all me, that he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’d suffered great atrocities at his hands. Ones that none of my brothers knew about.
Ones that not even my husband was aware of.
Ones I would have to bear the scars of until my dying day.
And because I’d attempted to take matters into my own hands, I’d inadvertently started a war.
I knocked rapidly, in a preapproved rhythm, on the door of the building I’d driven to and waited for someone to open it. Once it was, I stared up at the man who looked down at me.
“Thought I told you not to come back,” he said.
I shook my head, then nodded. I wasn’t exactly sure why Sigvaldi Thordsson induced such fear in me, but he did. Which was saying something. I’d grown up being cared for and watching “The Irishman”, a man who was feared by all…
Everyone except Sigvaldi “Sig” Thordsson, the Viking. The Norseman. The only one I trusted to help me solve my little situation without my having to get too involved.
“I-I kn-know, Sig, but… I got another letter,” I stammered, then reached into my purse, and handed him the rumpled letter that had been delivered to the estate that morning.
Sig grunted then accepted the handwritten missive. He jerked his head for me to come in and I did without hesitation.
Every time I stepped foot into Sig’s domain I felt as if I could hear the screams and pleas for help from every man he’d ever dragged or welcomed within its walls in order to torture, beat, and maim information out of them. While Sig had promised me he never committed such acts against a woman, I wasn’t so sure that he didn’t have a woman on his staff who was just as brutal, just as lethal as he was.
My brother did, even if he wasn’t aware of it just yet, and while she wasn’t on his staff, my sister-in-law Kyra was even scarier than Drew was.
“Seems like this jerkoff wants someone to find him and put him down,” Sig muttered as he walked past me and headed over to his bank of computers. I didn’t say anything, just stood in the middle of the room and watched as he worked. The room was quiet, nothing but the sound of the keyboard keys clacking filled the air. My phone vibrated in my pocket and my eyes widened when I realized that I’d forgotten to turn it off. Now anyone—namely Carrick and Drew—would be able to find my location.
Sig paused and glanced at me over his shoulder.
“Turn it off,” he stated firmly, then returned his attention back to the screens.
I nodded, then did what he asked without looking to see who had messaged me. Whomever it was could wait. This was much more important.
After long moments, Sig rose and stood up to his full 6’6” inch height. I looked up at him, taking in his platinum blond hair, his bushy beard, his chiseled jawline, and his massive arms and frame. Had I not been hopelessly in love with Carrick I might have lusted over Sigvaldi, but as it was, he was simply a means to an end. A tool I needed to use in order to get this demon from hell off my back.
“He’s gone.”
I blinked stupidly at Sig and shook my head.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” I croaked out.
“I mean he gave my guys the slip. Not exactly sure how he did that shit, I employ some of the best, and no one gets away from a Viking for too long, but still…” Sig grunted, and I could hear the anger in just that noise. “He ain’t where he’s supposed to be, which means the fucker just might be on his way here, if he ain’t here already.”
I waved my hands back and forth in a gesture of denial as I took a few steps away from Sig. It couldn’t be. There was no way. I’d paid him. I’d given him what he wanted. I’d been giving him what he wanted for years. How the fuck could he be gone? How the fuck could he be on his way to Baltimore?
B-More was my home. My family’s territory. We started wars and battles that we know we could win. But now…
“W-what do I do, Sig?”
Sig sighed and ran the fingers of his left hand, which contained a wedding ring on the third finger, through his long blond hair. After a while of no response, he put his hands on his hips and gave me a sad, but stern look.
“Go tell your brother that a war is coming. You ain’t gotta tell him you are a part of it. You ain’t even gotta tell him where it’s coming from, but Niamh, you have to tell him, before this asshole makes good on his threat and wipes out the entire McCarthy clan.”
My entire body trembled as I nodded, turned for the door, and headed towards it on shaky legs, only stopping when Sig called my name.
“I’ll do what I can to help. I’ll even get Ren to give me a hand, but we can only do so much. I’m afraid that all these years of keeping secrets may have finally caught up to us all.”
And with that I gave one final nod and headed out the door, climbed straight into my car, and headed for the nail salon. I knew I had to warn Drew and Carrick, but I needed to think first. I needed to make a plan. I needed to prepare myself for what was about to happen.
The man who’d helped my uncle traffick young black girls for decades had taken over the operation. The man who’d violated my body and my trust more times than I could talk, along with my now dead uncle, was coming to Baltimore to take what he thought was rightfully his. The man who had been my father’s right hand and had served as my brother’s temporary second until he’d been sent to Ireland, by the very despot who’d worked with him to kidnap and sell thousands of young girls. And now he was back to declare war on my family. He was back to kill, destroy, and maim anyone who stood in his way of getting what he’d always wanted.
Clan McCarthy…
And me…
His child bride.
Chapter Five
Manus- The Monster
I watched Michele and laughed when she glared at our daughter. I was supposed to be out the door and over to the main house on the estate fifteen minutes ago, but I couldn’t seem to pull myself away from one of my favorite pastimes. Watching Michele as she tried to navigate the new role she found herself in. That of being a mother.
I’d been surprised when she’d told me she was going
to have my baby. I’d been stunned when she’d told me she intended to keep it. But I’d been ecstatic when she asked me if I wanted to raise our child—our daughter—with her. Of course I’d said yes. I’d been raised in what essentially amounted to an orphanage within Clan McCarthy. No child who was an orphan, or had been abandoned, like me, was left without being cared for when they were a member of the clan. And while my father had served as Enforcer for the previous Irishman, Andrew’s father, Cassidy, when he’d died in a shootout between the Irish and the Triads, my mother, Eileen, had been offered shelter, a pension, and everything else a selfish bitch like her could have ever asked for.
She’d taken the money, sold the house, and dropped me off on the doorsteps of the McCarthy estate, before taking off to parts unknown.
I didn’t miss the bitch, but I did wonder, every so often, how different my life would have been if she had stuck around.
But as I watched Michele attempt to convince our daughter, Dahlia, to eat the baby food she was holding out on a spoon, I knew I didn’t regret the decisions which had brought me to where I was. I was happy. I was content.
Which meant something was fucking wrong.
It had been quiet. Too goddamn quiet, on the streets of Baltimore. Baltimore was never quiet. It was never at rest. There was never peace, and for some reason that eased and soothed those of us who moved among the shadows. But for the last few months, there had been a sort of uneasy truce between all of the gangs and criminal organizations, but no one had known who was behind it.
And no one wanted to ask questions.
But with the delivery of Jenafer’s body to Andrew and Kyra the day before I knew that truce was over, and it was time to kick down doors and put bullets in foreheads in order to obtain the fucking information we needed.
“Don’t you even think about it,” Michele warned Dahlia, pointing at the little girl whose lips were pursed as if she were about to spit the mashed bananas back into her mother’s face.
I covered my mouth, in order to hold back a snort of laughter, when Dahlia simply tilted her head to the side—a move she’d picked up from her mother—and with an impish twinkle in her eyes, simply widened her mouth and let her food slide down her tongue and plop down on the top of the high chair. When Michele tossed up her hands and let out an exasperated sigh, I walked into the kitchen completely, scooped up my baby girl, and headed to the refrigerator. I’d offered to make Dahlia breakfast, but Michele had insisted that she wanted to be the one who did it.
“I can do it Manus,” Michele protested, though she didn’t move.
“It’s alright, baby. I got it,” I told her, pulling out the carton of strawberries and grabbing a few leaves of kale. I saw Dahlia’s eyes widen before she started to clap her tiny hands.
Our daughter was a very special little lady. She hadn’t spit out the bananas because she didn’t like fruit, as a matter of fact, she loved them, but little Dahlia had a little too much of her mother and I in her. Even though she was our child and we were her parents, she didn’t trust us when it came to her food. She would only eat things she could watch being made. And while it made me proud as her father—no one was going to be drugging my little girl when she got older—at the same time I felt bad for Michele who was so used to being on the go with Kyra, that stopping to puree food just didn’t sit right with her. I knew she would eventually do it, though she doubted herself constantly, Michele was an amazing mother and caretaker—and a badass marksman—but it would take her a little time.
I figured that by the time Dahlia was two, Michele would be a pro, and it would be me who was left floundering.
I wasn’t able to keep musing on that when the phone rang, our Google Home™ announcing who it was that was calling us.
“Phone call from, Carrick O’Sullivan.”
“I got it,” Michele said, and answered the phone, Carrick’s worried tone coming through the speakers of our electronic device.
“M & M,” he said, using the nickname Kyra had given to Michele and I. “I got a problem. Nia was supposed to be going to get her nails done, but her phone picked her up deep in Viking country.”
I stiffened and turned to look at Michele. While there was no beef between the Irish and the Norse, the Vikings and the Irish mob had a definite, unspoken rule:
Stay where you fucking belong.
“What the fuck would she go out there?” Michele asked, heading over to the wall and pressing on the corner of the framed painting of two dogs pressing their noses together in a doggy kiss. The wall where the painting hung detached and slid back into the panel of the wall next to it, as a cache of weapons, all arranged, positioned, and resting in a display case slid forward on a track.
We’d paid extra to have one of those hidden compartments installed in every room of the house. And even more to make sure it wouldn’t be picked up using a metal detector should the police ever raid our home, but in that moment, I didn’t regret it. Not one bit.
“I have no goddamn clue. All I know is, she went out there, I sent her a text message to see why, then her phone went off. I lost her location and her phone hasn’t turned back on yet. I ain’t got no idea where the fuck she is now or if she’s even okay.”
I shook my head and picked up the Baby Bjorn™, settling Dahlia within the baby harness strapped across my chest. I walked up behind my woman and grabbed my own weapons, sticking them in various places on my body, and in the bag Michele held for me, before I headed with her over to the garage door. I picked up my phone, swapping the call with Carrick from the Google device back to my cell and walked out to the bulletproof SUV that Michele was starting up.
“Boss?” I asked Carrick.
“I just called him. He was about to go and take care of something to do with Jenafer but he’s on his way back. Said to meet him in the basement before we do anything else.”
“Got it,” I said, then hung up the phone without another word. I placed Dahlia down in her car seat, then slid the harness off my shoulders. Climbing into the front seat, my door was barely closed, the garage door barely open, before Michele was speeding down our driveway and heading towards the main house.
“I knew some shit was about to go down,” Michele said, her teeth clenched.
I simply nodded. I’d just been thinking about how quiet the streets were and that meant something was brewing.
It looked like it was finally about to spill over.
Chapter Six
Andrew- The Irishman
“Who. The. FUCK… let my goddamn sister go out to Viking country?!” I yelled, spittle flying from my lips. I didn’t give two shits about that. I wanted an answer to my question.
When no one responded, I picked up my gun and pointed it at Oisin. He’d been with Clan McCarthy since he was a wee lad pickpocketing on the streets of Dover, Colorado. My father and uncle, Knox, had been in the city initiating a deal with a member of Congress there, when young Oisin had attempted to lift my uncle Knox’s wallet. Before Oisin could blink, my uncle had him pinned to the brick wall in the alley, a knife against his throat. My father had simply chuckled, and asked Oisin if he wanted to be a part of a family. When Oisin had agreed, my father had brought him back to Baltimore.
I’d watched Oisin grow up. It would hurt me to have to kill him…
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender and shook his head, though I was proud of him for not whimpering and pleading for his life.
Fuck. I was going to hate to see him go.
“Boss. Swear on your father Cassidy’s grave, I wasn’t assigned to Niamh today,” he stated.
I narrowed my eyes at him, unsure if I could trust his words. A man would deny anything and confess to everything in order to stay alive.
“He’s right, Boss,” Fionn spoke up. Fionn was fairly new. He’d only been with us for five years, and while I trusted him to a certain degree—no one was a part of the Clan that I didn’t offer a measure of trust to—he’d allowed my baby sister to go out unattended. W
hen we were in the middle of a truce.
Fuck this goddamn truce. It was a false sense of peace is what this bullshit was. It was someone’s fucked up way of getting everyone in a state of complacency, so they could turn around and wipe us all off the map. I trusted my Enforcers. I semi-trusted my foot soldiers. I didn’t trust my runners at all, which was why they were runners and not official members of the clan. I trusted my wife’s “girl crew”, I trusted my brothers, I trusted my sister.
But there was no one I trusted more than my wife.
Which was why I looked at her to see what her opinion was on Fionn. She didn’t even look my way from where she sat in a large, leather armchair in the back of the room. It was where I usually sat when I had to bring someone down for a “conversation,” but Kyra was my wife. My woman. My queen.
The fucking Boss of Baltimore. That chair, that throne, belonged to her whenever she wanted it.
Happy wife, happy life.
Kyra simply tapped her thigh and I nodded before turning back to Fionn—who had a look of relief and gratitude in his eyes—and shooting him. Not in the thigh, but right between the eyes.
I heard every man in the room gasp, they’d all seen Kyra tap her thigh, so no doubt they, just like Fionn, had expected me to shoot him there. But they didn’t know my wife the way I did, and they didn’t know our way of silently communicating with each other. I knew what she’d meant, and while I was fiercely protective of my baby sister, she’d become a member of Kyra’s crew, and no one protected her girls like my K-Love.
I growled and pulled out my second gun, lifting both of my arms in the air, I pointed them at two random men. One of them a foot soldier, Rafferty, and the other, an Enforcer.
Ludwig.
My chest tightened at the thought of killing my most loyal of Enforcers, and my respect for him increased tenfold when he simply lifted his chin, prepared to accept his fate. I didn’t want to kill him and for the first time in years, my hand gave the slightest of tremors. I needed someone to say something. To speak up. Because while I didn’t want to kill Ludwig, I would shoot every single motherfucker in that room—except my wife and brothers, of course—until Nia was home or I had some information about where she was.
