Page 157 of Handsome Devil

“Not yours, but you can bargain with them on those terrains. You have the capital and their ear.”

“A territory is not just about money. It’s about prestige,” I spat out.

“Precisely.” Tiernan flashed that canine, deranged smirk of his. “And currently I have very little of it. We need to establish ourselves.”

“You are established here,” I argued. “The Irish Mafia in New York is called the NYPD. Sometimes the FDNY.”

“You have a sense of humor, Tate. I appreciate that. The Ferrantes own Crimson Key, also known as billionaires’ Vegas. They can give me their New York City scraps.”

That wasn’t going to happen. But at least now I had an open channel to bring the Ferrantes and Callaghans back to the negotiating table and talk some sense into Tiernan.

Who knows? Maybe once Achilles and Luca found out what Tiernan was up to, they’d kill him for me.

“Let me run this by the brothers.” I rapped the table between us, standing up.

Tiernan remained seated, inhumanly still and completely unfazed. “You do that, old man.”

I leaned across the table to loom over him, knuckles digging into the rotten old wood. “In the meantime, you stop following my wife. You back the fuck off and let her live her life, you hear me?”

He cocked his head, tsking. “A wise man once told me not to let people get deep under your skin. It’s a weakness in your line of work, see.”

God-fucking-dammit with this asshole. “Yourword, Tiernan.” I bared my teeth.

Tiernan’s eyes blazed with something I’d never seen before. Not even on Andrin. This unabashed, gleeful hunger for chaos.

“And they say romance is dead.” He put a hand to his heart. It was the first time I took inventory of his attire and realized he was armed to the teeth. His holster held two Glocks, and he had a knife strapped to his thigh.

“Don’t mess with me.” I bunched the collar of his shirt, yanking him so that our noses smashed together. A spray of blood erupted from his nostrils at the sudden, rough contact. “Give me your word.”

“I’m surprised it’d mean anything to you,” he mused, tongue darting to lick a trail of his own blood, a smirk on his face.

I’d almost broken his nose, and he didn’t give half a fuck. Between us, I felt the mouth of his gun digging into my sternum, warning me to back off.

“It does.”

“I give you my word then.”

I released him.

He sat back down unhurriedly, an amused smirk on his face. “You can go on your merry way now, Blackthorn. Do my bidding for me.” He raised a fresh pint of Guinness the same waitress who approached me put in front of him, angling the drink to me in salute. “You have forty-eight hours. Use them well.”

It was my twenty-first birthday when Daniel and I got drunk in Vienna.

He took me to an interesting destination each birthday. Europe was our favorite spot, since it was relatively close and drenched with history and art, both of which we were fond of.

“Have you ever wondered”—Daniel raised his fourth glass of whiskey to his mouth, mumbling around the rim—“why Andrin did what he did to you?”

I froze midsip, slowly putting my drink down. We never discussed Andrin. I never asked Daniel about my abuser’s peculiar skiing accident. I figured he would never fess up if he did anything. And frankly, I knew I’d be disappointed if Daniel denied it.

I wanted to think the last person Andrin ever saw promised him a slow and painful death.

“I did.” I cleared my throat. “All the time, in fact.”

“Why didn’t you check then?” Daniel asked. We were in a traditional Austrian pub, where the beer was leisurely crafted, the furniture carved of raw wood, and the lights were golden and creamy. Most of the people around us were locals. They were too wrapped up in their own conversations to pay attention to the two drunk Americans.

“Because I knew how much it’d trigger me,” I admitted. By then, I understood I had ten tons of baggage. That my sanity was held together by a thin, brittle string. And that looking into Andrin—really looking into him—may snap that string and become my undoing.

I didn’t want to fall apart.