Page 47 of Handsome Devil

Row: You’ve got a point.

Tate: We’ve got no wedding registry, but we’re partial to dressage Olympic horses, summerhouses on the Amalfi Coast, and Amedeo Modigliani art pieces.

Rhyland: You should be happy if I gift you a $20 Amazon GC.

Row: You should be happy if I DON’T gift you a punch.

Last but not least, I received inconvenient news from the Ferrante family.

We were sitting at a round table in a discreet gentleman’s club in the bowels of Brooklyn, playing a high-stakes game of Caribbean poker.

And by high stakes, I mean Achilles just won a fifteen-year-old undocumented Italian girl. She was weeping in the corner of the room, clutching her wobbly knees to her chest.

“What do you mean, ‘shit got messy’?” I ripped my gaze from my cards, fixing it on Achilles.

“What part of the sentence didn’t you understand?” Achilles rolled the tip of his lit cigarette between his fingers, eyes still fixed on his cards. “I can repeat it in Italian or Latin, but if you’re dumb, you’re dumb. Ain’t no cure for that.”

The sobbing intensified, grating on my nerves. A slew of teenagers lined the walls here for trade. All from Europe. All the spawns of people who betrayed the Camorra, were indebted to them, or both.

“I thought you said Boyle was unaccounted for. No family, no relatives.” My jaw tightened.

I got out of my first kill unscathed. Britain had railed for a few weeks, but the outrage died down when the media found out Boyle was, among other things, a mobster, a rapist, an ex-con, and a shit stain in human form.

“That part’s true. What we didn’t know was Boyle was the Callaghans’ cartel operation driver. He moved shipments around the East Coast,” Luca explained, palming a handful of chips and tossing them into the center of the green table. “I raise.”

“Who the fuck is Callaghan?” I squinted.

The weeping increased into incontrollable shrieks, and finally, Achilles turned his attention to the corner of the room. “Basta!” he roared in Italian.Enough.

“No one wants to fuck your ass, least of all me. No. You’ll work the kitchen or the stables. No harm will come to you unless you continue giving me a headache, in which case I’ll sell you to the Bratva. They will make a rag doll out of you before selling all your internal organs on the black market.”

That shut her up quickly. She bit into her arm, squeezing her eyes shut and forcing herself to stay quiet.

Achilles returned his attention to me. “Where were we?”

“Callaghan.” I knocked my whiskey back. “Who is he?”

“Theyare the second largest Mafia organization in New York,” he provided, spitting his still lit cigarette into the ashtray. He dragged a few towers of chips to the center of the table, matching his brother’s raise. “Irish. Capable. Violent. They sent Boyle to England to cool off for a couple months after a few run-ins with the law. He was supposed to come back to oversee a large-scale drug trafficking route.”

“Well, that ain’t happening anymore,” I said dryly. “Why do you allow others to operate in your zip code?”

“Carved out a deal in the early 2000s, and everyone seems to benefit from it. We gave them the rough neighborhoods, so the NYPD can periodically arrest and prison some of their soldiers,” Luca explained. “The DA has to hit a certain organized crime quota. Works for both the Irish and the Camorra. They get territory, we get peace of mind.”

“Sounds like they’re under your rule. Tell them to fuck off.”

“It’s a gray area. We stay out of their business unless they butt into ours. If you were a camorrista, we’d have more weight to throw. But you’re an outsider. Merely a client. And there’s another issue. Turns out the rest of your father’s murderers are also from the Irish Mob.”

“I see a big recruitment day in their near future.” I matched Achilles’s and Luca’s raise with my own chips. “Because I’m not stopping. They’ll all pay.”

“They know it’s you.” Luca dragged a rough palm over his stubble. “And they know we’re feeding you their names and addresses.”

“This a problem for you?” I put my cards down, covering them with my palm. We all had our sleeves rolled up to our elbows, since every single man at this table was a brazen cheater.

“No, asshole. It’s a problem foryou.”

“The father, Tyrone, is levelheaded. Used to keep his soldiers on a short leash,” Luca explained around a cigarette in his mouth. “But his son, Tiernan, is running the show. He’s yet to find a war he didn’t want to take part in.”

Vello, who was also sitting at the table, tossed his cards to the center of the table. “Fold.”