Page 80 of The Mafia Assassin's Redemption-

I could go one night.

My blood starts to throb.

Take Harry, visit my favorite sex shop…

I push my mind somewhere else fast. “We’ll all look into angles, see if the dead have been identified?—”

“It might be hard,” Seamus says. “Someone got rid of the bodies, rolled them up and took them, according to a witness.”

Unease spreads into my chest. “Like they didn’t care.”

“Like they were taking their fallen comrades.” Seamus spins the gun again.

I’ve seen that. Crews with causes. But there aren’t any to be had here. In New York, the only cause is money and power. Of course, that’s if they’re from here…

“We won’t know until we know. But I think we all go and find out what we can. I’ll talk to our allies and those who fall under our watch.” Callahan sighs. “I’ll take Dec with me.”

Later that night, I sit back in the small private room at a bar deep in Hell’s Kitchen, near Eleventh Avenue. There is still an enclave of car places and warehouses in the area where all kinds of illegal shit goes down.

The bar is in a pocket of no man’s land, where criminals and the unsavory come to drink. Deals are spun in here between all walks of life. Maybe we can get a lead if we watch closely enough.

“You wanna maybe tell me why someone in downtown Brooklyn fingered you as beingpaid to shoot at Salvatore Ricci?” Seamus says, walking over to the table. He twirls the pool cue in the air before swinging hard and then lightly tapping the shaking man on the back of the knees.

On the ground at my feet is his drinking partner.

“We just take jobs, and I didn’t—” The man stops whining as the name sinks in, his eyes widening.

Seamus hits him across the throat, making him stagger back, clutching it. He slams right into the wall and lands dangerously close to the dartboard. Strangely, he doesn’t grab the darts as I would.

He’s an amateur, and Seamus is taking full advantage of that fact.

It’s why I don’t step in even as my fingers itch to. He can handle it himself. This is shite we were born doing.

Seamus seemingly leaves the man, lines up, and shoots. “Ah, so you thought you’d take the other job and have a go at the Murphy clan, then?”

“What?” The man takes half a step forward, eyes wild, almost bugging with fear.

“Not you, personally, but your dead friends.” Seamus straightens and rests the cue tip on the sticky sawdust-covered floor. “Or the ones you farmed it out to?”

I don’t think these guys were friends with the ones I gunned down, just schmucks paid to do a job.

“Have you ever thought the Ricci family might be out to get the Murphys?” The man rushes out the words. “We do jobs for money, no questions asked. But we didn’t?—”

“Maybe they’re all incompetent, Seamus,” I say, kicking the man on the ground in the head as he stupidly tries to rise. “Because it seems incompetent, not looking into the Ricci and Murphy situation.”

“I’d call it stupidity, Torin,” Seamus says, circling the guy still standing. Barely. “There’s a blood wedding contract,meaning everyone in the Murphy family, including our latest member, won’t ever be touched by the Riccis. And the Riccis won’t be touched by the Murphys.”

“In case you need a lesson,” I interject, “in how blood weddings work.”

“I want to know who paid them,” Seamus says with a grin to me. He hits the guy in the lower back with the cue. “Who paid you?”

The guy screams in agony, his back buckling. “We didn’t?—”

“Next time,” Seamus adds, “I might hit you hard. Now tell me who paid you.”

“Some kid from Greenpoint in Brooklyn.” The guy swings his gaze from me to Seamus and back again. He pulls something out of his pocket and slaps it on the pool table. “We were told to call this number. No name, nothing. Just a voicemail. We weren’t killing no one.”

A Polish kid who wanted money. He probably got the job from someone else, and they got it from the source. Whoever that might be.