Page 17 of The Mafia Assassin’s Redemption (Mafia Obsession #2)

THIRTEEN

torin

“Fuck!” What the hell is wrong with this woman?

Harry struggles in my grasp. She’s fucking beyond lucky we’re not any closer to Salvatore and his underage girlfriend.

I hold her down and manage to grab the gun with one of my hands. I shove it in the back waistband of my jeans.

“Let me go,” she says through clenched teeth.

I lock a hand around the back of her neck, wrapping my fingers around her hair so she has no choice but to remain still.

“Fuck no, Dirty Harry. You lost all privileges when you ran off and decided to play Clint Eastwood in Central fucking Park. Now I’m going to move and you’re going to roll over and face me. ”

“I’ll knee?—”

I squeeze her hair harder and she shuts the fuck up. “Now.”

I lift up. She flops over and glares at me. We’re close, and in the light of day, I catch the darker gray specks in her eyes. It only adds to her fiery spirit. That silver and gray swirling fast and hard. Like a powerful storm.

Her lashes are thick and dark, and her hair’s a mess. Dirt streaks one cheek and she’s so fucking pretty I can’t stop myself from leaning in to kiss her.

But really, only because it makes us look less weird.

She looks good and tastes even better.

Her lips part for me, and what’s meant to be a simple kiss for display becomes real as I’m swept into her embrace. Our tongues meet and dance slowly as heat stokes high between us.

She might not like me, but she sure enjoys what I do to her. And I like doing it.

I break the kiss because laughter shatters the moment. I look up to see a couple walk past. I glance up at the bench where that scumbag Salvatore’s acting like the kind of guy who gives a shit what a teenage girl has to say.

No one but another teen cares about what a teen has to say. Not in that way.

I grind my teeth. Sick fuck.

They’re far enough away that I can’t hear their conversation, but I could kill them both with ease, even from this position. It’d solve the problem of the hit… but more likely, it’d make things worse, for all of us.

I swallow a frustrated sigh.

He’s not the last Ricci. It’d definitely make it worse.

And I’m not killing a teenage girl I don’t fucking know.

So I abandon my thought, get up, and haul Dirty Harry along with me. Then I sling an arm around her shoulders and maneuver her the hell out of the park and away from Salvatore.

“Give me my gun,” she snarls as I shove her in the car.

I lift an eyebrow at her. “No. It’s my brother’s gun, and Callahan is very possessive over his things. We’re going home and I’m locking you up.”

“We need to get Lucie. We—” She breaks off, her brows furrowed as she peers at the driver. “Who’s that?”

“Not Mikey.” I tap a hand against my thigh, my blood still spitting in my veins.

Lucie should have known better. I should have known better.

“Lucie’s already on her way home. Let’s hope Callahan doesn’t beat her for letting you out of her sight.”

Not that he’d ever do that. He’s so damn soft for his wife. But if Harry thinks we’re all demons, I’m going to damn well let her.

My brother might not be into discipling a girl with a whip or belt.

But I am.

Sexually, of course.

But right now, I actually want to punish her, teach her not to disobey, not to fuck me around or fuck things up, so even if she lifted her skirt to present that pristine ass to me, I wouldn’t fucking touch her.

Sexual discipline’s a play on force, of dancing along boundary edges. Not actual corporal punishment designed to hurt.

But right now, I want just that.

Fuck.

My chest burns and I shift, my cock straining against my jeans. And okay, maybe there’s a sexual element to my anger.

A lass who works so damned hard to exude church values, but really the contrite, humble fucking doormat to God is a damn deviant at heart.

There’s nothing humble about her.

Her mind’s clearly a viper’s nest of deceit.

I don’t need her to want this. Or me. She’s mine. She has no say in the matter according to the laws of her fucking church and the mafia.

Mine.

Whether I want her or not. She’s mine to do with as I wish, and she needs discipline. Maybe I need to deny her pleasure. It’s the worst punishment I can think of and I know she’d feel the pain. I’d never take a hand to a woman in any way other than sexually.

But edging her into immense frustration and forbidding her to come?

Yeah, I’ll do that.

She’s saying something to me, but I tune her out. I’m pissed at her for taking advantage of Lucie’s trusting nature and clear desire to make friends inside our world.

My brothers and I don’t think about having friends since we have each other and our trusted men. And even then, it’s really us against everything.

I grit my teeth, focusing my attention on anything but her.

Maybe I’m also a little pissed off for another reason.

I was the sniper for Cal yesterday on a job he had. We want our contacts, people we protect and bring business to, to actually pay what they owe, when they need to. So Seamus came up with the idea of scaring them a little bit to make our point and show them we’re serious about our arrangements.

Seamus wanted to go in there and show them what happens if they get the protection they want and still try to negotiate their payments down.

But it would take too long to go through all the bullshit.

So I did what I had Dec do on the night of the wedding.

I made it look like a shoot-up, to scare the fuck out of them and eradicate all possibilities for negotiation.

She grabs my arm and shakes me from my overworked brain. “Are you even listening?”

Her eyes are clear slate, her face pinched with aggravation. I drop my gaze to her hand on my hoodie, and then I lift my focus back to her face.

Harry snatches back her hand.

“Should I? Because right now I’m trying to work out why I shouldn’t fucking punish you. I’m not a soft man,” I say. “I kissed you to create a scene. Not because I wanted to.”

She recoils instead of lashing out, and it makes my stomach plummet and the back of my neck burn.

“Why would you want to?” she says quietly. “I’m sure I’m already putting a dent in your love life.”

“I don’t have a love life. I have arrangements. Sexual encounters. That’s it.”

A flash of thunder clouds darken in her eyes but she nods. “Then send me away?—”

“Fuck no.”

“But—”

“Stop.” The command is lacking in sexual innuendo, but I know how to pitch it for a sub. Even an untrained one. And she straightens and dips her head, spots of color blooming on her cheeks.

So fucking trainable, so fucking perfect. A piece of tightly wrapped candy waiting to be tested, tried, shaped.

But the anger’s still swirling inside of me and I clutch it tightly.

My mind trips back to the calm of the violence from last night.

The shooting where one man got winged by me and I just missed doing the same to my brother’s head.

Unlike Dec, who has natural ability but no real finesse, I timed it all perfectly, and even if Cal moved, I’d have moved, too. But he knows better than that. We’ve played this game before, and I think he gets off on the element of danger. He’s also disciplined and he trusts me and my skill set .

I have a file on assassins. Those for hire and those who are part of crime families. Funny enough, the latter are easier to find. There are fewer of them.

The former?

It’s a file I’m constantly building, and it spans continents.

The man who tried to make the hit in the gardens was homegrown to the States. He probably did work for different families, picking off strays and problems here and there. A simple gun for hire who hadn’t gotten the memo to call off the hit on Harry.

Ricci also seems like the type not to bother pulling in the big guns unless needed.

But some are hiding in the shadows, and I saw one last night sitting in the Irish bar where my brothers and I went after collecting our money.

It’s a bar we’re thinking of buying, a perfect fountain of information, and also a perfect setting for laundering.

It brings in a mix of locals, tourists, and the underbelly of New York, nestled on the corner between West 130 th and Madison Avenue in Harlem, right near the Bronx.

Shadows are like ghosts, slipping in and out and able to do things in plain sight. No one notices. Unless you’re of the same cloth, like me. This one—wearing a baseball cap pulled low and a bulky overcoat—was watching us, and I don’t like that.

When he left, I followed and stumbled into a fight where a girl was being attacked by a few men.

I shot the guy who was trying to molest her, as well as the one holding her down in a dark little area covered by bushes.

The others scattered after that, and I warned the girl to run. She did.

The shadow I followed didn’t stop once, though. I looked for him but he disappeared. Back at the bar, on the back table where he’d sat, I found something.

Two pictures of Harry on a folded piece of paper. Her age, maybe nine, and a recent one with Father Luigi.

My heart did a free fall into my shoes at the sight.

A faint scent in the air reminded me of Shiv’s perfume, and my stomach clenched as it always does when that smell wafts into the air around me.

The bartender said he remembered a young guy sitting at that table for the past few days. One of the Irish thugs from the Bronx, looking for work.

I’ve put out feelers.

But I don’t like knowing someone is watching and waiting.

I don’t give a fuck about the blood on my hands after the killings I made. My head had been filled with images of Harry’s mother as I’d found her in Dublin, and the thought of someone doing that to Harriet made me physically ill. So I killed the two guys just on principle.

The morning papers called it a gang killing.

Harry mutters something under her breath as we pull up outside our brownstone in the West Village.

I scrub a hand down the front of my face.

In addition to needing to discipline my wife, I’ve got a logistical problem.