Chapter 18: Convenient Mafia Wife: Chapter 18

New York City, New York Five Families SEVERU After the strange, but exhilarating conversation with Catalina, I get another unexpected phone call.

I slide my finger over the phone’s screen to take the call from the New York Irish mob boss Brogan Shaughnessy.

‘I hear that someone attacked your bride-to-be,’ he says without a greeting.

Rage brings everything in my office into laser focus. ‘Brogan, you bastard. You think your family is safe after that?’

‘It wasn’t my mob.’

‘Convince me.’

‘A team hit one of my betting establishments.’

‘I care why?’

‘Because although they wore masks, they were speaking Italian.’

‘None of my guys would be that sloppy. When I hit you, my men won’t be hiding their faces and the only speaking done will be the bullets from our guns.’

‘I know.’

‘The fuck you do. You just accused me of hitting your betting shop.’

‘No, I said it was hit by a team who spoke Italian. Badly, as it happens.’

I stay silent, my mind whirling, because blaming the Irish for what has been happening is too easy.

‘We’ve held a truce between our families for more than a decade,’ Shaughnessy says. ‘Someone is trying to get us to go to war.’

‘To what end?’

‘I don’t know, but we have a better chance of figuring it out if we cooperate.’

‘What do you want?’

‘We work together to figure out who the bastards behind this shit are. They’ve got someone in my outfit feeding them information.’

That’s a big thing to admit. I don’t take the bait and say I believe the same about my own syndicate. ‘You’ve got a relationship with one of my people, or you wouldn’t know about the attack against Catalina and Carlotta.’

‘I spy on you; you spy on me. It’s the way it’s always been done.’

I can’t deny that. It’s why I’m unconvinced the would-be arsonist is part of Shaughnessy’s mob. My information says otherwise.

‘But ask yourself this: if I’ve been spying on your syndicate since I signed that truce agreement in blood with your father, why aren’t my hits more successful?’ the mob Boss asks. ‘If I’d gone after your fiancée, I’d have her.’

His style is to hit and hit hard, just like my father’s was. Like mine is. Shaughnessy would have sent two teams after the women, and they would have been taken, regardless of Catalina’s abilities with a gun.

If he had wanted to burn down one of my warehouses, he would have done it and his man would not have gotten caught because he wouldn’t have been sent in with faulty intel.

Is it possible the would-be arsonist hadn’t been given the intel about our security upgrades, not because the informant didn’t know about them, but because whoever hired him wanted an independent contractor, who happened to be Irish, caught?

‘If you went after the women, I would burn your boroughs to the ground in retaliation.’

‘That you haven’t says you’ve already considered the probability that my mob isn’t behind these attempts.’

He’s right. Damn it.

‘The bratva want my docks.’ I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know.

He replies, ‘And they want my brothels for their sex slaves. The fekkers.’

Neither the Irish mob nor my mafia engage in human trafficking, much less keep slaves to work in any of our businesses. We are not good men, but we have our codes and we’ve been living by them for generations.

‘It could be the bratva,’ I concede. ‘But it was Albanians that attacked my fiancée and her sister. The surviving kidnapper claimed to be hired by an anonymous source.’

‘I’m sure your interrogation techniques got the truth out of him, but his own people could have set them up to believe his team was hired by an outside source.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll have my people do some digging.’

I don’t bother saying I’ll do the same. Shaughnessy knows I will. Whether either of us shares what we find is still up for question.