I hardly knew the woman, but seeing her like that nagged at some deeper nurturing instinct that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge yet.
“We’re two minutes out,” Sullivan, my usual driver, called as he turned into the parking garage of City Hall.
If the righteous, upstanding citizens of the city knew what sorts of meetings actually happened here, they would lose their minds.
Sullivan parked and we waited for the all-clear from my security team before stepping out.
Despite it being a late-summer evening, a chill crept through the underground parking structure as one team stepped onto the elevator and went up first, radioing down when it was my turn to take the elevator to the fifth floor where the mayor’s office was.
It was probably overkill to bring a fifteen-man security team with me for a simple meeting like this, but I knew the other four heads would be doing the same and it was all just a silly game of ‘my guns are just as good and shiny as yours, so don’t fuck with me.’
“You’re good to go in,” Callum informed me as soon as I stepped off of the elevator. “But just note that they’re all already in there.”
Irritation filled me at being the last to arrive. One glance at my watch told me that I was exactly on time for the meeting.
That just meant that they’d all coordinated an earlier start time without me, trying to herd me and make me feel like I’d lost control of the situation.
“Do you have everything we’ll need?” I asked Rhodes as we waited for Callum to open the double doors that led into Ethan Chandler’s office.
Rhodes shot me a solemn nod, his dark eyes darting around and taking in everything around us. His lighthearted mood from the car was gone and he’d settled completely into his role as my second, gauging the various risks that were being presented to me on a silver platter right now.
Callum pulled the doors open and I stepped inside. Sucking in a deep, steadying breath I plastered a neutral smile on my face and greeted the people inside. “Gentlemen and lady, it seems as if I’m a little bit late to the party. I do apologize.”
The large office was packed full of security lining the walls around the circular conference table where most of our brokerings had happened over the past two hundred years of criminal activity in the city.
There was a place for all five of us and an additional one for the mayor that was supposed to be the neutral party to settle our disagreements. I searched each face critically as it turned in my direction, trying to see where each person stood when it came to our impending topic of discussion.
Amante was a bastard who kept a ham-fisted grip on the drug trade going in and out of the city, beating out whatever cartels tried to sell, but he was also the easiest of the bunch to read. The older man was clearly still pissed about my crashing his little wedding ceremony yesterday, his eyes sparkling with barely repressed anger as he shot me a smirk.
I ignored him. Amante was the least of my worries right now.
Directly next to him was Ethan Chandler who was shaking like a terrified chihuahua as he glanced between me and who I surmised he’d chosen to be the master of his leash.
On Amante’s other side sat Jifein Cheng, the head of the Chinese Triad and the only female family head in our little quorum. She was an elegant older woman with nearly gray hair and an air of superiority about her. Cheng also tended to side with Amante on most things as their relationship was more symbiotic than the rest of us—the Triads controlled the city ports and Amante’s drugs came through those ports.
If Amante wanted Perrie back, then Jifein Cheng would be his biggest defender. But she also thought Chandler was a fucking idiot, so that was a point in my favor.
Next to her sat Shuuhei Saito, the only member of the group that was close to me in age. Saito had come into power of the Yakuza at the same time I rose within the Keane family. Money laundering and nightclubs were his game, not the flashiest out of all of us, but it solidified his place as a voting member of our tenuous alliance.
I could get Shuuhei to agree to almost anything thanks to a maybe misplaced sense of camaraderie that had grown between us over the past few years.
The last member of the five families was Vladimir Volkov and he looked over at me last, his too-bright blue eyes taking me in cooly before his gaze slanted away from me again.
Volkov was always the wild card of our meetings. No one was even sure exactly what the Russians got up to and anyone who pried tended to end up dead.
I knew they dealt in flesh—something that made me a little bit queasy to think about. They also provided the girls that the rest of us utilized to blow off steam and I hadn’t forgotten the woman who’d managed to fire off two rounds at me in my own home.
Yulia had been the softest of Volkov’s working women before she’d married and was widowed by one of my own men, but it still made me realize that trusting any of these people too much was a recipe for a quick death.
Volkov pretended as if nothing mattered, not these meetings, nor the inner workings of our city. But if my sneaking suspicions were correct, the man was far more dangerous than he looked.
“Oh dear,” Amante said, glancing at his watch as I sat down in my seat and we finally reached the majority needed to actually hold this meeting. “Did I tell you the wrong time to show up? Apologies, Keane, I’ve been a little frazzled as I’m sure you can imagine.”
I ignored the jab, feigning ignorance. “I have no clue what you mean.”
Amante didn’t take the bait, but fortunately Ethan Chandler wasn’t as smart. It seemed his daughter’s intelligence wasn’t a genetic trait after all because the man slammed his fists on the table and pointed at me. “You stole my daughter, my baby!”
No one reacted to his little outburst. Despite his shaking voice and teary eyes, we could all see his act from a mile away. Chandler didn’t give a shit about his daughter or else he wouldn’t have sold her in the first place.
“You must realize that interrupting a wedding and stealing the bride does have consequences, Edison,” Amante said, using my first name to patronize me.
Unruffled, I held a hand up and Rhodes supplied the files that I’d brought along with me. I’d made enough copies of everything for everyone to get one. “I have a contract signed by one Ethan Chandler that upon my very generous donation to his gubernatorial election campaign, that I would be offered the hand of his omega daughter once her doctors cleared her.”
The documents were signed and dated over six months ago and notarized on that same day. Chandler had come to me begging for a handout and he’d been the one to offer Perrie to me, not the other way around.
Cheng’s dark eyes skimmed the document. “This would never hold up in court as the United States Government doesn’t acknowledge betrothals, Keane.”
“It’s not the government that is making this decision. Do you have a similar contract, Alessandro?” I asked, using Amante’s same tactic.
Amante, who had also been reading the contract, glanced over at Chandler like he was a bug that he wished to squash. “I do.”
Holding my hands up in a genial gesture I offered him my best smile. “Then by all means, let’s see it. If yours is dated earlier than mine, then I will drop this and bring the omega back to you and you can marry her off to those weird little sons-in-law of yours—oh, wait—I guess they can’t really be considered that anymore can they?”
Amante’s grip on the paper tightened, crumpling it.
“You do have a contract, don’t you?” Saito asked, clearly hopping onto my side as he lifted a dark brow at the Italian mafioso.
One of Amante’s men stepped forward with a similar file folder and handed it to him. He passed it to Chandler first, who swallowed visibly as he handed it to Volkov who barely even looked at the thing before it got to me.
