“You’ve been watching far too much Fleabag, kid,” Rhodes teased as he leaned down to get his own kiss, frowning when I ducked away from him. “What gives?”
“I’d like to at least be wearing some of my lip gloss when we step out of the car at the venue and that won’t happen if I keep letting you both kiss me as much as you want,” I told him primly, slipping out of Edison’s grasp to grab my gold clutch and my black camera bag. “Now, let’s head down before we really are late.”
“You’re bringing your camera?” Edison asked, though he immediately took it from me and slung it over his shoulder.
“Yep, midterms are next week and I barely have half of a portfolio to present.”
I hated to admit it, but I was struggling with my professor’s assignment. Every student had pulled fifteen random words from a hat and our job was to present each of those words translated into a photograph. The rules were that no two pictures could be in the same room and that it couldn’t be on the nose what the word was.
I loved taking pictures, figuring out settings and lighting and everything physical about it… but abstract was definitely something I had a hard time with.
“Besides,” I told Edison as I tugged Rhodes, who was still pouting as much as a man as stoic as he could pout, down for a feather light kiss. “I can’t wait to capture picture evidence of the look on the branch head’s faces when you irritate them tonight.”
This was the first time they would all be in the room with Edison since they’d decided to bully Rhodes during the three-day rut. I wasn’t sure what Edison had planned for them, but I’d watched the vein on the side of his head pop as Rhodes filled us in, so I knew it would be good.
The annual Charity Gala was a chance for the richest people in the city to come together and do some good for the underserved communities that made up the metropolis that they all benefited from out of the goodness of their hearts…
I’m just kidding.
It was actually a night for people to wear their most expensive clothes, not eat any of the fancy food that was brought out because said expensive clothes were too tight, and to donate just enough money that they were able to manage tax breaks for the upcoming tax season.
I hadn’t been to one since I was seventeen years old, right before I was diagnosed with my leukemia, but they didn’t look as if they’d changed much upon stepping out of the car.
“Don’t stray too far from me or Rhodes tonight, pet,” Edison said, his mouth close to my ear as he gently pressed a hand to my lower back, leading me towards the double-doors. Rhodes trailed close behind us, ever our constant shadow.
I hoped that, one of these days, he would be on my other arm and we’d be able to attend these things as a pack.
Gripping Edison’s arm, I smiled up at him as we stepped through the doors and into the ballroom. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Twenty Five
“Where has my wife gone?” I whispered to Rhodes as I only half-listened to whatever Liam was droning on about.
As much as I couldn’t stand the branch head, he at least made an attempt to kiss my ass like the disloyal rat he was. The rest of the branch heads were clear across the ballroom in a clump, only glancing over every once in a while to glare at me.
It was obvious that the topic of their conversation was me and I also knew what it was probably about.
After learning the shit they’d tried to pull, I’d banned them from the estate unless they were there for a scheduled meeting or for one of the many ridiculous family parties coming up for the holidays.
They were just lucky that was all I’d done. I had long grown tired of the older generation of my clan and their chances were quickly running out. Their sons, who were firmly on my side after watching their aged fathers take their much younger mothers as wives and then proceed to treat them like shit, were also coming to their last straw with the men as they refused to give up their power despite them being so old.
An entire generation of young boys that wanted to have nothing to do with their fathers had created the current divide in the Keane clan. The pot that had been heating up for decades was about to boil over.
“She’s taking pictures of the man who’s asleep in his soup,” Rhodes whispered back, nodding to one of the tables where an older man, some business mogul that was nearing ninety and still dragged himself out to these things, was almost face first in the split pea soup that had been served for dinner.
Perrie, oblivious to the people around her, had her camera up to her eye and was snapping photos of the man, the red curls of her loose updo bouncing as she held the camera away from her face to look at the screen, a little smile pulling up on her glossy pink lips.
Then, as if she felt my gaze on her, Perrie’s gray eyes lifted to meet mine and the smile grew.
She pointed to the doors and mouthed the word bathroom, waiting for me to nod before she let her camera fall around her neck. The urge to immediately follow her filled me and I nearly did so before Liam cut into my line of sight, effectively blocking Perrie from me.
“Are you listening, Edison?”
I slanted a glance at Rhodes who was already breaking away from us to follow, ducking and weaving in between the people in the packed ballroom, before turning my attention to Liam again.
“You were saying something about the ports?”
“Yes, the ports!” Liam again launched into his tirade about the fees that Jifein Cheng lobbied at the five families for using her ports—a long standing issue with the branch heads who had all utilized her services at one time or another.
“I just think that maybe using a more northern port owned by the Doyles would be better—I hear he wouldn’t charge us half of what Cheng is.”
I had to force myself not to roll my eyes at that. Bobby Doyle and the Doyle clan ran the ports up in New York and while it was true that he charged less for using them, he also skimmed other things off of the top.
But most of the branch heads liked him because he was closer in age to them and ran things the same way they’d been run in the 80s when all of them were in charge.
I couldn’t stand the man. He reminded me too much of the worst parts of my father.
“We would still have to pay to get our shipments to us by ground,” I pointed out before adding silently: and the last time we did a ground shipment of weapons I lost fifteen men.
After my scrapped meeting with Shuuhei Saito we had to reschedule. Shuuhei was less than enthused about having to wait a week to tell me what he knew, but when he finally did it just left me with more questions than answers.
Things were pointing in multiple different directions and it was muddying the investigation to a point that I was starting to get jittery. Apparently Haruto had a woman and had gone to see her the day he went missing. They just didn’t know who she was yet.
My money was still on the Italians being the culprits—which made sense seeing as Alessandro Amante still had a stick up his ass about my stealing of his selected bride.
It should have been cut and dry from there… except for the evidence pointing in other directions.
