Marrying My Father's Enemy

Chapter 5

Killian's POV

Five years. Every player in New York, black market and white collar alike, had been hunting for one girl.

Everyone understood that the Moretti heiress had to be sitting on a small fortune of information.

Carmine understood it best of all. Over these five years, that old bastard had thrown more manpower at finding her than at anything else in his life, and come up with nothing.

She'd vanished like she'd never existed at all. Most people had written her off — assumed she was rotting somewhere at the bottom of the Hudson. But I knew better. I knew she was still breathing, because Carmine's men were still looking.

A month ago, two bodies turned up in an alley near a motel in Queens. Cause of death: exsanguination from a wound at the throat. A clean incision, precise, no hesitation marks. Toxicology came back with a high concentration of succinylcholine in both bloodstreams.

I recognized one of the dead men. He was one of Carmine's dogs, sent out to hunt for Sloane. My people had been tracking him for weeks.

More interesting — three days before the killings, someone had made an anonymous purchase on my own black-market pharmaceutical supply chain, for the exact same controlled paralytic.

That's when I started paying attention.

Carmine's hospitalization had become something of a running joke in this business — no self-respecting Don gets nearly killed by his own fifteen-year-old daughter inside his own house. After he woke up, no one in the Moretti family ever brought it up again, not once.

But I got my hands on his medical report. That fragile-looking heiress had struck her father square on the thinnest part of his skull — the temporal bone — hard enough to nearly cause brain death. And on her way out, she'd dosed two of his guards with a paralytic, calibrated with surgical precision: enough to drop a grown man cold, not enough to kill him.

This girl was not what she looked like.

It took my people a full month of narrowing the net before they finally traced it back to that unremarkable little clinic.

I got her photograph. Those eyes — I recognized them instantly. The same eyes as the girl half-hidden at the edge of an old Moretti family portrait.

I decided to go get her myself.

"Want backup, Don?" Sean caught me in the parking lot. "It's a remote location. If Carmine's men get there first—"

"They won't." I pulled the car door open. "Those idiots are still staking out motel registries."

Sean didn't push it. Four years working under me had taught him one lesson: when I say I don't need something, asking twice earns you a rotation guarding the docks.

I didn't bring anyone because this business never runs short on traitors. Bury a hundred of them, and there's always a hundred and first who thinks he'll be the one who doesn't get caught. I needed to move faster than word could travel back to Carmine.

It was pouring that night. I kicked the door in loud enough to match the storm, and my headlights caught her full in the face, blinding her. I expected the shock to break her. Instead, after one brief flicker of panic, she went perfectly still. A scalpel was in her hand before I'd even crossed the threshold, her back to the wall, braced to fight. Her shirt had been washed so many times it had gone gray-white at the seams. Whatever life she'd been living out here, it hadn't been easy.

The moment I said her name, something shifted behind her eyes.

She struck fast, but I could tell — she didn't want to kill me. Not in this clinic, anyway. That hesitation was all the opening I needed; I caught her wrist without much effort. It was pitifully thin under my hand. The grip I used would've made a grown man cry out. She didn't beg.

She just looked at me — like a young leopard cornered against a wall, wary, cold, refusing to break eye contact. I didn't like that look. Too unfamiliar.

I pinned her over the desk. She didn't panic; she kept fighting, right up until I dropped the photograph of her mother and sister in front of her. Only then did the leopard go still, and let herself be led out without another word.

All I wanted from her was information. I never intended to hurt her.

Even though I had every reason to.

Countless nights, I've dreamed of my sister dying in my arms. Isla was seventeen. A normal high school girl who'd never touched a single filthy thing in this business — the whole family had worked to keep her clean of it. And Carmine still put his hands on her, over a territory dispute. He didn't just take her. He used drugs on her. Used men on her. Every degrading method he could think of. By the time I found her, there was almost nothing left to save.

I remember that day like it happened an hour ago. Everything he did to her, I intend to return to him in full. I hate him. But I'm not the animal he is — and even though Sloane is his daughter, I won't make her pay his debt.

I don't kill people who don't deserve it. Everyone locked in the Boxes earned their place there.

That prosecutor — the one my men used, repeatedly, on camera. She'd spent her career exploiting legal loopholes to shield mob bosses and the well-connected from dozens of assault charges against ordinary girls. One of her victims was thirteen. The girl's mother set herself on fire outside the courthouse afterward.

What that prosecutor got from us doesn't come close to a fraction of what she earned. I have her brought in once a month, filmed each time, until she hands over every case she ever signed away — until every one of those animals answers for it.

Things with Sloane had been going smoothly. She'd promised information; I'd promised her family's safety. That should have been the end of it.

But barely an hour after the maid took her upstairs, Sean came to find me. "Don. Cora's account had activity."

"Talk."

"Her son had a loan-shark debt. Carmine paid it off for her — in exchange for weekly reports."

"Those reports were fabricated. I fed her every word of them myself. Don't waste my time. Tell me something new."

"Just now, her account received a wire — a hundred thousand dollars, from Carmine's side."

I narrowed my eyes. Her appetite had grown teeth. That kind of money had to be connected to Sloane — except I'd never once let Cora know who Sloane really was. Which meant there was another bug in the house.

"Watch her. Find out who leaked it. Deal with both of them together."

"Yes, Don."

"How long has she worked for us?"

"Fifteen years."

I pressed my fingers into the bridge of my nose. I remembered her braiding Isla's hair. Isla used to love the way she did it.

"Give her one last chance. If she doesn't move tonight, put her and her son on a plane out of the country tomorrow. If she takes Carmine's money instead — you know what to do."

"Yes, Don." Sean nodded and left.

That was about as soft as I get. She still managed to disappoint me.

By the time my men dumped the two of them on the floor in front of me, I already knew tonight would end in blood.

What surprised me was Sloane. She didn't beg for herself once. Every plea out of her mouth was for Cora.

I almost laughed. This woman probably assumed she still had value to me — that I wouldn't kill her, and so she could afford to spend her breath on someone else's life. I wanted to see, for myself, whether she was as false as her father.

I told her to strip in front of the men. Cora's life, in exchange.

I watched her hands work through each button — her collarbone, the curve of her chest under thin fabric, that narrow waist I still remembered the exact feel of. Tears ran the whole time she undressed.

Then the skirt dropped, leaving her in nothing but her underwear and an open shirt, arms wrapped around herself, telling me I was humiliating her.

She was right. But I didn't think it went far enough yet. This girl needed a lesson that would actually stay with her.

So I pressed the gun to Cora's head and told her to keep going.

She tore at her bra clasp like something feral, and right as it was about to give—

I pulled the trigger.

The bullet went straight through Cora's forehead. Her blood sprayed across Sloane's skin.

Sloane froze. Her hand was still at her chest, eyes blown wide, and then she was on me, hitting me with everything she had. There was no technique in it — just pure, shattered instinct. I caught her and pinned her against the sofa, then held up the transaction record from Cora's account.

She recognized the account. I watched every trace of color drain from her face.

I took off my jacket and put it over her. I don't like anyone looking at her bare, not even my own men — trained as they are never to let their eyes linger where they shouldn't.

"I saved your life."

She didn't answer. Her whole body was shaking.

I crouched down until we were level. "I gave her one last chance. If she'd taken you and run tonight, I would have let her live. She chose Carmine's money instead. That was a dead end, and she knew it."

Her throat moved. Her eyes shifted from my face to the body on the floor.

"So you knew. This whole time."

"I knew."

"Then why didn't you just tell me—" Something sharp flickered in her eyes.

"I gave her a chance to live. I gave you a chance to learn something. You're smart, Sloane. But your judgment still needs work."

I turned and walked toward the stairs. At the top, I stopped. "Go get cleaned up. You smell like the sewer."

Behind me, I heard the faint scratch of her nails digging into the leather of the sofa. Quiet. But I heard it just fine.

She wasn't broken.

Good.

I've never had any interest in taming something weak.