LEO
The car peels away from St. Patrick’s Cathedral with enough speed to throw Emma against me, and I can already hear the sirens starting to wail in the distance.
Right on schedule.
The NYPD will be swarming the cathedral in about ninety seconds, which is exactly why we needed to move fast and why Marco and the others are still inside creating enough chaos to make pursuit impossible for at least twenty minutes.
By then, we’ll be long gone.
Five years of planning, and the execution was perfect.
Five years since Connor Brennan put a bullet in my younger brother’s head over a dispute about the Brooklyn ports.
Five years since I got the call from Dante telling me Gabriel was dead, left to bleed out on a warehouse floor like he was nothing.
Five years since I had to tell my mother that her baby boy—the one who wanted to be a chef, who brought her flowers everySunday, who still called herMammaeven at twenty-four—was never coming home.
Connor claimed the Santoros were taking more than our fair share of port access, which was complete bullshit and everyone knows it.
The Brennans have always been greedy fucks, pushing for more territory, more control.
Gabriel was at that warehouse trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution.
Connor Brennan shot him in the head for his trouble and left him to die alone.
The Brennans paid blood money, an insultingly small amount my father accepted because he was tired and sick and didn’t have the stomach for war anymore.
They called it settled.
Business as usual.
But I never forgot. I willneverforget.
My father died eight months after Gabriel, his heart giving out because he’d lost the will to live.
My mother hasn’t really smiled since we buried Gabriel, and I became the man I needed to be to run this family, to make sure no one ever thinks they can take from the Santoros without consequences.
When I heard Connor’s daughter was marrying Tony Lombardo, I knew the moment had finally arrived.
The marriage was clearly a power play, an attempt to expand Brennan influence and potentially squeeze us out of port access entirely.
The Lombardo shipping routes through Jersey combined with Brennan’s Manhattan stronghold would create a corridor that bypasses our territory completely.
It’s smart, I’ll give Connor that.
It’s exactly what I would do in his position.
Too bad that plan didn’t actually work.
Today, Connor Brennan learned what it feels like to have everything ripped away.
Emma Brennan, however, doesn’t seem to appreciate the meticulous planning that went into her kidnapping.
“You fucking cock-juggling thundercunt!” She launches herself at me the second she gets her balance, her fists pounding against my chest, my shoulders, my arms, anywhere she can reach.
The monstrosity she calls a wedding dress is wrapped around both of us and she’s fighting through it like a wildcat caught in a net. “Let me go! Let me out of this fucking car right now, you piece of shit!”
I let her hit me.