Honored: An Alpha Mob Romance (City Series Book 4) (17 page)

“I hate paper,” I grumbled as I finished off my stack.

Liam laughed. “Was that the last of it?”

I looked up at him. He was leaning against the wall, sipping a glass of wine, and grinning at me. When we first started, the room was covered in stuff; now, though, it was all stacked into neat little piles.

“Wow, we’re actually finished,” I said, surprised.

“Well, with the easy part at least.”

“What do you mean?”

He sighed and sat down next to me.

“Now we have to start reading all this shit.”

I nodded. “Right, because you don’t have the full picture yet.”

“Exactly.” He took a long drink of wine.

I blinked and yawned. “What time is it?”

He looked at his watch. “A bit after midnight.”

“Long night ahead of us, then.”

“Listen, you don’t need to stay up. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

I glared at him. “No, thanks. I’m helping.”

He frowned and shrugged his shoulders. “You really don’t need to.”

“Just show me what you found already, and we’ll go from there.”

For a second, I thought he was going to argue. Instead, he leaned over me, his arm brushing against my chest, and grabbed a small pile of papers. Without another argument, he went through them one at a time, pointing out the tiny transactions to a foreign bank account. They took place over years; Liam said he did some rough math, and they equaled at least a half a million dollars. And those were only the ones that he knew about or noticed. Hidden away in the paper, there were bound to be more.

We got to work, digging through the papers and making note of anything fishy or odd. It was slow going at first, but I quickly fell into a rhythm. It felt like the numbers were swirling around me in the room, and I felt like I was starting to get a picture of what Colm’s life was like. Fifty dollars for dinner on a Tuesday night, three thousand dollars from a jewelry store, two hundred at a bar, three hundred at a casino. On and on the transactions went, one little number after another, each one signifying something so much more than itself.

Seen individually, each transaction was practically meaningless. There was no context. Sure, he spent eighty dollars at the grocery store, but there was only so much we could pull out of that single event. But that moment combined with every other moment gave a strange picture of a man’s life. Patterns started to emerge, habits and desires. For example, I quickly found out that he loved a particular deli; I didn’t know why or what he got there, but he went almost once a week.

It was such a small thing, a bank statement, and most people kept them private because they didn’t want other people to know how much money they had or how much they spent. I realized that they were so much more dangerous than that, though. With someone’s full bank records, you could figure them out, get a sense of their habits and their likes and their desires. That could be so much more dangerous than just knowing how much money they had.

“I can’t imagine my dad doing something like this,” Liam said, jolting me out of my daydream.

“What’s that?”

“My dad. I can’t imagine him combing through bank statements.”

I was surprised. He hadn’t spoken much about his father since I met him. “Why not?”

“He was an old-school gangster, thought problems all existed out in the real world. Would have said that it was a waste of time to look at all these fake numbers and fancy bullshit.”

“So why are you doing it?”

“Because the world changes. These words and numbers are as real as anything else.”

I nodded, understanding. “They have power.”

“Exactly. This stuff has power. Might be nerdy or whatever crap you want to call it, but it’s this kind of shit that rules the world these days.”

“What was he like? Your dad, I mean.”

“Like I said, an old-school mobster. All violence and tough-guy act.”

“Must have been hard to be his son.”

“Yeah, sometimes it was. He was strict, and he beat the shit out of me a few times. But he taught me stuff, like how to fight and how to pick a lock and how to tell if someone was lying to me.”

I could almost picture the young Liam, growing up with a violent, complicated father, and it made sense that he grew up into a violent, complicated man. That violence seemed tempered somehow, or at least suppressed enough to let him think the way that he does.

“Where did you learn all this stuff?” I gestured at the papers.

“Figured it out on my own, I guess. Talked to dad’s people sometimes, let them teach me a bit about how his business worked. But mostly I just fucked around and learned as I went. I made a lot of dumb mistakes in the beginning.”

“Like what?”

He laughed. “Dumb stuff, like lending money to the wrong guy, or investing in stupid shit. One time, I tried to open an upscale strip club, but that was a terrible move. Nobody wants to sit in a velvet-covered chair in a strip club, at least not in these neighborhoods. They’re trashy for a reason.”

I laughed, imagining swanky gentlemen in top hats and monocles cheering as a woman slowly unveiled her ankle. I was sure Liam’s idea for the club was a lot dirtier, but I liked mine.

“It’s weird. I was just thinking about how all this equals a man’s life. Like, we can read his habits and what he loves just by looking at a bank statement,” I said.

Liam nodded. “It’s a little scary, I guess. How much you can learn about a person from all their data and whatever the fuck you call it.”

I laughed. That was more like him.

“What are you going to do if we find what we’re looking for?” I asked softly, hoping he was still in a sharing mood.

He paused and seemed to scrutinize me for a second. His eyes were deep and harsh, like vast whirlpools for my own, and I almost felt myself getting lost in them. Frankly, I was losing myself in him, and not just in his eyes or his arms, but in the way he held himself. I wanted to move closer but resisted the impulse.

“Like I said before, not everyone in the Mob is happy with Colm. The problem is, I don’t know who I can trust. I thought O’Brian could be our guy, but he’s not interested in helping us.”

“How many bosses are there?”

“Twelve, and there’s at least one more I can ask. But, I don’t know. I can’t go to him with what we have, not yet at least.”

“There’s twelve of you? Why not go to any of the others?”

He shook his head. “They’re probably in Colm’s pocket. The Right People have a code of honor, but they’re still people, and people fucking love money.”

“Why do you call them ‘Right People’?”

He shrugged. “It’s an old term, a really old term. It used to mean any thief or someone like that, but now it means anybody who’s in the Irish Mob. Like how the Italians have a Made man, we have a Right person.”

“Never heard that before.”

“Yeah, well, the Cosa Nostra is loud. We like to be a little quieter.”

I laughed at that. I couldn’t imagine his people could be any louder, especially with dumping bodies into a public river. But I decided not to press.

“Okay, so who’s this other guy?”

“His name is Boss de Barra. Frankly, he’s fucking terrifying.”

“I can’t imagine he’s any scarier than Colm or any of the other psychopaths you deal with.”

“He is, though. He runs out of north Philly, which isn’t exactly our typical home turf. He staked out some neighborhoods, cut a bunch of throats, and made it his own. People say he’s a complete nut, like crazier than the craziest guy in Colm’s entourage.”

“What do you mean, people say?”

“I’ve never met him.”

I stared. “You’ve never met him?”

“He doesn’t come down from his territory very often. It’s basically a little fortress he runs up there.”

“So let me understand this. You’re entrusting our lives to some crazy guy who lives way up in the north and barely ever comes down here?”

“Basically, yeah.”

“That’s insane.”

He nodded. “It’s a little insane.”

I groaned, shaking my head, and looked at the piles in front of us. Not only did we have nothing so far, but if we did find something, it was totally up in the air whether or not it could even help. Liam’s plan hinged on an insane guy, someone he had never even met.

Then again, at least it was better than nothing.

“I guess we should get back to work.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess we should.”

I grabbed another piece of paper and began to skim it. My eyes felt heavy and frustration was welling up in my chest, but I forced myself to keep going forward. I had to keep going forward. I felt Liam watch me for a minute or two, and then he turned back to his own pages, getting back to the hunt.

––––––––

T
he sun was coming up by the time we finished.

“Fuck,” Liam said, slamming his fist down on the windowsill.

I looked at the papers scattered all across the room once again. We had read and reread and checked each other’s stacks at least five times. I was exhausted and my limbs were heavy and I felt like I was about to fall over from fatigue.

And we had nothing. At least nothing that Liam didn’t already know. There were no new leads, no new incriminating records, nothing.

“Fuck,” he said again, looking out over the neighborhood.

I felt nothing. I felt hollowed out and empty. It felt like too much effort to work up the energy to be pissed off. I should have been livid and terrified. We had just spent hours working through a bunch of useless papers, trying to find something that could save our lives. Liam had risked a lot even getting the papers in the first place. But there we were, back to square fucking one, with a bunch of pissed-off murderers scouring the city for us and nothing that could save our lives.

I should have been screaming. Instead, I just felt like taking a quick nap.

Liam had his head in his hands, rubbing at his eyes.

“What now?” I asked, not really caring what the answer was.

“We need more.”

“What do you mean, more?”

“We need more documents. More papers and shit.”

I groaned. “Liam, all the paper in the world won’t save us.”

“No, you’re wrong. I know the fucker did it, I know he was stealing. And he was smart enough to keep the real shit off these books. But I know he has to have some records of it.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Let’s assume he has some. How are you going to get it? Short of breaking into his hideout, or whatever you Mob guys use, and stealing it?”

He turned and gaped at me for a second. I made a face at him.

“What?” I said.

“You’re brilliant.”

“I think you just lost your mind.”

He walked over to me, dropped to his knees, and practically fell on top of me. He was laughing, and he pinned me down to the floor. Excitement jolted through me at his touch, though I was pretty sure he had completely cracked. Before I could speak, he pressed his mouth against mine and kissed me deeply.

I didn’t care if he was going nuts. I savored his kiss and returned it greedily. I wanted as much of him as I could get before we were both killed, or whatever was going to happen.

He pulled away and grinned down at me.

“I have a plan,” he said.

“Go ahead and share.”

He rolled off me, and I sat up, supporting myself on my right elbow.

“I’m going to rob the bastard.”

I blinked at him. “Can you do that?”

“Yeah, I can do that. I’m a master burglar.”

“So you’ll just rob the boss’s hideout?”

“His pub. I’ll rob his pub. If he has more financial stuff, or a second set of books, it’ll be in there, probably in a safe somewhere. I’ll break in late tonight and steal whatever he has.”

“Isn’t that, I don’t know, completely suicidal?”

He laughed and shook his head. “You’d think, but nobody would dare rob him. Nobody but me, at least. The place will be empty that late. It’ll be easy.”

“Liam, don’t. We can figure something else out.”

He stood up and stretched, and I briefly admired his lean, muscular form. He grinned down at me.

“Trust me. I can do this.”

I shook my head, at a loss for words.

“I’m going to make a call and then get some sleep. You should too.”

I nodded. “Are you sure?”

“Not at all. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

He strode out of the room and I watched him go. Silence flooded the room again, and I felt suffocated by all the paper scattered around me.

I didn’t want him to go. I wanted to run away, leave Philadelphia forever, forget about everything and disappear, but I knew he couldn’t do that. Plus, I couldn’t leave Petey with Chelsea. I had to trust him.

I got up and walked into the bedroom and collapsed onto the thin mattress. I wasn’t going to give up. I wasn’t going to let everything destroy me. I wasn’t going to let Liam go through hell alone, no matter what the cost. I wasn’t going to be some weak, whiney girl who broke down at the first sign of a problem. I had to get my shit together and support him the best that I could. When I woke up, I decided that I’d go through everything one more time, just in case we missed something.

As sleep began to overtake me, I pictured Liam sneaking around an empty pub, pulling paintings and jewels off of the walls like a cartoon robber.

“Y
ou sure about this?”

I looked back at Leary, at his all-black outfit and his black ski mask, and nodded. The neighborhood was silent, except for the soft buzz of a weak yellow streetlight. It was around three in the morning, and I knew that the place would be empty, or at least our chances were pretty good that it would be. I reached forward and felt the hard plastic body of the car we were crouched behind and thought about the past few days in silence as Leary steadied himself.

Ellie was counting on me. Fuck, everyone I knew was counting on me, and they didn’t even know it. Richie and his mom were safe, probably having a great time with all the cash I gave them, but their lives would be done with if I didn’t figure my shit out.

I wasn’t ready to roll over and let Colm murder me. I breathed deep and could practically taste the stillness and the fear wafting through the air. Across the street, Colm’s pub was dead, black, and closed up, and Leary was watching it like a hawk, ready for any sudden movement or any flicker of light that would give the presence of a guard away. But there was nothing: Colm was confident in his position, and he didn’t think he needed to post any goons to watch over his spot.