“What do you need?” I asked. I would do anything I could to make it better, but this next part was all up to her. I couldn’t help with what she needed, but if I could, I would take away the pain.
“Just, thank you.” She had tears in her eyes as she said it. She was in pain, but she was thanking me.
“For what, hon?” I asked, confused.
“Being here. I needed you tonight. I had a feeling it was going to happen. I had a feeling-”
I wrapped my arm around her and hugged her. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll get you where you need to go and the boys will come to us. They are always there for us when we need them.” It felt like a falsehood even as I was saying it, and I flinched. I wanted them to be there, but I couldn’t guarantee that they would. Those men put their business first and their family second. It was the nature of the job, and it always would be. We had to love them in spite of that.
“They are. But I need you now, and you are here. You are a good friend, Kat.” She let the tears flow as she barred down for yet another contraction.
“Breathe, Jo. Just breathe.” I took note of the time and told her so that she could inform the doctors.
“It’ll be okay,” I reassured her. I’d do whatever I could to make sure she was comfortable.
“Will you stay with me?” she asked.
“I will. I’ll do whatever you need me to do,” I promised.
I’d be there with her until the end. She was family.
Janson
“Is this the club?” I asked as I looked out the tinted windows up at the bright neon sign. El Gato blinked in neon blue letters down at us. Men and women lingered just outside the doors, cigarettes in and alcohol in their hands as they chatted so loudly that we could hear them all the way from the car. The music spilled out onto the street, the backdrop for these loud, drunken conversations, and even I cringed. The bar was uncharacteristically seedy for Canton, which was a normally a family-friendly middle-class neighborhood.
Of course, David would find a place like this. It was the one place that stuck out in all the normal.
The nasty little seed that sprang forth.
“Is he in there?” Greyson asked from his phone. “Do you actually see him?”
He looked at me and nodded. That motherf*ck
er was going to pay. He’d played the family for a fool, kidnapped the only thing that mattered to my boss, and tried to force her to be his. Even if I wasn’t involved in what was about to happen, I would have no sympathy for a man like him.
For the threat to the family, for what he did to Joanna. He was a fool and he needed to die.
At our hands. It wouldn’t be quick, it wouldn’t be painless, that was a given, but it was Greyson’s job to decide who got to live and who got to die and how. It was his right as the soon-to-be leader of this family.
It was gruesome but it was the truth. It was the only way our families would be safe. His wife, his child. My Kathryn.
She was mine.
I’d never get used to feeling this way. But I knew I needed to protect her at all costs. It was the one thing I knew better than I knew myself.
I opened the car door and stepped out. “Well, let’s f*ck
ing go get this bastard and end this shit once and for all.”
He got out of the other side and nodded. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”
I saw his gun flash from under his blazer and reached for my own, checking its location. It made me feel safe. Powerful. I knew that if I had to, I could defend myself. I’d been handling firearms since I was a teenager, and I was smart enough to be an expert at it by now.
But the same could be said for David.
The reality of that man was that he worked twice as hard as us to get half of the legitimacy that we had, and he still failed. I wondered what kind of force we would be facing, his men against ours, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t come down to it.
One on one, that was what Greyson wanted. I was just meant to be there at his side.
“If shit gets dodgy, you make sure to get out of here, you understand?” Greyson said.
“You know that’s not going to happen,” I answered as I gripped the handle of the knife in my belt. f*ck
that shit. I would go down with him and he knew it.
We stormed in through the club doors and looked around until we saw him. He was just f*ck
ing sitting at the bar drinking a cocktail while women danced up on the stage in little more than a pair of harem pants and bikini tops. It was a foul sight, but that didn’t matter.
I grinned as we made our way through the crowd to David. We couldn’t do it here, no, we would have to convince him to talk to us, walk outside with us. We’d have to use a little bit of creative magic on our part. But we were part of the Irish mob. That’s what we did.
Greyson clamped a hand on David’s shoulder and he turned around to face us. The man staring up at us had the right body, the right hair color, but the wrong f*ck
ing face.