Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100086 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100086 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
The money…
He should be goddamn pleased that she didn’t want it. She grabbed a box cutter and started collapsing the boxes, putting a little more violence into it than strictly necessary. Dmitri didn’t want her to have the money his father had put aside for her any more than she wanted to have it. But if he didn’t get her to take it and return to the Romanov fold, he’d be going against Andrei’s dying wishes. As Andrei had been so fond of saying when he was alive, a man didn’t get by in their kind of life without having his own code of honor. While that didn’t require him to be faithful to his wife or keep him from murdering the opposition or delving into the kind of illegal things that kept Olivia up at night, it did mean that his word was something he’d never break.
And that code was one Dmitri had inherited from their father.
So far Dmitri hadn’t moved to force the issue, but if Sergei showing up last night was any indication, it was only a matter of time before he truly insisted she return to the family.
The boxes thoroughly demolished, she stuck the box cutter into her back pocket and gathered up the cardboard. It would take all of fifteen minutes to get rid of these and finish closing up, and then she’d be headed home to cuddle her daughter. Shutting a door between themselves and the rest of the world sounded like heaven right now.
But when she took the boxes into the back alley, she froze. There were three men in the alley. Couldn’t they find another damn place to do a drug deal? She started to back into the pub, but raised voices caught her attention. Two of them backed the third into the brick wall, their stance aggressive and reeking of promised pain. Go back inside, Olivia. This isn’t your fight. Just call 911 and lock the damn door.
One of the men punched the third, sending him spinning to the ground. She gripped the doorframe, torn between the need to run and the need to intervene. The second man stepped forward, his intention to kick the guy while he was down in every line of his body. Damn it. A boot could do fatal damage to the soft parts of a stomach. “Stop!”
“Stay out of this, bitch.”
I wish I could. But she was already moving, ducking back through the door to grab the shotgun Benji kept hidden in the gap between counters. The first night she’d closed alone, he’d shown it to her and walked her through using it until he was satisfied she wouldn’t shoot her foot off trying to defend herself. She could have told him that she was no stranger to using guns, but it was just easier to go along with it.
Olivia walked through the door, cracked the barrel to make sure it was loaded, and snapped it shut in a sound that only a fool wouldn’t recognize. She lifted it, bracing the stock against her shoulder so it wouldn’t knock her on her ass if she had to pull the trigger. “I said stop.”
The two standing men exchanged a look, clearly weighing their options. She waited, though the shotgun was already getting heavy, the stock slick in her clammy hands. Are they O’Malley men collecting payment? A part of her didn’t want to believe it. The rest of her knew exactly how families like that—like the Romanovs—functioned. She widened her stance, ready to do whatever it took to get them away from the guy on the ground. “I already called 911. They should be here any second.”
The man on the left cursed long and hard and turned to the one on the ground. “Don’t think that we’ll forget Ricky, you piece of shit.” Then he grabbed the other guy’s arm and hauled him away.
Olivia waited for them to turn the corner…and then waited another twenty seconds to make sure they weren’t going to change their minds. Only when the coast was a hundred percent clear did she rush to the fallen man’s side. “Are you okay?”
“Aw, sweetheart, I didn’t know you cared.”
Cillian.
Chapter Five
Cillian had taken a beating a time or two. He’d always had a mouth on him, and sometimes it talked him into more trouble than it talked him out of—and that wasn’t even taking into consideration his upbringing and all that other shit. There was an ongoing threat of violence that existed in the background of all their lives from the time they were old enough to understand what their father really did to provide the lifestyle they enjoyed. For all that, he hadn’t understood why two strangers chose tonight of all nights to jump him.
Not until they’d let slip Ricky Halloran’s name.
The sins of the past keep coming back to bite us in the ass over and over again, like a snake that’s eating its own tail. We hate them for Devlin. They hate us for Ricky. And on and on it goes.