If it weren’t for the obnoxiously loud gasping coming from the man below us, all three of us would have forgotten he was there. But when I looked closer, I realized who it was they were waterboarding.

Ryan Ross. How the fuck did they get him?

“Ryan, as much as I would like to draw this out, I am late for a meeting with my fiancé, and I hate being late,” Melody stated, as a blonde man stepped forward, holding her jewelry on a white fucking pillow.

“To hell with you and your fiancé. You no good Italian cunt bitc—” Before he could finish, one of the men who had held him down smashed his fist several times into his face.

“It’s Boss or Ms. Giovanni,” the man said, spitting on him. “Nothing more. Nothing less.”

Melody frowned and even that made me hard. She had beautiful lips.

“I didn’t want to do this,” she said, putting her earrings in before being handed a gun.

Spitting the blood from his mouth, Ryan smiled. “Do it. I’d rather die than talk to you, bitch.”

“Who said this was for you?” Melody smiled back as two men dragged a sobbing female forward and placed her on a chair in front of the scum. Ryan’s eyes widened as he looked at her.

“The Valero don’t know about your special friend, do they? They aren’t big on you fucking women outside the ones they offer you. You tried really hard to keep her a secret,” she said, walking behind him. It made my blood boil at how close she was to him.

“Did you know she’s pregnant?” Melody asked, causing the girl to hold on to her flat stomach and sob even louder. “Two lives saved if you just tell me what I want to know.” She loaded the gun.

He didn’t say a word, even as the girl begged him.

“So this is your answer then, Ryan?” Melody asked slowly. “I will kill her.”

He still did not speak.

Sighing, she fired not once, not twice, but repeatedly, only stopping when the girl’s lifeless body fell from the chair. She didn’t even flinch. Instead, she walked toward the girl and emptied the rest of her clip into the body. When she was done, she turned back to the now blood-spattered Ryan who sat wide-eyed and shaken. This must have happened often, because her men went to work, carrying the body and cleaning up the blood on the ground, which hadn’t touched her. They brought a new blood-free chair for her to sit on and handed her a pair of heels. All of which happened in a matter of seconds. They moved like the military.

“Does it make me a hypocrite if I still consider myself pro-life?” She didn’t even blink as she stepped into her white shoes.

“She’s just as fucking merciless as you are,” Neal uttered in disbelief.

In a single moment, though, she had gone against everything I ever believed. This was not the role I wanted my future wife to play. She was too beautiful for the blood and the darkness. She should be upstairs, flipping through catalogs and painting her pretty little nails, or waiting in our bed for me to have her. This could not stand, and this would not be her role. I was to become the Boss and the Ceann na Conairte. She was to stand at my side so the Italians would fall in line.

Not that I could deny how sexy I found it. My mind hated this . . . saw the danger in this . . . but my body lusted after it painfully. My cock throbbed for her.

Declan snickered to my right. “Right now, you wish the biggest thing you had to deal with was a charity junkie for a wife.”

I couldn’t agree more. I would have to fix this situation and fast.

“Everyone out!” I roared, making every last one of the inhabitants of the room look at me as though I had lost my mind.

The eyes that shined with the most rage were those of my beautiful, soon-to-be wife. Oh well, this would be her first lesson. There was one Boss, only one Ceann na Conairte, and it was not her.

FOUR

“Every murder turns on a bright hot light,

and a lot of people . . .

have to walk out of the shadows.”

~ Albert Maltz

ORLANDO

“Thank you for lying to him. I know it is not your forte.” I coughed. I was always bloody coughing. I wanted nothing more than to rip my damn throat from my neck.

“Yes, well,” Sedric said, handing me a glass of brandy. “One day he may thank me for keeping the identify of your daughter secret.”

With shaky hands, I held on to the glass before tossing the contents down my throat. It helped the hacking this damn cancer caused, but not by much.

“She’s your daughter now.” I hated saying it. I couldn’t even meet his gaze. I just stared at the empty glass. My own hands looked so foreign to me.

When had I become this man? This broken and tired old man who was frustrated at watching the sun come up in the morning and seeing the moon fill the night sky? When had I become tired of living? In my youth, all I did was live, some say a little too much, but I knew this was to be my future.

Even now it wasn’t enough. I wanted to live more. I wanted more. It was the curse of being a Giovanni. We wanted it all, even if we didn’t know it yet. I rode like lightning and—

“Orlando?”

Snapping out of my trance, I stared at the gracefully graying man before me with slight envy. Even now, he did not look a day over thirty-something. The Callahans, I swear, had found the Fountain of Youth.

“My apologizes. What did you say?” I frowned, trying to sit up, but my body was my prison and I couldn’t.

Walking over to me, Sedric slowly lifted me up with one hand. “I said, she would forever be your daughter. I wish to know why you didn’t tell me about the cancer. I wouldn’t have used it against you.”

“Liar.” He couldn’t help himself, a small grin spread across his face. “I didn’t wish for anyone to know, Mel included. But that damn girl was too bloody smart for her own good and blackmailed the doctors into telling her.” Snickering, I grabbed the bottle off my desk, spilling a few drops on my hands.

Sedric nodded, staring out the window as he drank. “When I first found out about her, I was shocked and angry that you would allow your daughter to get tied into the life we have chosen. I had to see it with my own eyes, and watching her chop off two men’s hands down in Mexico sure did the trick.”

“So you saw her on a good day.”

His eyebrow rose, and all I could do was snort.

“I didn’t allow Mel to do anything. She doesn’t ask for permission. She takes what she wants. By the time you’ve figured out what happened, it’s too late to stop her. I didn’t even realize it when she started taking over. One moment she was helping me balance cocaine and clean guns, the next she was telling me not to worry because she already knew what to do. I tried to fight her, but the damn girl’s plans always worked so well. I was left speechless.”

“Your empire may have needed us once upon a time, but not now. I must admit, she has done well, frighteningly well, in fact. You could have terminated the contract,” he said, and he was right, I could have. Any self-respecting Boss would never have shared his or her throne with another, and yet here we were.

“If Mel was a man, no one would dare deny she has the capability to be the best there ever was. But there will always be a fool who thinks she can be run over, and she would never stop fighting. If someone backed her into a corner, she would either fight or tear down the wall and attack them from behind.” I chuckled. It was one of the things I loved about her. That fire in her eyes reminded me so much of her mother.