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“I don’t understand it either,” I admit. “But I want you all the time. Forever. And I can’t keep pretending that interviewing these men doesn’t make my blood boil imagining any one of them touching you, standing by you, putting a baby in you. There’s not a man on this planet good enough for you, not me, not even the Russian, but I want to try.”
“I want to be the one. I love you,” I say, and then I say it ten more times, a chant against her ear. “Let me be the one. Please, please.”
I’ll lose my nerve if I wait—he will wear me down with sweet kisses and proclamations of love repeated like a prayer in my ear. It has to be tonight.
Dad was notoriously a father, not just of us three, but of everyone in the Family. I am not as loving, or paternal. I am an unmarried 28-year-old who killed her first fiancé and has been interviewing marriage candidates like a twisted reality TV show.
“She’s come into my club before,” he explains, and this surprises me. Mary is the last person I would ever expect to come to a club alone, but she is a creature of many secrets, always skulking off into the night. To go clubbing, apparently. “She fascinates me, is all. It will pass.”
“We could be so good together,” Cillian insists. “I’ve been trying to tell you. To show you.”
I’m about to step out of the room when Cillian moves suddenly, a blur of motion to my right before there’s a sickening slam at the back of my head. Everything goes completely black.
“I am better than you,” I say. “I can beat you in a fight and your business would be in shambles if Sean hadn’t married Willa. Without us, you’re just a fucking gangster.” A muscle ticks in Cillian’s neck.
“This is all Cillian.” “It’s got his rat ass name written all over it,” Mary says.
“And now he has Vanessa,” Sean says before I have to.
“They live, you get my cooperation. They die, you will get my corpse.”
I don’t think about it. I line up my shot and shoot, then shoot again, both shots directly into his skull. He’s the first person I’ve ever killed.
“I love you,” he says, pauses, then rushes on, “I am criminally, fatally in love with you, and you can try to marry someone else, but I’m not going to leave. I like your house too much and I like you too much to ever be away from you.”
“I know that Maxim is better for you, I get that on paper he is the perfect fit, but he isn’t. It’s me, Vanessa. It’s you and me, I can’t explain how I know it, but I do. It’s us. We’re meant to be, and I will not let some Russian mob boss come between that. If he tries, I guess I’ll just have to kill him,” he says.
“To my sister Mary, and to Maxim Orlov, who I’m thrilled to announce will be wed this February.”
“Two of the most dangerous people in Boston, what could possibly go wrong?”
