Entangled Mafia Princess: A Dark Captive Romance Beginning, page 1
Entangled Mafia Princess
Em Brown
Wind Color Press
Copyright © 2022 by Em Brown
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Contents
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
Chapter one
Kai
“Bad day?” Rafe Lee guesses as soon as I soon as I walk into the study of my home in Marin County overlooking the bay and Golden Gate Bridge.
“A shit day,” I acknowledge.
Rafe shows me the glass he holds. “I helped myself to a drink.”
I nod before sitting down opposite him. Rafe and I belong to the same triad, but we connected because we were both raised by our grandmothers. Rafe lost his parents to suicide and murder. Mine were killed in an automobile accident. When our grandmothers passed away, the Jing San Triad became our new family.
“You here on business?” I ask him.
“Passing through. I’m headed to Europe. But what happened with you?”
To calm myself, I draw in long breaths as I listen to the crackle of the fire in the fireplace. Back when I lived in Heihe, China, a city on the border with Russia, where winter temperatures easily dropped below zero, the warmth of a fire was something to be savored. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where winter temperatures can soar into the seventies, fireplaces often seem more decorative than anything else.
“I had an unexpected setback,” I reply.
My latest endeavor was supposed to catapult me up the ranks of the Jing San Triad and make me a legend within the organization. But what was supposed to have been the pièce de résistance of my career slipped from me. The amount of money I could have secured from the sale of the artificial intelligence I had stolen from SVATR, Silicon Valley Advanced Technologies and Robotics, would have eclipsed all my previous arms trades combined.
It was bad enough that my prized take was stolen from me, but the salt into the wound was how long and hard Michael’s wife had sobbed when I had to break the news to her that her husband had been killed in the effort. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to inform a woman she was now a widow, but it didn’t get any easier. The women always remind me of how my grandmother cried when my grandfather passed away. I was just a small kid at the time, but I remember it more than I remember the deaths of my parents a few years before.
“Anything I can help with?” Rafe asks.
It had taken months and months of planning and thousands of dollars in bribery before we could break into the heavily fortified offices, hack into the SVATR server, and download the encrypted information onto a laptop equipped with SVATR security clearance. I’m not about to have all that effort go to waste.
Not wanting to trouble Rafe just before his trip, however, I reply, “It’s okay. I just need to regroup.”
Rafe only looks at me with those dark, intense eyes of his. He can probably see the truth, but he respects my boundaries enough not to question me. Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to confide in him. Rafe is like the older brother I never had. Though he doesn’t divulge much, I sense he has his demons, but he always appears suave and collected. His personality is the opposite of my friend Andrian Plotnikov, whom I partnered with on the SVATR heist. Rafe’s cautioned me about Andrian, and I know he wouldn’t approve of my working with Andrian on such a significant endeavor.
“You let me know if you need anything,” Rafe says before we turn to more banal subject matters.
After he departs, I text my right-hand man, Andy Huang, for an update. Even though Andy was injured in the ambush shortly after leaving SVATR, our guys were able to down one of the attackers before they made off with our laptop.
Who did this? And who could have betrayed our plans? I rub my temple.
Athena, a German Shepherd I rescued from the Tenderloin District when she was barely a year old, paddles into the room. As if she knows I could use comforting, she rests her head upon my lap and licks at my hand when I stroke her head.
Andy calls me back. “We got a name.”
I sit up. “Yeah?”
“He works for Liam Callaghan.”
“Liam Callaghan. Who the fuck is that?”
“Don’t know. I can continue with the waterboarding. Or we can switch things up and start pulling teeth.”
Noticing an incoming call from a blocked number, I say, “I’ll call you back.”
Without picking up the other call, I know it’s Andrian. We’ve known each other since we were boys growing up in the conurbation of Heihe and Blagoveshchensk.
“Dmitri didn’t make it,” Andrian informs me after I pick up the call. “He died from his gunshot wounds.”
“Shit, I’m sorry,” I reply in Russian, a language many residents in Heihe learned to welcome their neighbors from across the border. Dmitri, Andrian’s most trusted lieutenant, is a significant loss and a personal one.
Andrian pounds what sounds like a table and curses. “How are your guys?”
“I lost Michael,” I answer, “and Andy was hit in the shoulder, but he’s okay.”
“Yebat’! You get anything out of the ubl’udak that was caught?”
“Liam Callaghan.”
“Liam who?”
“Callaghan. Sounds Irish.”
“You wait. I make quick call to Belinsky and ask about this Callaghan.”
Belinksy is part of the Russian mafia in New York. The Jing San has people on the East Coast, too, and I make a mental list of who I can reach out to.
A few minutes later, Andrian calls again. “Callaghan. From Boston. Belinksy, he thinks the Irish are looking to expand west.”
I know the Irish mafia has a presence in places like Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha, but I’ve yet to encounter them as far west as California.
“Why the fuck they have to come out here?” Andrian asks.
“Maybe the same reason you came out from Saint Petersburg, Florida.”
“I want to give this Callaghan a new asshole. I pulled all my hackers to work on this project. Chert voz’mi! And the timing is terrible. The boss wants me in Moscow tomorrow. Says it’s important.”
“Then you should go. I’ll take care of this.”
“I’m going to blow this fucking Liam Callaghan to pieces first.”
“That won’t get us the laptop back.”
Andrian pounds the table again and unleashes a string of curses. I let my friend vent—Andrian always was a hothead—but eventually interrupt the tirade, saying, “Andrian, focus. Our guys got ambushed. By a punk. Chances are we’ve got a traitor, among your people or mine, or both.”
At that, Andrian calms enough to say, “Fuck. When I find out who it is, I’m going to tear the bastard’s testicles out and shove it down his throat.”
“Do that. We need to find the leak as soon as possible and make an example of him.”
“You’ll check your people, too?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll talk more with my people back on the East Coast, see what they know about this Liam Callaghan.”
“Good. Give my regards to Lukashenko.”
“Do svidaniya.”
After hanging up, I call back Andy. “Get what you can out of the guy, then dig into this Liam Callaghan.”
As I sit with Athena napping at my feet, I mentally comb through all the people who might have tipped Callaghan off to our plans. Aside from a few of my guys, I haven’t told anyone in the triad of my effort to acquire the artificial intelligence from SVATR or that I was partnering with my childhood friend in the Russian mafia to pull it off. So there’s only a handful of people who could be the problem.
Needing to vent my emotions, I head down to my personal gym. Andrian likes to break things when he’s frustrated, but I prefer to pound weights. I’m sculpted but not overly beefy. Too much muscle and the wrong workout can diminish dexterity and quickness, two qualities that got me through my years living on the streets of Heihe before it became a prosperous city with tree-lined boulevards and luxury hotels.
I was a late bloomer and a scrawny boy in my early teen years. There were plenty of times when, after getting beat up by Russian teenagers in Blagoveshchensk, I wished I had been bigger and stronger. Now that I am, I could easily take on the jerks who stole the cheap Chinese goods I tried to sell or who kicked me while I was down because they resented those from Heihe as the city became visibly more and more prosperous compared to Blagoveshchensk. A part of me would relish the opportunity to confront my boyhood tormentors today. Or it might be as fulfilling, certainly easier, to have my bodyguard put a 0.45 between their eyes. But the better part of me is content to leave my past behind me.
“This is what I have so far on Liam Callaghan,” Andy tells me after
I glance through the dossier Andy handed me, taking in Liam’s background, how he worked his way up the mob in Boston, where he lives, what properties he owns, and, last but not least, his family. The man is married with one son, currently in Ireland, and a daughter who’s just about to celebrate her twenty-first birthday.
Chapter two
Casey
“You look like a princess,” my aunt, Chloe, coos as the hairdresser places the tiara on my head.
“Or a Barbie doll,” says my cousin Hannah, who turned twenty-one a few months before me.
I look at myself in the full-length mirror of a dressing room in the luxury hotel where my birthday party is being held. With my wavy blond hair and bright blue eyes, I bear some resemblance to the dolls I used to play with, but I reply, “I don’t have tits big enough to look like Barbie.”
“They’ve made the doll a lot more realistic these days.”
Chloe adjusts the tie of my halter dress. “Either way, Kenton Brady is going to eat you up when he sees you.”
“Totally,” agrees Hannah.
I glance over at my mother, but she seems more interested in her martini. Grace Callaghan, a picture of elegance, has enough natural beauty that one would not guess that she has undergone several Botox injections and collagen treatments. Her low-cut sparkling black dress shows off her breasts, which she had enlarged when she was a teenager.
Turning back to the mirror, I say, “Actually, I’m not looking to impress Kenton."
Grace turns my way. “It’s time you dated nice Irish boys.”
“I don’t know any nice Irish boys. Do you?”
My mother narrows her eyes at me, which I ignore. We both know that my father is hardly a “good Irish boy” unless “good” means being a successful member of the Mafia and a husband who cheats on his wife with women barely older than his daughter.
And Kenton’s hardly a shining example of goodness either. He was a senior at Notre Dame when I was a freshman. He was known for throwing raging parties with his roommates at their off-campus apartment. On two separate occasions, guests had ended up in the hospital from overdrinking.
“I heard Kenton cut short his vacation in Bali just to attend your birthday party," Hannah says.
“I didn’t ask him to do that.”
“Mr. Brady will be here, too, flying out from St. Louis,” Grace adds.
The Brady family head a Mafia in Missouri. This party isn’t so much a birthday celebration as it is a networking event for my father.
“Let’s just get this over with,” I grumble. I’d rather spend my winter break at Tahoe, where I had picked up snowboarding shortly after we had moved to California. I love the sport, but my mother isn’t keen on me getting injured. At least stick to skiing, which has some sophistication, my mother had said.
“Took you women long enough,” my father says when we meet him outside in the backyard where my birthday party is being set up.
Nearing fifty, my father has a dusting of gray above the ears. Though his eyes are set a little close together, he’s otherwise a handsome man and looks sharp in his white sports coat over a black silk shirt.
“Mr. Brady said he and his son will try to be the first guests to arrive,” my father tells me while the other women walk ahead and check on the buffet table, “so you might have Kenton all to yourself before the other girls get to him.”
“That’s okay. I’m not really interested in Kenton,” I respond.
My father stops. “Not interested in one of the hottest and most eligible bachelors this side of the Mississippi?”
I almost laugh at hearing my father describe another man as “hottest.”
“I don’t think he’s relationship material,” I say, recalling the many girls Kenton had been with at Notre Dame.
“Don’t worry, his father will take care of that.”
“How?”
“In fact, I believe Mr. Brady has already impressed upon Kenton the advantages of merging the Callaghans with the Bradys.”
I frown. “Merging? Are we talking about a company?”
“That and more.”
“You and Mr. Brady get along well. What else do you need?”
“If you and Kenton were to get married, it would solidify our collective interests.”
“Seriously? Are we living in feudal times all of a sudden?”
“My line of business—our society—is a little different.”
My chest tightens. “First of all, I never said I was interested in marrying. I’m only turning twenty-one for chrissake. And if I ever did want to get married, which I doubt, it wouldn’t be to Kenton Brady.”
A cloud passes over my father’s face but he tries to remain calm. “You haven’t even given the boy a chance. You overlapped at Notre Dame for only a year.”
“I doubt he’s changed since graduating.”
“He’ll settle down once he’s married and has kids.”
“Like you did?” I ask pointedly.
He purses his lips in displeasure. “Casey, you aren’t going to find anyone better than Kenton Brady. He’ll take over his father’s operations one day, just like your brother will be taking over mine.”
“Then you should have Connor marry Kenton. Gay marriage is legal here in California.”
Pulling away, I go over to where Hannah stands admiring the three-layered cake decorated in dog roses. I can’t believe my father. What he’s talking about is an arranged marriage. Did he forget we’re living in the 21st century? Who does that?
Well, he can’t make me marry Kenton. And I doubt Kenton would really want to marry me either.
“This cake looks so good,” Hannah says, “but I’d probably have to go to the gym twice to work off the calories from it.”
“Come with me to Tahoe and you can work the cake off on the slopes,” I implore. Not only do I want to snowboard, I want to get away.
“You know I don’t ski.”
“I told you I’d teach you to snowboard. Anytime.”
“Thanks, but winter sports aren’t really my thing.”
“Fine. You don’t have to hit the slopes. You can come up for the hot tub or the casinos in Nevada.”
“But you’re going to be on the slopes. What am I going to do in the meantime?”
I sigh. My dream birthday would be a trip to Mammoth Mountain, but no one in my family is into activities involving snow. I have friends at Notre Dame who ski, and one of them lives in Colorado, so maybe I’ll fly out there instead of going to Tahoe.
“I’ll be right back,” Hannah tells me. “I think one of my lashes is coming unglued.”
While Hannah heads to the bathroom, I stare at the cake. My birthday party hasn’t even started and already I want to leave. Feeling antisocial, I look around for a place I can have some alone time.
I see a little girl about ten years old sitting by herself on a chair beneath a heat lamp. Not recognizing her, I go over. She has a handheld video game device.
“That almost looks like the snowboarder Chloe Kim,” I remark of the animated character gliding through the air.
“It is,” says the girl.
“No way! Chloe’s in a video game?”
I watch as the character lands on the ground, runs up to a chest and opens it to reveal munitions and a medical kit.
“There are a lot of skins to choose from in Fortnite,” the girl explains.
“Mind if I watch?”
She looks at me in surprise. “Um, I guess.”
Standing behind her chair, I watch her play. The video game has nothing to do with snowboarding. Instead, it’s a battle game in which players attempt to eliminate each other to be the last one standing.
“You seem very good,” I say to the girl.
She smiles. “Really? You don’t think it’s weird that I play Fortnite?”
“Why would I think it’s weird?”
“Kids at my school say that Fortnite is a boys’ game.”
“That’s sexist. And what does it matter to them that you like Fortnite? You do you. It looks like a fun game, and that Chloe Kim character—”
“It’s called a skin.”
