One
Eoghan
Two years later
I hated church.
And that wasn’t something I said lightly.
I hated it with a passion, and as a Five Pointer, that sucked, because part of the position of being in our exalted brotherhood was that we attend church and confessed our sins.
Of which there were many.
On a daily basis.
Really, we should have had a hotline to the confessional with how much sin we perpetrated, but as much as my father, the head of the Five Points—the biggest Irish Mob family in the United States—donated to St. Patrick’s, it wasn’t enough for his entire crew to be outfitted with their own personal priests to service them.
My lips twitched at the thought, even as Father Doyle glared at me for daring to be amused within these hallowed walls.
While my father thought the sun rose and set on the old fuck, I didn’t, so I glared back at him, amused even more when his cheeks blanched and he stared straight ahead.
The day my father died was the day when this old fuck was being sent to wherever they sent old priests off to.
And yeah, I saw him outliving my father, mostly because of the life Aidan O’Donnelly led.
The lives we all led.
That Da had hit the grand old age of sixty-six was pretty much a fucking miracle. I wasn’t sure if I’d live that long, and maybe with a Bratva bitch as my bride, I wouldn’t last the fucking week.
The enmity between the Russians and the Irish wasn’t as bad as it was with the Italians—fucking hated that scum. Jesus, everyone did. They were cocksuckers who made the Albanians look trustworthy, and let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t trust an Albanian to look after a sandwich from Subway, never mind my territory—but the hostility between us was still bad.
Never the twain shall meet, and all that shit.
And personally, I didn’t appreciate playing Romeo to a fucking Muscovite Juliet, but it wasn’t like I had a choice.
Today was my wedding day.
Yeah, I was getting married, and I wasn’t fucking happy about it.
It was also my bride’s goddamn birthday.
Fucking eighteen.
Jesus.
I had about six hundred of New York’s elite at my back, we even had the Deputy Attorney General of the state in the pews, and the hypocrisy within these walls which, ordinarily, would have amused me, instead, irritated the fuck out of me.
The place stank of shit.
I didn’t give a fuck if these bastards were wearing eight hundred dollar an ounce scent, all I could smell was crap.
A lot of it.
The place was decked to the nines, both families’ wealth out on display in the way it was decorated, but also, with the level of protection we had on this event—most of which I’d arranged because security was my jam. For every two guests, we had one detail covering their asses because this wedding meant something.
It was a way of formalizing ties between the Bratva and the Irish Mob, a way of securing them too, but I knew it was also my father’s way of trying to take us up to another level. The number of famous faces, of political figures in the pews, spoke clearly of both families’ spheres of influence, and he wanted that—wanted his greedy mitts all over those spheres. He’d long been playing the property ladder in the city, and with our money man and close friend to the family, Finn O’Grady, working the figures, we were starting to take over shit, owning the biggest skyscrapers, holding controlling stakes of the best plots of land in space poor Manhattan.
I already knew my father was a whack job, but if I hadn’t known it, this wedding proved it.