Chapter One
Despite the fact that New York no longer allows smoking indoors, the strip club I’ve just entered smells of tobacco. It’s the expensive kind though. Cigar versus cigarette. Probably Cuban.
The clientele at Red’s weren’t your average Joe’s looking for a good time. These were power players. Politicians, hedge-fund owners, and people like me who played at civility but dealt in the underworld. We all came because Red’s had the best tits and ass in town.
If you had money to blow, and you wanted to see New York’s best breasts, this was where you came.
“I can’t fucking believe you dragged me here,” my cousin muttered under his breath. I snorted at him.
“You used to love Red’s,” I reminded him. We’d spent years here. I was pretty sure Alex lost his virginity to one of the strippers.
That was half of the beauty of the place. You could literally have anything you wanted, and we’d partaken before we were old enough to even know how to keep it hard for too long.
“I’m married,” Alex reminded me. “My wife would cut my dick off if she knew I was here.”
I rolled my eyes. Alex had married some blue eyed daughter of one of my brother’s made men. They barely knew one another, but my cousin, much like my brother, was a stand-up type. He might not love his wife in the traditional sense, but when he said his vows, he intended to be faithful.
“Lucky for the two of us, I don’t have a ball and chain around my neck.”
He didn’t seem amused. I rolled my eyes.
“Get the stick out your ass. You don’t have to do shit you don’t want to.” He leveled me a look, as if reminding me that he didn’t want to be in the club. I’d dragged him. Reminding the asshole that if he didn’t come with me, I was likely to end up in much more trouble. I might be the enforcer of the Italian mafia’s New York syndicate, but that didn’t mean I was above engaging in some shenanigans.
My cousin wasn’t impressed.
Slapping a hand on his shoulder, I chuckled. “Come one man. I just beat a murder charge.”
I closed my eyes as I remembered how close I nearly came to spending the rest of my life in a jail cell. I would rather be dead than confined to a cage. Luckily, I’d beaten the charge and lived to drink again.
“Dom said to keep your nose clean,” Alex reminded me.
“Sasha’s got Dom by the balls these days. If she didn’t, he’d be out with us instead of sipping tea or whatever shit the two of them are doing.”
My brother was don of the mafia, and he’d married the daughter of the former head of the Bratva. At first, I’d hated Sasha. She was the enemy, and the idea of her in our home, close to the one family member I had left, made me want to slit her throat and throw her body in the Hudson.
But I hadn’t, and Sasha had more than proven herself to be loyal to my brother, the family, and to me. If she hadn’t testified on my behalf, I’d likely be sitting in a prison cell. I shuddered as I thought about that.
“Let’s get a drink,” I told Alex. I was in the mood to get blacked out and have some hot girl shake her tits in my face, and I wasn’t going to let my cousin, or anyone else, ruin my good time.
“Just swear to me you’ll keep your head on straight,” Alex said.
I smiled at him. “I would,” I told him, “but that would be incredibly boring.”
He opened his mouth to speak only to be cut off by a few howls and hollers. I smirked as I watched several of my friend walking into the club. They were rowdier than was normal, but I knew the manager wouldn’t mind. This place might be upscale, but money talked, and we would be spending a ton of it.
“Fuck me,” Alex groaned. I smirked as I watched my cousin sink further down into his chair.
“Where the fuck are the waitresses?” I muttered. Usually bottle service girls were swarming the place. But tonight, there wasn’t a single girl in sight.
“I don’t think we need bottles,” Alex told me.
I sighed in frustration. “It’s a celebration,” I reminded him.
He opened his mouth to argue, but I leveled him with a firm stare. “Knock it the fuck off,” I ordered.
The rest of my crew made their way over. For some of them, this was their first time at Red’s, and I could see the excitement in their eyes as they watched the girls gyrate on the poles. Though they were all part of the mafia, in some capacity or another, they weren’t all ranked as high as myself and Alex. We were fucking royalty, and I planned to party accordingly.
Tomorrow I would be mister fucking responsible. But tonight, I needed to let loose. “It’s stripper and booze or blood and bullets.”