My future bride was involved in something that could get her in a lot of trouble.
Was this what she meant when she said she wanted someone to accept all of her? No man in his right mind would let his woman take those kinds of risks. And I had no doubt, none of the Mykos clan had any clue of the activities of their precious princess.
Yes, I knew I was an ass, but the people Nyx tangled with in her games were undoubtedly worse than those her brothers or I dealt with regularly.
Now I had to find a way to catch her red-handed. Until I figured out the logistics of my plan, I might as well see how she burned off all the steam.
6
Nyx
“Pour me another.I need at least one more to take the edge off,” I said to my bestie, Akari Ota.
She was the managing partner of Kato Kosmos, the newest of the nightclubs in the Ida. She’d arrived back into town earlier today after what we liked to call her quarterly required family time with her overbearing parents. And with the holidays steadily approaching, she would have no free time until after the New Year. Which meant she would have to visit them or have her family come to her. She’d chosen the lesser of the two evils.
Akari narrowed her black eyes, saying without words, “Girl, don’t get me in trouble with your overprotective cousin,” and then reached for the Firewater Reserve Whiskey tucked away on the top shelf behind her.
“Don’t glare at me like that. If you had the night I did, you’d hand me the whole damn bottle.”
She set two crystal tumblers in front of us, poured our drinks, and then pushed one toward me.
“Want to tell me what happened between the let’s-hang-out-tonight call and our current state ofI want to kill my liver with this five-thousand-dollar bottle of spirits?”
Picking up my drink, I took a healthy swallow and let the fiery liquid soothe my senses before replying with, “Assholes. That’s what happened.”
“As in the man-type of assholes?”
“Are there any other?”
“I feel like we missed a conversation or two during the week I spent in Seattle with my parents.” She studied me as if I were an alien species. “When did you get a man? And why am I the last to know about it?”
I cringed. She was so going to let me have it. If there was anyone who would have my back in the situation I was currently in, it was Akari.
Both of us came from similar backgrounds. Our families were tied to shipping empires and the worlds of the syndicate, we were females in families full of males, and we’d moved to Las Vegas to get away from the rules and regulations we’d grown up using every means necessary to circumvent.
The main differences we had were our cultural backgrounds. Hers being Japanese and mine Greek, and that she’d grown up in Seattle and I was from New York.
She also happened to be the sister-in-law to Lana, Draco Jackson’s granddaughter. Which gave her one extra point in the what-the-fuck-ometer, since I at least got away from having mob bosses up my ass all the time telling me what to do. Whereas, she constantly had an eye or two on her.
Who was I kidding?
I just happened to bribe the eyes on me with a cut of my business so they reported only the information I wanted to the powers that be.
“Do you remember when I mentioned I had a problem that I hoped to resolve by the time we met tonight?”
“I take it the man was the problem.”
I took a deep breath. “You could say that. He’s my fiancé.”
“Your what?” She set her drink on the bar between us, grabbed the edge of the bar, and then leaned forward. “I need you to start at the beginning and don’t leave a fucking thing out. If there is one thing I’m good at, it’s knowing when you are lying, Mykos. That poker face of yours won’t work on me.”
I pressed my fingers to my temples for a brief moment, looked around to make sure only our protection stood near us, and then relayed the whole sordid Mykos-Drakos saga.
“So, let me get this straight. You’re engaged to the head of a rival family, neither of you wants to marry the other, but he makes out big if you do get married. You offered him your portion of the trust to end the engagement, and he countered by saying he’d rather fuck you for the next year.”
I nodded. “Yep. That about sums it up.”
“Are you attracted to him?”