Deathless & Divided (The Chicago War #1) (20 page)

It was a much better sight than the night before.

“What kind of place?” Lily asked.

“Bar,” Damian answered. “Partly.”

Lily lifted a brow and without saying a thing, Damian caved.

“A strip joint.”

“Oh,” Lily muttered, her smile fading.

“A lot of business goes on there, meetings and whatnot.”

She still didn’t appear particularly pleased. Damian didn’t want to be the one to explain that a great deal of business went down in places like those. They were the best ones to funnel illegal funds in from. Restaurants happened to be another one. Anything where cash could be hidden, the Outfit had a leg and an arm in.

“Are you jealous?” Damian asked.

Lily snorted. “Of strippers, Damian?”

Point taken.

“Good, you shouldn’t be anyway,” he said. “But I do have to head over there after we get something to chow down on.”

“About the shooting yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

Lily hummed, sadness dimming her pretty features. “Back to life, right?”

Damian nodded. “Back to life.”

“I thought you were going to take me to Eve?” she asked.

“Still will. Her parents’ place is on the way.”

“Parent,” Lily reminded him gently.

Damian flinched. “Yeah. That’s where she is, anyway. I got that info before you woke up. She’s not … doing well.”

Understatement. Evelina Conti was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, a lot like her father and brother. Questions were being asked. Answers were wanted. No one had any. This was going to be messy.

“She’ll appreciate you coming, though,” Damian said.

“What are we doing now?”

“What do you mean?”

“You and me,” Lily said quietly. “What are we?”

“Whatever you want to be.”

Lily laughed drily. “That’s not entirely true, Damian. We’re still getting married and I still didn’t choose it.”

“I don’t know what you expect to hear from me, Lily, but my stance remains the same as it did before last night. Besides, what is the problem with being able to stand one another, huh? Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Is that all it’ll ever be?” she asked.

“I’m not asking for you to fall in love with me.”

Lily didn’t bat a lash. “Touché.”

“The car was white, I don’t give a fuck what anybody says,” Tommas said sharply. “You weren’t facing the window, Joel.”

“How fast did that drive-by happen, huh?” Joel demanded. “Three seconds, maybe four if we were lucky. It was silver—grey, even.”

“It was white!”

Damian leaned against the wall beside Dino, watching the scene unfold. Why the fuck the color of the car that had been involved with the shooting was important, Damian didn’t know. He supposed they were trying to discern who had been driving, but since everyone who had seen the car agreed the windows were tinted dark, no one knew the shooter.

“What do you think?” Damian asked Dino.

“I think we’re going to have a problem on our hands,” Dino replied.

Damian chuckled. “Theirs, anyway.”

“Something like that.”

“Could have been the East Side gang,” someone put in. “We’ve had a lot of issues with them.”

“No,” Dino said, jumping to the main conversation. “It wouldn’t be them. They’re the type of thugs that enjoy bragging about the shit they’ve done. We would have known already if they were the problem.”

“Very true,” Terrance said, his gaze on the tumbler glass of whiskey in his hand. The boss was another man in the place that seemed to be taking the entire scene in silence. He always had liked to observe more than participate. “We’ve cleared out a lot of those little problem gangs, anyway. I don’t think that’s where we should be looking.”

“It was white,” came a whisper from the far, shadowed corner.

Damian cringed at the pain in the man’s voice. Riley Conti didn’t even look away from the glass of rum in his hand as he spoke the words. He was still shaking and Damian had been counting. That was the man’s fourth glass in an hour. Riley was shitfaced and thoroughly working on forgetting what had happened.

It was going to hurt a hell of a lot more when he was sober again.

It always fucking did.

“The car was white,” Riley spat. “It’s not a fucking gang. This is … personal, right? I mean, if they wanted to go after the boss, why not just damn well do that, huh? S’not about the boss, you goddamn idiots.”

Terrance’s brow rose but for once, the Outfit’s leader didn’t correct his front boss’s ignorance and rudeness. Your wife getting killed was a pass on that shit, obviously.

“What, inside job, then?” Ben DeLuca asked.

Dino stiffened beside Damian.

“I didn’t say that,” Riley said, his words slurring at the end. “I said it’s personal, meaning someone pissed someone else off and they’re making a point.”

The thirty or so men chatting quietly in the strip club silenced instantly with that suggestion. While they had all been discussing back and forth for a good hour about possibilities and what needed to be done, the very whisper of an inside job stopped them all. Immediately, men glanced between one another in a hushed state, tension climbing higher with every passing second. Damian could see the unspoken questions, accusations, and suspicion in their eyes.

Terrance leaned back in his chair. “That’s a bold statement, Riley.”

“Makes better sense than a fucking gang,” the front boss replied in his drunken stupor. “Who’d you piss off, Terrance?”

The boss waved it off. “Laurent?”

“Yeah, Boss?” Laurent asked from where he sat at a booth with five other men. The bullet he took in his shoulder the day before didn’t seem to be causing him any issues. Then again, Damian’s uncle always did hide things well.

“I didn’t get the chance to say something what with the bullets and blood, but make damn sure your wife understands we’re not to have a repeat of yesterday.”

“Got it,” Damian’s uncle said quickly.

“What was that all about, anyway?” Dino asked Damian too low for anyone else to hear.

“I told you, she had a fucking spell,” Damian said, unaffected.

His cheek still hurt something awful, too. The nice row of scratches on his back that Lily had given him in the shower after their first round made up for that, though.

“About what?” Dino asked.

“Lily.”

Dino scowled. “Our father?”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking bitch. I suppose she forgets her father was the dirtiest cop that ever lived.”

Damian laughed darkly. “I know.”

“Doesn’t apply to her, right?”

“He was dirty, maybe that’s why she overlooks it,” Damian suggested.

“Probably.”

The conversation still happening drew in Damian’s attention again.

“They drew blood first,” Joel said. “I want to know who it was and soon.”

“Patience comes in handy for times like these,” Terrance replied. “You’ll do well to remember that.”

“He has a point, Terrance,” Ben said. “Doing nothing feels like we’re sitting ducks waiting for the next bullet to hit one of us. Perhaps Mia was just an accident, maybe whoever it was had been aiming for you.”

Riley choked out a pained sound in the corner. No one paid him any mind.

Ben continued like he hadn’t been interrupted. “Who’s to say? What if the next mistake is one of your granddaughters, hmm? You’ve always got them around and close. The next stray bullet might just have their blood all over it, Terrance.”

The boss barely reacted to the idea of Abriella or Alessa being caught in the crossfire of another shooting, but Damian knew better. Terrance’s gaze narrowed and his lips twitched, fighting to pull into a sneer. Anyone else probably overlooked the small ticks, but not Damian.

Terrance was worried.

As he should be, Damian mused.

“What about the Poletti kid?” Theo asked as he took a seat across from Terrance.

Damian froze in place. How in the hell did Theo know about the Poletti hit? Theo asked his boss about it like he knew Terrance had been the one to make the call. But that was impossible. Damian hadn’t said a word to his friend about the hit.

Dino knew …

Damian passed Dino a questioning stare.

Dino simply shrugged and lifted his beer to his lips without a word.

“What about the Poletti kid?” Terrance asked.

“Are we looking at a situation of retaliation here?” Theo asked back.

Joel’s stare snapped to his grandfather. “What in the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Terrance muttered with a wave of his hand to dismiss the concerns.

Theo didn’t relent. “You put that hit out on him, didn’t you, Boss?”

“What did you just say?” Joel asked, his tone taking on a threatening edge.

“Just what I fucking said,” Theo said without any heat to his words. “You’re not deaf or stupid so clean out your ears. Boss decided to cull that issue before you got a big head and invited the enemy in. Shit like that happens when you think you make all the calls and you don’t, Joel. Welcome to the big boy world where you are not the most important person in the room. I imagine that must be hard for you, but grin and bear it, yeah? God knows we’ve done it enough for you.”

Ouch.

“Damn,” Dino whispered like he was fucking proud or something.

Damian figured it out then. Terrance had told Joel of the hit on James Poletti, but he obviously hadn’t explained to his grandson that he was the one who made the call for it.

Terrance opened his mouth to speak. “I—”

“Did you kill James?” Joel demanded, cutting in on the boss.

Terrance heaved a sigh. “Joel, you are one more word away from getting my boot in your teeth.”

Riley stumbled out from the corner, waving his glass wildly as he pointed at the boss. “You did this?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You … you did this!” Riley shouted. “My Mia—she died because of
you
?”

“Somebody needs to stop him before he does something he regrets,” Dino said.

“I think you’ve had quite enough,” Terrance said calmly to his front boss. He gestured at one of the enforcers leaning against a chair behind him. “Ruck, take him home or—”

“I will not go home!” Riley took another stumbling step forward before his glass fell from his trembling hand. It shattered across the floor, the rum slipping along the lines in the tiles. Everyone else in the room seemed too frozen to speak or move. “Did you do this, Terrance? Tell me.”

“I wasn’t the one holding the gun, Riley.”

“You didn’t have to be,” Riley said. “Isn’t that what you always said,
Boss
? The man who orders the gun is just as bloody as the one who pulls the trigger.”

“Take him home,” Terrance repeated to the enforcer, still unruffled by the threatening tone Riley had taken on. “Sober him up and get him thinking clearly.”

Riley cackled with a drunken laugh as the enforcer stepped forward to shuffle him out of the strip joint. The rest of the men who had gathered for the meeting stayed quiet until the front boss for the Outfit was out of the building and it was safe to speak again.

“He’ll be fine once he cleans up,” Ben said to Terrance.

The boss didn’t look like he believed a word of it.

“It could be retaliation,” Terrance said instead. He subtly passed a glance in Damian’s direction before going back to the conversation at hand. “The hit wasn’t entirely clean when it was followed through. There might have been someone who saw something, figured out the hit came from the Outfit, and didn’t come forward to the police.”

No one turned to Damian for answers.

This was exactly why he liked being on the boss’s payroll and not anyone else’s. The only person he needed to answer to for his fuck up was Terrance. Even so, he didn’t think the boss was blaming him for it.

“You fucking bastard,” Joel hissed. “And for what, to teach me a goddamn lesson?”

Terrance shrugged his thick shoulders like it didn’t make a difference either way. “You will learn my lessons one way or another, Joel.”

Joel gawked with his jaw wide open and hatred brimming. “Who did the hit, then?”

“I want enforcers on all the women,” Terrance said instead of answering his grandson.

Another lesson Joel needed to learn was to never expect answers from a boss. Terrance wasn’t required to explain his decisions.

Terrance ticked his chin in Chris’s direction, an enforcer that tended to work a lot with the Conti crew. “Chris, stick close to Adriano and Evelina. I’m sure Riley will agree with me once he’s clear-headed.”

Laurent spoke up, too. “I have a couple of men from my crew keeping an eye on my wife.”

“Already.” Terrance didn’t even pose the word as a question. It felt loaded with something Damian couldn’t place. “Why is that, Laurent? You had no reason to believe this was a situation of retaliation on anyone’s part.”

“Being safe, Boss.”

Even Damian had to wonder about that.

“Sure, sure,” the boss drawled before giving his right-hand his attention. “Ben, I’m sure you’ll figure something out for the DeLuca side.”

“Of course,” Ben replied.

“And Damian,” Terrance added.

Damian perked, but barely. “Yeah?”