“I just can’t help but think that, despite your devout intentions, you could have done without beating the shit out of the poor girl.” Sam dumped the towel back on Byrne’s face and emptied another bucket of water on it. Brennan was definitely in his element. He was in the business of inflicting pain.
Kaminski whimpered at the sounds in the room, dangling from the ceiling.
“It was Kaminski!” Byrne gurgled through the towel. “He did it! I told him to threaten her, maybe slap her around, but no more. He was the one who hurt her!”
“Where’d you hurt her, Kaminski?” I asked the hanging man in front of me, my eyes leveled with his stomach. He flinched, realizing how close I was. Neither man was going to rat me out. Crossing Sam Brennan was something very few people in Boston did, and those who were stupid to go that route didn’t live to tell the tale. Even if Byrne and his brawny assistant did run their mouths to the feds, I had half the judges in Boston in my pocket.
“I…I…”
“Her eye?” I asked serenely. “Why, yes. I do remember my fiancée sporting a nasty black shiner.”
I swung the poker to his face, crashing it above his nose. The hot metal hissed against the burlap fabric, melting it into his skin. He let out a carnal snarl, twisting violently like a worm on a hook.
“I also remember you got her cheek.” I struck his cheek blade through the sack. “Her brow.”
Smack!
“The ribs.”
Smack!
“Her knees, too.”
Smack! Smack! Smack!
I beat Kaminski while Sam drowned Byrne in his own bed. Ten minutes later, when both F-grade mobsters were barely conscious, Sam threw in the towel. Literally. On the floor. I wiped the tip of the poker on Kaminski’s pants, then returned the stick to its place.
“Keep the money.” Sam stubbed the cigarette butt he threw on the floor with his boot on his way out.
“And don’t ever go near my future wife again.” It was my turn to address the room. The air was heavily perfumed with sweat, blood, and violence. I tugged my leather gloves as I looked around. “If I hear you so much as breathed in her direction, there will be hell to pay. In fact, I’ll be checking in to see you keep your distance from her. If I find you in her zip code…” I trailed off.
I didn’t need to finish the sentence.
They knew.
An hour later, we were at a local Irish pub down the road from Colin Byrne’s apartment.
“Red Right Hand” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds ricocheted through the paneling. Sam flirted with the two busty waitresses, helping one of them fill out a tax document.
Not for the first time, it occurred to me that Brennan was definitely on the spectrum of sociopathy. I’d been smart to keep him away from my sister. I, too, reserved a spot on that scale but somewhere in the middle.
But Persephone was not my sister. I had zero obligation to save her from myself.
At any rate, my plan was to avoid her at all costs as soon as she was with child. Sooner, if I could help it. She had no room in my day-to-day life.
Hurting the men who hurt her left me oddly satisfied. Peculiar, seeing as getting a hard-on from violence was more of Sam’s thing.
“What’s crawled up your ass?” Sam eyed me over the rim of his Guinness pint, poetic as always.
“Just thinking.” I sprawled back in the old wooden booth, scanning the mixed bag crowd of young professionals and blue-collar workers.
“My least favorite pastime.” Sam palmed a handful of salted wasabi peas, throwing them into his mouth. “What about?”
“Marriage.”
“More specifically?”
“The inconvenient necessity of it. What are you waiting for?”
Sam thumped his red Marlboro pack on the table. One cigarette slid up obediently. He raised the pack and caught the cigarette between his teeth.
“Nothing.” He lit up. Sam was notorious for breaking city council rules. Smoking inside restaurants was among the least offensive things he did. “I have no plans to get married. It’s a surprisingly easy decision to make when you have no duty to continue a lineage and your biological parents are a back-stabbing asshole who deserved to die and a whore who left you on her ex-boyfriend’s doorstep when you were old enough to know what it meant to be abandoned.”
“Who’ll inherit everything you own?” I asked. Sam Brennan was rolling in it. I didn’t know exactly how wealthy he was. He probably declared no more than fifteen percent of his income to the IRS, but I would guess he was in the double-digit millions club.
Sam shrugged. “Sailor. Her kids, maybe. Money means nothing to me.”
I believed him.
“But you grew up with Troy and Sparrow Brennan,” I pushed, knowing nothing was going to come out of this conversation. The man was cagier than a zoo. “Boston’s golden couple.”