Page 75 of Deathless & Divided

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?”

“I know your time is well-spent with the Rossi crew lately, but you’ll be drawing back on that until this mess has blown over.”