Page 15 of Sinful King
“What do you advise?” I asked, testing him.
He closed his leather bound book and sat back.
“Talk to Blair and work it out with her. Don’t involve her lawyer and by proxy her husband’s family.”
It was a logical response. The exact thing I should do but I wasn’t a logical man, at least not when it came to Blair.
“Love is hard, Sean,” he went on, twisting the ring on his finger. “This life is hard, too. I get it. But you can have both. It doesn’t have to be a game of cat and mouse. You already love her and she loves you, too. Work that shit out and don’t make my life harder.”
We rolled to a stop at our destination and my cousin turned to me.
“I’m not Finn but he made sure you’d be good by personally asking me to have your back until everything is settled, so trust me, iight?”
Reached out to him personally, huh?
I almost cracked a smile.
“This is your only chance, Tadhg. First fuck up and I send you back to work under your da.”
He nodded and opened his door.
“Now that I’ve passed your test, I convinced Ashton to meet with you later for a little friendly chat. But first, we need to handle this. Yasmine and Delilah are already here.”
We’d gotten a foothold in the garment district over the last few years. Yasmine and Delilah had put all their effort into this assignment lately, bearing a lot of fruit.
They’d done enough to prove to my da letting them into the fold was worth it. He’d been skeptical as they weren’t O’Sullivan’s by blood.
But first cousins, nonetheless.
“Welcome back, cousin!” Yasmine bellowed from where she clipped fabric to a beam hanging from the ceiling. “It’s messy but we just got a shipment, so bear with us.”
Yasmine, Delilah, Niamh and Anessa were the daughters of our mother’s sister, Viviana. Their father Landell had been my da’s driver up until recently, up until we learned of his betrayal.
He had no clue we were on to him, just that I was set to take my father’s place and he wasn’t needed to drive me around.
We had to draw out his accomplices before cutting him loose completely. Before putting him in the dirt.
“Where’s Delilah?” I asked, watching Tadhg disappear into a back room.
“Uh…” Yasmine walked toward me, brows furrowed in concern unlike when she greeted me. “We talked to Niamh last night. She’s in the back sulking. Is Darragh gonna pull the plug on this.”
I knew they weren’t involved in Landell’s bullshit. In fact, my da allowing them into the mob ranks and keeping Landell as only a driver had been the reason their father went off the deep end in the first place.
For years he wanted in and never once had my da allowed it. All Landell had done was prove why he needed to be kept out.
“How do you feel about your pop?”
She frowned but didn’t hesitate when responding.
“I mean he’s my dad and I love him, but he put us all in a fucked up situation by going against the family. Especially me, Delilah and Niamh. He didn’t think of the consequences we’d have to bear and for that I can’t forgive him.”
I nodded.
It was an honest answer, one I could accept.
But I hadn’t expected anything less from Yasmine. She spoke from the heart every time she opened her mouth. Delilah, too.
They didn’t have that savage mentality like Niamh, who’d spent a lot of her childhood attached to Finnegan’s hip. But they were useful to the legitimate business side of things.
