CHAPTER ONE

JASON

Six months ago, my father opted out of life—for good. The blow of his death almost shattered our family. When I say we’re barely hanging on by a thread, I mean it. Each of us carries the sorrow like a torch, burning us up from the inside out.

William, my baby brother, glances over his shoulder. He’s keeping a very close eye on the long alleyway behind us. His jaw is set, his shoulders stiff. I want to tell him to relax, but I’m sure I’m as tightly wound as he is. I return my focus to the job at hand and snap the lock on the coroner’s office door. The moment I push the heavy wooden frame open, the lock clinks onto the brown tiled flooring. The noise is sharp and loud as the sound bounces back.

I step into the hallway, and William follows me as he holds his gun with both hands.

“Are you expecting trouble?” I ask my brother while glancing at the 9mm in his hands.

He fires a quick peek my way as he passes me and takes the lead down the hallway. Like he should be protecting me and not the other way around.

“Hello,” I call out, and as I expected, I get no response. I open the top button of my gray suit jacket while I shoulder past William.

He tuts. “Can’t you just wait until I check the place out?”

“I called ahead. No one is here.” I turn into the large, open waiting room, and there’s nothing appealing about it. A small reception desk is tucked away in the corner of the room. The bamboo wood on the front of the desk is cheerful, along with the Hawaiian poster that’s pinned to the back wall. The whole assembly makes me think of a beach, not a place of death.

The other furniture in the room is a small black two-person couch. It sits low to the ground. 

William slides his gun back into its holster, close to his hip. “You could have told me you called ahead and got no answer.”

I move around the desk and shuffle the Post-its and random paperwork. “I’m telling you now,” I reply as I pick up a piece of paper.

William’s jaw clenches, and I fight a grin as he walks to the small table that holds some glossy magazines. I return to the piles in front of me: invoices, quotes, and reordering of stock are all I see. I glance up as William steps up to the desk. There are those moments when I see him. He’s not my baby brother anymore. At twenty-seven and over six feet tall, he’s very much a man. A man with so much anger in his eyes that he’s fucking drowning in his sorrow.

“Anything?” he asks, looking across the desk.

I shake my head in answer, and he walks away, pushing his hands into his navy trouser pockets. He’s grown stocky from all the time he spends in the gym. It’s his new coping mechanism. It’s better than his old one, which involved so much drinking and drugs that I’m surprised he was able to kick the habit.

He’s the one who found our father hanging in his office.

He’s the one who helped take the old man down from the rafters. He’s the one who wouldn’t leave our father’s side as the Gardaí removed the rope from around our father’s neck.

I witnessed none of the destruction, but my mind sure as fuck filled in every little detail with its own vicious black paint, making sleeping an unpleasant ordeal.

I step out from behind the desk and take a final look around the room. A dying plant in the window is the only other decoration. My hands itch to get the plant some water. Our father loved plants and nurtured them. He would restore this plant to life if he had the opportunity. Too bad he doesn’t.

“You spent last night with Matty?” I ask, with my back turned to William. Matty is the second youngest and more fragile than the rest of us. He’s also a topic no one wants to discuss except for me. I’m close to Matty, and I hate how lonely he always seems. But being around him is taxing on a good day; on a bad one, I want to shoot myself or him.

“Yeah, we just chilled. Watched some TV.”

A smile grips my lips, and I glance back at William and allow him to join me. He’s already smiling. Some of the anger has left his eyes. “Fuck you” is his reply.

I laugh. “I said nothing.” We enter the main office. I don’t like how closed up the room smells or how much dust I spot as I get closer to the desk and the long row of filing cabinets. I count six large silver ones.

“You didn’t have to say anything. We sound like two old fuckers waiting to be returned to the soil.” He sniggers as he speaks. “You know he had a pack of those mints. When he offered me one, I thought to myself, ‘This can’t be my fucking life.’”

I laugh again at the image of them sharing a pack of mints. But the truth is, William being clean for six months makes me so fucking proud. “I’m proud of you, William. I really am.” 

He shrugs off my praise and starts looking at the medical examiner’s desk. Yeah, he’s not good at taking praise. I suppose none of us are.

Praising us isn’t something our father did. We thrived on the negative and spent too much time trying to fix what our father saw as weaknesses. Alex and I took the brunt of his criticism; being the two oldest sons, most of the responsibility fell on our already burdened shoulders.

I pull open the filing cabinet drawer with the letter M on the front. It doesn’t take long before I find our father’s name, Edward Murphy. I stand there holding the file, unable to open it. This is the moment of truth.

William is looking over my shoulder. “Open it.” His voice is low, but I hear the fear and anticipation. Sliding the drawer closed with my knee, I open the file.

My gaze darts to the cause of death. This is the moment I want to prove William wrong. He convinced Aidan, the middle brother of us five, that father hadn’t hung himself. That someone had staged it that way. His whole theory was built on the knots in the rope that our father couldn't make. It made sense, but it also sounded too much like hope to me.

“I fucking told you.” William smacks the file with two fingers, nearly knocking it out of my hand. I reread the cause of death again:

Blunt force head trauma. Blood Loss.

I’m unsteady as I read over the words once, twice, three times.

“I told you. I told you,” William keeps repeating, but I honestly think he’s as shocked as I am.

“You did.” I turn to William and close the file, gripping the paper in my hand. “Someone murdered our father.” I’m holding the evidence. “Why weren’t we told?”

“Where is the pathologist?” William asks the same question I’ve been thinking.

This is huge. This is so fucking huge that it’s bound to rip a hole in the Irish Mafia. The murder of a leader. It’s the cover-up of the fucking century.

A hand lands on my shoulder and drags me out of my thoughts.

“We will get the motherfucker.” William raises both brows as he dips his head with a feral look in his dark eyes.

I nod.

William releases me. “I’ll check out the rest of the place.”

I reopen the file and reread the cause of death. Why? Our old man didn’t deserve this kind of death. If he had been murdered, he would have gone down as a fucking hero. Whoever did this made sure the world saw our father as weak.

Guilt gurgles and spits in the pit of my gut. I’m one of those people who saw his actions that day as a weakness. Shame of what he had done forced me to not shed a single tear. Not as the news was told to me during a meeting. Not as Alex and I organized the funeral. Not as I found out that everything was in our Uncle Frank’s name, leaving us Murphy brothers with nothing. I didn’t cry as they lowered my father into the ground and covered his coffin with soil and holy water.

I place the file onto the desk like the weight of the truth is too much for me and power up the laptop. My brain is on repeat. Someone murdered our father.

The icon spins on the screen as I wait for the pop-up box that requests a password. There isn’t one. I’m straight into the desktop. For me, that’s odd. But it could be my family’s paranoia. Everything with us was under lock and key. Yet someone got to our father and killed him. 

My suspicions are justified as I click from one empty folder to another. I open up Google and am surprised to see some search history. A shoe store, some porn, a handle for a grill, and flights to Spain. I check the dates. Five days after my father died. If this had been me, and I had killed a leader, and if I had made the death appear as a suicide, I wouldn’t leave any evidence around like the actual pathologist did. I’m already sure he’s dead. Rotting at the bottom of some green river. Someone wiped the computer and did random searches to leave something on the laptop. So why leave the file? The drawers were unlocked. My mind spins. Did someone want me to find the file?

I open the three drawers one at a time but find nothing. The dust on the desk has been disturbed in certain areas. We could get forensics down here, and it would be worth a shot. The red light on the voicemail flashes. I hit the button and let the recordings play over the room as I take another look around.

The voice recordings are mostly people waiting on reports. One message catches my attention.

“Dad. It’s your weekend to have me. I’m still waiting for you. If you don’t come in the next twenty minutes, I’m staying with Mum.” The young voice of what I assume is a teenager sounds bored.

So, the pathologist had a son. The son isn’t a strong line of inquiry, but I file that snippet of knowledge away. The floor has been cleaned, and it makes me wonder if the pathologist died here. I don’t smell bleach, but there isn’t anything on the brown tiles. A dark shadow under one of the filing cabinets grabs my attention. I bend my neck to try to see, but it doesn’t help to enhance the view of whatever is there. 

Getting down on my knees, I get a better look at the small black device that must have slid under the filing cabinets. Maybe during a struggle? It could lead me to something. The recordings continue to play as I lift the cabinet, and my fingers graze a cell phone. I squat as low to the floor as possible and try to grab the phone. My fingers tighten around the device just as a bag is pulled down over my face.

My vision is unclear, and my air is restricted instantly. I drop the cabinet, and it nearly crushes my fingers as I fight to get the plastic bag off my head to see who the fuck is trying to kill me.

Jason

I've harbored secrets my entire childhood, secrets that have the potential to shatter my family. I have no idea how to navigate this new role I must play but being handed a Bratva princess should be easy; only she comes with terms. Terms that, at first, I decide I can abide by.

That is until I meet Kira.

She's not only a Bratva princess but the sister of the notorious Negotiator, and she has secrets of her own, secrets that I will uncover.

Raised to defy the laws of pain, I'm unstoppable. But when Kira's secrets are revealed, she penetrates my darkness, and not only do I have to face the demons from my past that have come back to haunt me but hers as well.

Kira

I'm a Bratva Princess born to be a queen.

My brother has promised my hand in marriage to a Mafia man. I must marry a stranger and produce an heir.

Before I return home to my brother and his sinister plan, I vow never to let that happen.

I hold my truths close to my chest until my secrets threaten to bury me, and I have no choice but to turn to the very man I vowed would never have me.

Mafia Prince - When trouble lands her at my feet, I take the opportunity to have what I truly want. I offer her a deal. I’ll help her, but the cost will be one night in my bed.
One night of submission.