Brutal Prince Bonus Scene (Brutal Birthright, #1.5)(53)

“As long as you can keep your temper,” I say, half-smiling.

“I don’t—” Aida says hotly, breaking off when she sees that I’m teasing her. Mostly. “I don’t have a temper,” she says with dignity. “You don’t know what it’s like to always be the smallest dog in the fight. I have to attack first, and hardest. I never had much softness in me. I never have, and I never could.”

I can’t imagine her soft. It would ruin everything about her.

“Anyway,” Aida says quickly. “I still don’t know why you want to be Alderman. The Griffins are richer than god. You’ve got friends all across the city. Your territory’s secure. Why in the fuck do you want to sit in an office and deal with all that bullshit?”

“Why do you think people spend a half a million dollars campaigning for an Alderman’s seat, when the salary is $122,304?” I ask her.

“Well, obviously you can fuck around with zoning and tax law and suit your business interests, as well as handing around favors to everybody else.”

“Right,” I say, encouraging her to go on in guessing.

“It just doesn’t seem worth the trouble. You can get all that shit with bribes and trading favors. Or good old-fashioned violence.”

“But you’re always at the mercy of somebody else,” I tell her. “The incorruptible detective, or the greedy politician that got a better offer from someone else. Real power isn’t working the system. It’s running the system. Building it yourself, even.”

I pause, remembering a little of our overlapping family history.

“You remember when the Italians ran this city?” I say to her. “Capone had the mayor on his payroll. Imagine if Capone was the mayor. Or the governor. Or the fucking president.”

“I don’t like how you use the past tense to refer to our glory days,” Aida says lightly. “But I take your point. I guess it makes sense why your dad was keen to make an agreement between our families. It’s not about this election. It’s about the one after. If you want to run the whole city, you really do need us.”

“Yes,” I say quietly.

We’ve pulled up to the tower, its skeletal, half-built frame jutting up into the sky. Only the bottom few floors have been completed. The lot is a jumble of heavy machinery, stacks of building materials, makeshift offices, Porta Potties, and parked trucks.

The site would be dark and deserted if the whole north side wasn’t lit up by lights and sirens. I see a fire truck, two ambulances, and several police cars. Dante is speaking with a uniformed officer, while another cop takes notes from a battered and bandaged security guard. I assume that’s the guard who was on duty when someone torched the machines.

The air stinks of gasoline and charred metal. At least four pieces of heavy machinery are unsalvageable, including two excavators, a backhoe, and an entire crane. The blackened hulks are still smoking, the ground beneath muddied by the firemen’s hoses.

“It was that fucking Polack, I know it,” a voice says on Aida’s opposite side.

It’s Nero, appearing out of the darkness as quiet as a bat.

He’s quick and fucking sneaky. He could probably steal the gun out of the nearest cop’s belt without the guy noticing until he tries to disarm at the end of the night.

“How can you be sure?” Aida murmurs back. She’s keeping her voice down because we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. Me, because I don’t want my name attached to this, and Nero because he has, at the bare minimum, a fuckton of unpaid parking tickets.

“This is their calling card,” Nero says. “They’re like Russians, but crazier. They love to make a scene, and they love symbolism. Besides,” he jerks his head toward the crane, where a blackened lump smolders against the base, “they left that.”

“What is it?” Aida breathes.

Her face has gone pale. I know she’s thinking the same thing as me—the object has the raw, cracked look of charred flesh.

“It’s a boar’s head,” Nero says. “The Butcher’s calling card.”

Dante joins us, his skin darker than ever from all the smoke in the air. Sweat has cut pale tracks on the sides of his bristled cheeks. His eyes look black and glittering, reflecting the flashing lights atop the police cars.

“The security guard is telling them it was a bunch of punk kids. We got the story straight before the cops rolled up. Luckily, the fire truck was faster than the cops, or we would have lost half the building, too.”

“You don’t want them to know it’s Zajac?” I say.

“We don’t want them in our business, period,” Dante replies. In fact, he shoots a questioning look at Aida as to why I’m here.

“I asked to come,” I tell him. “I feel responsible, since it was me who aggravated Zajac at the fundraiser.”

“He already had it out for us,” Nero says with a quick shake of his head. “We’ve gotten into it with him twice already over his men encroaching on our territory. Ripping off our suppliers and robbing banks in our neighborhoods.”

“He’s intent on starting conflict, that’s obvious,” Dante says, his deep rumbling voice like an idling engine. “We should—”

What he proposes is cut off by the rapid-fire snaps and cracks of a semi-automatic. It sounds like a string of firecrackers but a hundred times louder. A black Land Rover roars by, three men hanging out of the rolled-down windows, guns protruding and muzzle flashes illuminating their masked faces.