Page 10 of The Price of Power

I shot him a look, the kind that said that wasn’t good enough, and he responded by grabbing a waiter who was walking by—actually reached out and grabbed him by the arm. My eyes widened at his audacity, but any complaints the server might have had died on his tongue the moment he saw Gabriel’s face.

“Do you know who I am?” Gabriel asked.

The waiter nodded. “Of course, sir.”

“And you see this woman I’m with?”

The server raised his head and briefly looked me in the eye before ducking his head down again. “Yes.”

“Good,” Gabriel said, his voice slipping back into the commanding tone that had hushed the whole lounge earlier. “If anything happens to her tonight, I want you to go straight to the police and tell them that she left this bar with me. Understood?”

“Sir?” The poor waiter looked more afraid than ever. “A-Are you sure about that?”

“Positive,” Gabriel said, sounding as confident as ever. “Now promise me—“ He glanced down at the man’s name tag. “—Oscar.”

The man gave a shaky nod. “Of course, sir. Whatever you want.”

Gabriel let go of the man’s arm. “I won’t forget this, Oscar.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant that as a threat or a compliment, and given the way Oscar rushed away from our table, he didn’t either.

“Satisfied?” Gabriel asked, turning his attention back to me.

Sort of. I wasn’t worried about being hacked into little pieces anymore, but now I had more questions than ever before.

“Who are you?”

A devilish spark shimmered in his dark eyes as he stood up from the table and extended his hand to me. “The man who’s going to show you just how pleasurable one night of total freedom can be.”

And God help me; that was the man I wanted right now.

Chapter Three

GABRIEL

She didn’t know who I was.

I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. I couldn’t walk the streets of this city without people stopping to gawk. Now more than ever, everyone seemed to know my face from the nightly news or newspaper articles or the covers of magazines. I couldn’t go a city block without seeing some headline about me and my family. Just this week, the Times ran a full-page piece titled Gabriel D’Angelo—The New King of the New York Underworld.

Half the stuff in there was bullshit, of course, and the half they did get right was watered-down gossip that had been making the rounds for years. I’d committed far worse crimes than the dozen or so the paper had printed. But apparently, even that PG-rated garbage was enough to make the island of Manhattan shake. The public’s reaction in the bar tonight was proof of that.

Not that their nervousness was anything new. People had feared the D’Angelo name in this city for generations, all the way back when my great-grandfather first stepped off the boat from Italy. I just happened to be the most recent to inherit the role of head of the family.

Of course, it wasn’t just my name or my new position that had everyone in the city terrified of landing on my bad side. It was how I’d got here.

Mafia murders were nothing new. Countless bestselling books and blockbuster movies proved the public couldn’t get enough stories about bloody gangland justice. But even in those fictional versions, the bad guys had their limits. There were rules.

As far as the public was concerned, we were only supposed to put out hits on traitors or members of other crime families, those who talked to the cops or poked their noses into our private business. We weren’t supposed to target our own family. We weren’t supposed to kill our own. Especially not for the sake of our own ambition.

But according to the papers, that’s exactly what I’d done to the previous D’Angelo boss—my uncle Sal.

When reporters discovered that the cops had found my brother and me at the site of his murder, they took the story and ran with it. It didn’t matter to them that the authorities had cleared us of all charges, ruling Sal’s death a matter of self-defense. The second the reporters got a look at the crime scene, they instantly cast me as the blood-thirsty villain.

And they were right, of course.

I was every bit as violent and ruthless as they made me out to be…just not for the reasons they thought.

While in my mind, Sal’s murder had been both honorable and justified, it had nothing to do with self-defense. His death had been justice, pure and simple—killing the man who had killed my father.