Page 2 of Blood in the Water
And he was usually the one doing the kicking.
It was one of the reasons he’d been sent to recruit Damian back when he’d been working New York on his own, taking advantage of the fall of the Syndicate like so many others had taken advantage. Farrell hadn’t wanted to like the bastard, but he hadn’t been able to help himself.
He heard Aria on the stairs, her voice soft and singsongy, and a moment later she appeared in the kitchen, balancing a dark-haired toddler on each hip. Damian stood to take one of the twins out of her hands and Farrell almost had to look away for the love in Damian’s eyes. It was undoubtedly the way Farrell looked at Jenna, Lily, and their infant son, Aiden, but he tried not to think too hard about that, about how much he loved them. About what he would do to protect them.
“Hey!” Aria said. She was vibrant, her raven hair was still streaked with burgundy, but her face was fuller and more relaxed than it had been back when she’d been walking the tightrope between Primo and his manipulative and abusive underboss, Malcolm. She kissed Farrell’s cheek, then looked at the little boy in her arms. “Look, Raff, Uncle Farrell’s here.” Rafael buried his curly head into Aria’s shoulder. “He’s shy,” Aria mouthed over the boy’s head.
Farrell nodded and reached up to lightly rub Raff’s back. He looked at Damian, holding Benedict, Raff’s identical twin. The boy beamed at Farrell and held out his chubby hand, spouting a string of gibberish that made Farrell laugh.
Damian smiled. “As you can see, Benny is never at a loss for words.”
“They’re getting big,” Farrell said.
“How are Jenna and the kids?” Aria asked.
He filled them in and they spent a few minutes going back and forth before Raff started to whimper and rub his eyes.
“Someone’s tired,” Aria said. “Time to say goodnight to Daddy and Uncle Farrell, boys.”
Damian wrapped his hand around their heads and kissed their cheeks one at a time. “Night-night. I love you.”
Farrell hid a smile, wondering how many of New York’smost notorious criminals would believe that Damian Cavallo, head of the Syndicate’s New York territory, stood in his kitchen at night, baby-talking to his sons.
Aria took the babies out of the room. She started singing to them as she left the room, her voice disappearing as she made her way down the hall and up the stairs.
Farrell looked at Damian. “Night-night?”
Damian grinned. “Fuck you.” They laughed. “What the fuck are you doing here anyway? Besides eating my wife’s lasagna.”
“Wanted to know if you heard anything about those fuckers in Boston,” Farrell said.
“Sure you don’t want me to email it to you?” Damian asked. As an early adopter of cyber technology in organized crime, his operation ran the U.S. cyber lab for the Syndicate.
“I definitely want it emailed — through the encrypted system of course — but give me the short version. I want to update Nico when I see him later this week.”
“The short version is that all of the guys brought in by Seamus O’Brien were part of a crew led by Niall Devlin,” Damian said.
Farrell shook his head. “Fuck me.”
“I take it I don’t need to give you background?” Damian asked.
“Not on Devlin.” Everyone who was born before 1985 and grew up in the U.K. had heard Devlin’s name. One of the IRA’s most notorious leaders, his reputation for violence was outmatched only by his reputation for recklessness. Devlin didn’t care if civilians got blown up in the IRA’s fight against Britain’s government. He was an agent of chaos. “I thought he was underground?”
“As far as we know, he is,” Damian said. “He’s not a match with any of the pictures you sent us of the guyshanging around O’Brien. But that’s what they have in common — and O’Brien too.”
“Bloody terrific,” Farrell muttered. When they’d planned to take back the Boston territory — a territory once run by Carlo Rossi, father of Angel, Nico’s wife — they’d only planned to deal with O’Brien. At the time, they’d thought he was just another ballsy thug taking advantage of the lapse in Syndicate leadership. It was only after they dug into the territory that they’d uncovered O’Brien’s long-hidden connection to the IRA, a connection that went back to a bombing in Dublin in 1989. “What about the other guys? The ones in Boston now? Anything we can use?”
“Hard to say,” Damian said. “I’ll send you the dossiers.”
Farrell sighed. “Copy Christophe on them too. He has his hands full with Burke and the woman.”
“Is Burke up to the task?” Damian asked.
Farrell thought about it. His exposure to Nolan Burke had been minimal, but so far he’d successfully walked the tightrope of his place on O’Brien’s crew, his work as the Syndicate’s mole, and his damnable insistence on protecting Bridget Monaghan. It was a deadly game for even an experienced criminal, and Burke wasn’t exactly an expert: he’d spent the years after his work with the original Syndicate working for a law firm in Boston and padding his already significant bank account. It hadn’t inspired confidence the year before when they’d made the decision to bring him in, but there was only one metric that counted. “He’s not dead yet.”
“Not a ringing endorsement,” Damian said.
“I might have said the same about you two years ago,” Farrell said.