Vicious Hearts: A Dark Enemies To Lovers Mafia Romance

“Fuckin’ bed rest, man.” Castle shakes his head, a deep scowl on his face. “Total fucking bullshit. I’m fine.”

“Yeah?” I walk across the floor of the spacious bedroom Castle has in the Upper East Side brownstone and pluck a football off of a little gold trophy stand on one of his shelves. I toss it up and down in my hand nonchalantly as I turn to him. “Want to go play a little catch out back?”

Much as he might want to, of course he can’t. Castle’s under strict doctor’s orders to stay in bed because of a fractured rib and some torn muscles in his back from when he yanked Calliope out of the way of being crushed alongside Neve’s car. But that doesn’t stop him from glaring at me.

“No,” he mutters. “But only because that’s a fucking collectible. Put it down, by the way.”

“It’s a used football, Castle.”

“Yeah, used by Emmitt Smith for the last few yards of his record-smashing eighteen-thousand, three-hundred-fifty-five career rush yards. Put it down, please.”

“The fuck is a rush yard?”

He rolls his eyes. “We really need to get you into watching American football.”

“Yeah, we really don’t.”

He sighs. “Okay, fuck this. I’m getting up. I’ve got shit to—”

“Catch.”

Castle lunges to the side, reaching for the football I’ve just lobbed his way. He makes it, but the look of bitten-back pain on his face and the groan he makes are unmissable. And he knows it, too.

“Prick.”

I grin, lifting a shoulder. “Stay in bed. Get healed. Nice flowers, by the way.”

I nod at the tasteful bouquet of yellow roses sitting in a vase next to his bed.

“Thanks. Callie sent them.”

I arch a brow.

“For fucking saving her,” he sighs. “Chill.”

“Women do love a hero.”

He rolls his eyes. “Shut up. She’s like twenty.”

“Says the man who’s all of thirty-two.”

“And in an arranged engagement with Luca fucking Carveli, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I’m sorry, are you trying to convince me or yourself right now?”

“Cillian?” he growls. “Seriously. Drop it.”

I chuckle. “Pity they didn’t prescribe anything for that crankiness.”

“Yeah, nothing to do about that, unfortunately.” He grins. “So, where’s Una tonight?”

“Dinner with that doctor she bumped into with you.” My eyes narrow. “Look, I know you already looked into her…”

I have, too.

“…but?”

I tip my head back and forth. “Anything strike you as…off…when you saw her and Una?”

He shakes his head. “She’s a pretty open book, Cill. Smart, driven, had a great career as a well-regarded criminal psychiatrist before retiring. Married once, just for a short time. No kids. She was divorced before she ever even met Una and her brother.”

“She come from money?”

He shakes his head. “Nope. Her mother was a single mom who worked double shifts at a diner to get the kid into med school.”

My brow furrows. “The ex-husband?”

“Tax actuator in Missouri. What are you looking for, Cill?”

I shake my head. “Nothing.”

He eyes me. “You don’t like it when she’s off somewhere, do you?”

“Let’s skip the psychoanalysis, shall we? I promise, you wouldn’t like what you found if you took a skip down the path of my head.”

He chuckles. “Fair enough. But I guess you could say things are getting fairly serious with your wife?”

“Very funny.”

“I only half meant it as a joke.”

I clear my throat, turning to look out one of the windows.

“She makes the chaos in my head…” I shrug. “Slightly less chaotic. That thing in me—the violence. It’s quieter with her.”

For once, Castle doesn’t crack any jokes. I think he’s fully aware that this is some of the most emotionally open I’ve ever been with him. Possibly with anyone.

“Then I’m happy for you, Cillian,” he growls quietly. “I truly mean that.”

I smile out the window. Just then, my phone goes off.

“Hey, you home?”

It’s Hades.

“At the brownstone, I mean. I’m outside. You need to hear this.”

I frown. “Yeah, sure, come on up. We’re in Castle’s room.”

My men guarding the front door know Hades, obviously, and he’s on the green list. Not even a minute later, there’s a tap on the door, and it swings in.

“Go ahead,” Castle grunts. “Get in the bed rest jokes while you—”

“Yeah, I’m not here to make jokes or bust balls, actually.”

My jaw grinds. There’s a darkness and an urgency to Hades’ tone and in the grim look on his face.

“What is it?”

“You know how they say you’re supposed to let sleeping dogs lie? Well, I’m shit at that. And this whole thing with Seamus has been bothering the fuck out of me.”

I can see why it would be bothering him. There are some slightly more disturbing theories that Dorsey’s floated out about why Seamus’s body is missing from the FBI burial plot.

Grave robbery. Fucking corpse worship. People who idolize serial killers have been known to steal parts of their bodies, or even their whole bodies, because of their fascination with them. There’s even a black market for this shit, and people pay. Dorsey said the FBI busted some guy selling the Ashville Axe Murderer’s dick on the dark web for a hundred grand.

And people call me unhinged.

“Look, Dorsey said all that weird graverobber shit has happened before, especially with high profile cases like O’Conor. Supremely sick, but not unusual.”

Hades nods. “Maybe. But it’s been bugging me, so I started digging into some other stuff with this Coal Creek place and called in a few more favors.” His mouth thins. “So, this Dr. Thompson… She gets permission from the DOJ and the FBI to do these little off-the-record psych evaluations of O’Conor. For her book, yeah? But the book was never published.”

Castle frowns. “Dorsey covered that. Bureaucracy, man. Someone new gets elected, who puts in a new FBI Chief, and things get shuffled around. They cut the program.”

Hades nods. “Well, then I looked into the good doctor’s assistants. There were three of them at Coal Creek.”

My brow furrows. “And?”

“They’re all dead.”

A dark energy starts to throb deep in my chest.

“One from cancer, so that’s above board—”

“Hades…” Castle frowns. “I’m a skeptical guy myself. But what are you talking about, a conspiracy of some kind?”

“Well, the second assistant was pushed out of a ten-story window in a robbery where nothing was actually stolen. And the third one committed suicide with a Magnum to the chest. So… You tell me.”

My mouth draws to a line and Castle’s face goes dark. “That’s a big fucking gun to shoot yourself in the chest with.”

Hades nods. “It’d be hard. I’d call it damned near impossible if you’re a hundred-and-two-pound woman, which the victim was—”

“Where are you going with his?” I growl, my heart thudding, my hand twitching restlessly by my side.

“Dorsey mentioned Seamus had conjugal visits, even after the whole psych thing got shut down.”

“And?”

“And I dug up—” he smiles and corrects himself. “Well, the middle-management DOJ agent, who very much doesn’t want his wife seeing the video I have of him and two extremely friendly male escorts, dug them up. But, here.” He unlocks his phone and shoves it towards me. “Conjugal visitation records from Florence ADX.”

“We’ve seen these.”

He shakes his head. “We saw the records of O’Conor’s visits from before the Coal Creek observations. These are from during and after.”

I frown at the black bars over the photocopy of a sign-in sheet. “With the names redacted?”

“My guy swore that’s nothing he could get around. Standard practice, I guess. Maybe there was a new bureaucrat at the prison. But look to the left.”

My eyes slide over to the column of dates and then times running down the side.

“What the fuck am I supposed to be looking at here?”

“The check in times.”

“They’re all the same.”

He nods grimly. “Same check out times, too. Which is less weird once you know that Florence has strict time-slots. You only get an hour and a half to get your fuck on during a conjugal. But it’s that same check-in time for every one that got my attention.

“Could be when visiting hours start,” Castle grunts.

“That’s what I thought, until I checked. The visitation window starts about two hours before those two-fifteen check-ins.” His jaw tightens. “And look at the blocked-out names. Every censor bar is the same length.”

“Same name,” I hiss.

Same time. Every time.

He nods grimly. “Cillian, those aren’t random conjugal visits from psycho fans. Those are dates.” He takes his phone back and brings something else up. “This is the best shot my guy could scrounge up. It’s from a security tape of whoever this chick was that kept visiting O’Conor.”

He shows me the clip. Yeah, we’re not getting shit from it. It’s blurry, and the woman in question is wearing a brimmed hat, a high-collared jacket, and sunglasses. Castle nods his chin at me, and I pass him Hades’ phone with the video clip on loop so he can see.

“Oh, and this Dr. Thompson?”

“We’ve been through this. Castle’s totally looked into her. She’s clean.”

Hades frowns. “Not really.”

I go still. “Explain.”

“I mean yeah, she’s not a bank robber or anything. But, she’s not clean. She was stripped of her medical license four years ago.”

Alarm bells begin to sound in my head. I glance sharply at Castle, who looks equally on edge.

“She retired, Hades. I looked into her—”

“Castle. I just paid an admin at her last position to unseal the fucking records for me. She didn’t retire, she was fired. She also had her medical license revoked after a ‘psychiatric episode’ following a disciplinary hearing in regard to prescription drug theft.”

What. The. Fuck.

“She tried to sue them, and they agreed to drop criminal charges and seal everything if she backed the fuck off, which she did.”

My pulse is on fire as I yank my phone out of my pocket and dial Una’s number. It rings and rings and rings, and then goes to voice mail. I try again, and the same shit happens. Fuck me.

“Oh, and I almost forgot.” Hades looks grim. “Coal Creek wasn’t the first time Dr. Thompson observed O’Conor in a professional setting.”

“What?”

He nods. “He picked up a minor assault and battery charge something like thirty years ago. The mob paid for his lawyer, so he got it pled down. But he did do a stint in court-mandated psych evaluation. And take a big ol’ guess as to who his shrink was.”

“That’s impossible. They’d never okay Thompson at Coal Creek given that kind of history with—”

“Except she wasn’t ‘Doctor Thompson’ back then,” Hades growls. “She still had her maiden name. McCurdy.”

Every fucking alarm bell in the world is going off in my head as I smash the button to call Una one more time.

Then the floor really drops out.

“Oh fuck.”

I whip my gaze over to Castle, who’s still staring at the surveillance video on Hades’ phone.

“Castle—?”

“Fuck me, that’s fucking her.” He taps the screen, his face white as he turns it to me. “Cillian, that’s Gail fucking Thompson.”

Seamus’s shrink. Whom he knew before prison. Who started visiting him on a routine basis in prison.

Whom Una is having fucking dinner with right fucking now.

“Holy shit,” Hades breathes. “I don’t think she was just his shrink. I think she was in love with—Cillian?”

I’m already out the door, bolting down the stairs.

I think I just found Apostle.

I’m jumping behind the wheel of my GTO down in the garage when my phone goes off.

Una.

Thank. Fucking. God.

“Una, you need to—”

“Hello, Cillian…”

I go stiff. The voice is metallic and rasping, off-kilter and mechanical from the voice changer it’s being spoken through.

“I swear to fucking God,” I snarl. “If you’ve—”

“She’s fine, Mr. Kildare. They’re all just fine. For now.”

All.

Who. The. FUCK. Is. “All”?

Blood roars in my ears, and my jaw clenches so hard it feels like my teeth are about to fucking shatter.

“Listen to me,” I rasp. “Who—”

“If you’d like them to stay fine, I think you know where to find me.”

“I’m on my—”

“Oh, and Cillian?” The voice makes a cold, robotic coughing sound. “Be prepared.”

“For what?”

“To die. Be prepared for everyone responsible for the death of my love to meet their final reckoning at the gates of judgement tonight.”