Vicious Hearts: A Dark Enemies To Lovers Mafia Romance

“Morning, sunshine.”

I turn to glance at my niece, Eilish, grinning at me from the breakfast table of the Upper East Side brownstone—the home she and her sister grew up in, and that I moved into almost a year ago, when I came to New York from London to take over after Declan was killed.

“More like good afternoon.”

Neve, Eilish’s older sister, grins an equally Cheshire Cat smile at me over the rim of her coffee mug. Beside her, Castle just shakes his head, giving nothing away.

Since getting married, Neve of course now lives with her husband Ares in their penthouse on the West Side. She and Eilish are thick as thieves, though. And when you add Castle into the mix, who’s basically been like a big brother to them ever since I hired him to be their bodyguard more than ten years ago, it’s like a little trio of siblings that can’t stay away from each other.

Neve and Eilish glance at each other, grinning impishly, before they turn back to me, wagging their brows.

“Yes?” I grunt.

“Oh, nothing, Cill,” Eilish giggles. “It’s just that…well, you sure were out late.”

My brow furrows. “And?”

“And so when are we going to meet her?!” Neve blurts with a grin.

I’m confused. But that confusion quickly fades when I catch Castle’s eye.

“I, uh, told them about the woman you’ve been seeing,” he says pointedly. “You know, the one keeping you away from us, away from family dinners, out late…”

There’s a reason Castle quickly moved from being a bodyguard and nanny to top lieutenant to basically my second in command after I moved here.

He’s one smart motherfucker.

As it stands now, only he, Hades, and I know what happened that night. And I have no fucking intention of that changing.

I do not need my nieces—Neve especially—to think there are any Seamus-related demons coming after them from the grave.

“Soooooo? What’s her name?” Eilish beams at me. Fan-fucking-tastic. I’m getting dragged into schoolgirl gossip at the breakfast table.

“Her name is none of your business.”

She giggles, seeing the playfulness in my eyes even with my grouchy, muttered tone.

I’ll never be “normal”. I’ll never function the way Neve, Eilish, Castle, or anyone else I know functions. Just as I’ll never have a family of my own, because there is zero scenario where me getting married and having children is even remotely a good idea.

Not with my darkness.

Not with the violence inside of me.

And certainly not with the knowledge that I could very well pass my monstrous nature down to my offspring.

That’s a hard pass. The world does not need more Cillian Kildares in it.

On the other hand, I’m okay with that. Romantic relationships are too complicated for me to keep up for very long—I’ve tried, and failed. And in a way, my nieces are like daughters to me—Neve and Eilish here in New York, even my slightly estranged third niece, my late sister’s daughter Rose, in London.

And fuck, even Castle—he’s somewhere between a step-son and a little brother.

“Well, we’d love to meet her sometime,” Neve shrugs. “And I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey,” Neve grins at me. “We’re about to go pick up Callie and take a look at how the renovations are coming along at the Banshee. Wanna come with?”

Neve, Eilish, and Calliope, Neve’s sister-in-law and the youngest Drakos sibling, have recently gone in on buying and reopening an Irish bar together, God help us all.

I smile. “I’d love to. But I’ve got some business stuff to get through.”

“Are you sure?” she coaxes. “I’m driving my new wheels and everything.”

Another new development: my lifetime New Yorker of a niece actually got her driver’s license and a car—an admittedly gorgeous Aston Martin Vantage that Ares bought for her.

“Oh, well, in that case…” I smirk over the rim of my coffee. “It’s a definite no.”

Eilish cracks up. Neve sticks out her lower lip, rolling her eyes as she flips me off.

Yeah, I don’t need a romantic relationship or children to have a family.

I already have one, weird and wild as it may be.

Neve and Eilish eventually stop trying to pry the name of a woman who doesn’t exist from me when they leave to go meet up with Calliope.

Honestly, God have mercy on whoever tries to get in the path of that three-pronged tornado.

Not long after that, Hades shows up, and he, Castle and I disappear into my office. Make no mistake, the Drakos and Kildare families might be a united front now, since Ares and Neve have gotten married. But our family businesses are still our own. The blending of the families acts as a truce and presents a united front: it’s not a business merger.

Hades, however, isn’t here on family business. He’s here on the business of ghosts.

If any other members of either of our families have any suspicions that Seamus’ potential network of followers is still out there, they’ve kept it to themselves. But Hades, Castle, and I…we read the room with each other months ago. And keeping an eye out for any hints of Seamus’ people has been something we’ve been meeting on with some regularity ever since.

“Got anything?”

Hades clears his throat as he drops his muscular frame onto the couch across from me. While Castle and I have been looking into connections on the street, Hades has been digging into Seamus’ history. It helps that he’s got a Homeland Security deputy on his speed dial who apparently owes him a fucking lifetime of favors.

“Seamus was a very popular man in prison.”

Castle rolls his eyes. “Is this the beginning of a shower sex joke?”

The younger Drakos brother smirks, shaking his head. “I don’t mean he was popular with the other dudes in prison. I mean he was popular with the women who came to fuck him.”

I arch a brow. “Excuse me?”

He slaps a manilla envelope down on the table between us.

“Conjugals. Motherfucker had a whole fan club of groupies who wanted to bang him, same as Dahmer or Bundy. And let me tell you,” he nods at the folder. “There was a fucking lineup to ride that sociopath’s dick.”

My jaw tightens. “Why is this the first time I’m hearing about any of this?”

“Because it was sealed.” Hades arches a brow at me. “And if psycho-fuckers surprise you?” He glances at Castle, then back to me. “Then you’re going to want to stay seated when I tell you about the off-site psych evaluations he had on a bi-weekly basis.”

My eyes narrow lethally as an icy blade drags slowly up my spine.

“What?”

Seamus O’Conor is one of, if not the, most prolific killers the FBI has ever captured. Fifteen years ago, when I made sure he went into the fucking hole and stayed there, he was tossed into ADX Florence—aka the Alcatraz of the Rockies. It’s the highest-profile, highest security super maximum prison in the country, and O’Conor was hands down the most dangerous inmate they’d ever had, the one they least wanted to escape. I mean, the man put forty prisoners and seven guards into their graves during his time there.

So what the ever-living fuck was he doing being taken out of that place for “off-site psych evaluations”?

“There’s no fucking way that’s true,” Castle growls. “Who the hell would be dumb enough to let that piece of shit out of his cage?”

Especially since Seamus’ colorful history involved, aside from mass murder and torture, breaking out of just about every other prison he’d ever been in.

Hades lifts a shoulder, dropping a second envelope onto the table.

“A criminal psychiatrist who was writing a book on serial killers, that’s who.”

My jaw grinds as I reach for the two envelopes. The first has a list—a lengthy list—of women’s names and dates. Seamus’ in-prison booty calls, apparently.

“Dr. Gail Thompson,” Hades grunts. “That’s the criminal psychiatrist. She petitioned the DOJ and the FBI and got special, classified permission to study O’Conor, provided she used what she learned to also write a Bureau guide on sociopathic behavior, as well as her fucking bestseller.” He shrugs. “I didn’t get much, but some of it’s in there. Seems like your basic Hannibal Lecter Clarice Starling Silence of the Lambs type shit. Lots of poking into his relationship with his mom, that kind of thing.”

Hades frowns as I open the second folder.

“The kids, now that’s a weird one though. My guy didn’t really have any answers about that.”

Something ticks like a clock in my head. My eyes narrow as they raise to Hades.

“What fucking kids?”

“In there.”

He points to the folder, which I start to leaf through. There are pages of notes from this Dr. Thompson, various psych evaluations. When I shuffle to the bottom of the folder, suddenly, I stop cold.

What the fuck is this.

The picture is old and grainy, maybe taken with a disposable camera. In it, two children—a boy and a girl—who appear to be about ten stand side by side. They also look to be nearly identical. Both with dark hair and blue eyes. Same noses. Same chins. Same…faces.

Twins. They’re fucking twins.

But, striking as they are, it’s not the kids that really capture my attention. It’s the man standing behind them with the silvered, long hair, the silver beard. Looming over them. A hand on each of their shoulders, fingers clawed and cruel looking.

Fucking smiling for the camera.

It’s Seamus.

“Who the hell let him near two—”

And then I go still. The darkness inside of me begins to rage—quietly at first, then louder and louder as I lean closer to the image, my eyes piercing into it.

Into her.

The top half of her face may have been covered, but I’ll die before I forget those eyes.

Those lips.

The delicate throat.

The incorruptible defiance, and sweet, intoxicating fragility.

Hades and Castle are saying something to me, but I don’t hear a word. Slowly, I turn the photo over, and my eyes zero in on the words scrawled across the back.

“Wait, what’s that?” Hades frowns. “I didn’t notice that before.”

Castle leans closer. “Yeah, what—” he goes still. As still as I am. “What the actual fuck?”

On the back of the photo is handwritten, “Daddy loves Una and Finn”.

It says the little psycho who tried to kill me is Seamus’ fucking daughter.

“Holy shit…” Hades growls, staring at the photo. He raises his gaze to Castle and I, his brow furrowing deeply. “Did you fucking know?”

“That that fucking sociopath had kids?” Castle hisses. “No. No fucking idea.” He glances at me sideways, but I shake my head, mesmerized, still staring at the photo.

Of her.

My mysterious attacker—my lethally dangerous playmate—has a name.

Una.

“This is the first I’ve ever heard of it.”

When I raise my eyes, Hades’ are narrowed suspiciously.

“Something on your mind, God of Hell?” I hiss thinly.

He draws in a slow breath, his sharp blue eyes glinting fiercely in his olive-toned face. He shoves a hand through his dark hair as he sits back on the couch.

“You could say that,” he growls. “I’m just wondering when the skeletons in the Kildare closet will finally stop falling out all over the fucking living room floor. Because once again, I find myself caught off guard by some shit from your family’s fucking past that I have a sneaking suspicion is going to now involve my fucking family.”

Yeah. About that. It wasn’t until after the Drakos and Kildare families united through Ares and Neve’s marriage that it came to light that the infamous An Seiceadóir aka The Executioner aka Seamus O’Conor was in fact Neve’s great uncle.

In the wake of that revelation, there was some doubt on the part of the Drakos side—mainly on Hades’ part, actually—that perhaps all the shit that was going down right then with Seamus was far more than the Drakoses had bargained for when they agreed to unite the families.

Which, I’ll grant, is fair.

“This isn’t Kildare history, Hades,” Castle growls, a warning note in his voice. “If anything, considering it’s your brother who put that monster down—”

“Saving Neve, you fucking prick—”

“Enough.”

My voice cuts through the room like a blade, silencing them. My eyes stab unblinking into Hades, which I’m well aware always unnerves the shit out of him.

“Castle is right. This isn’t Kildare history. It’s just buried history. No one—and I mean no one—knew Seamus had children.”

Hades’ eyes narrow as he nods slowly.

“That’s who stabbed you the other night, isn’t it?” He drops his gaze and leans over the table, tapping the photo. “Her.”

In lieu of a response, I take out a cigarette and deftly light it.

“I want him found.”

“The boy?” Castle nods slowly. “I’m on—”

“Not you.” I shake my head. “I need you ultra-focused on Eilish. And even though Neve’s got Ares and all of the Drakos muscle and eyes that come with that, I also want you overseeing her, too.”

If that little psycho comes after my family, there’s no limit to how much I’ll make her suffer.

I turn to Hades, who shrugs. “Yeah, I can get on that. Finn O’Conor, yeah?”

“Probably at least a different last name. I’ve never heard of either of them, which means Seamus was keeping them well-hidden.”

He nods, pulling out his phone out zooming in to take a picture of Una’s twin brother. “I’ll get on this today. I’ve got some good people I trust to keep their eyes open and their mouths shut.”

“Perfect,” I growl, looking him in the eye. “And this stays with just the three of us for now, is that clear?”

His jaw grinds. “I don’t take orders from you, Irish.”

My lips thin. “Let me put it this way. I don’t want Neve finding out that any of this is going on, because it’ll break her, considering what that motherfucker did to her. Understand?” I snap.

I know he’s as protective of his sister-in-law as he is of his own blood sister, Calliope. The second I say it, I watch Hades’ demeanor flip instantly.

“Okay. We’re on the same page.”

“Good. Maybe keep this away from Ares, too.”

Hades smirks grimly. “Yeah, that’s a wrath no one needs to see.”

No shit. Considering that Seamus also almost killed the eldest Drakos brother, and almost killed his wife Neve right in front of him…no, Ares does not need to know that Seamus O’Conor’s offspring are prowling the streets of Manhattan.

He’d burn the whole fucking city down just to find them.

“Find the boy.”

Hades nods as he stands. “On it. And the girl?”

I take a slow drag of my cigarette before stubbing it out on the ashtray in front of us.

“Leave her to me.”