Damien's Mate - Anastasia Wilde

Chapter 1

Whenever Damien Fernandez pictured the final day of his life, he was usually dying in bed at the age of a hundred and three—after a kickass steak dinner and a few shots of top-shelf whiskey—with an equally old but somehow still-hot wife holding his hand, and kids and grandkids and great-grandkids all around him.

Or else bleeding out alone in a back alley before he hit thirty, after getting shot doing some penny-ante heist that wasn’t even worth it.

It turned out neither one was right.

Instead, he was going to die tonight, on the floor of a Chicago crime boss’s obscenely overdecorated ballroom.

First he was going to execute a hit on a Russian mobster, and then he was going to get whacked himself by his boss’s top trigger man.

Or, he was going to refuse to do the hit, and still get whacked. Partly because he’d failed to carry out Vic Salzano’s orders, and partly because not doing the hit would tip off Salzano that Damien knew Salzano was setting him up.

Salzano had made promises—about how doing the hit would prove Damien’s loyalty and move him to the status of ‘made man,’ one of the mob family’s inner circle, even though he’d been with them less than two months.

Salzano was full of shit.

Best guess: after Damien was dead, Salzano would make it look like Damien had been secretly working for one of the Russian’s rivals, and Salzano knew nothing about it.

Then Salzano would insincerely apologize to the Russians for his poor hiring choices and regrettable lapse in security, pointing out that he’d atoned for both those things by already taking care of Damien’s execution.

Bottom line, Damien could do the hit, or not do the hit, and he was still going to end up dead. The only difference was which level of Hell he’d wind up on.

The one thing he couldn’t figure out, was how to get the fuck out before the whole thing went down.

Right now he was stuck working security for Salzano’s niece’s formal engagement party—which was really a cover for a rare top-level meeting of half the crime bosses in Chicago. And Marco Corsetti, Salzano’s trigger man, was babysitting him.

If Damien tried to leave, he was done.

After the meeting, when all the bosses were on the way out—that was when he was supposed to do the hit on Rostov.

Damien had wondered—briefly—how the niece felt about her engagement party being filled with major players from the Italian, Russian, Serbian and Colombian crime syndicates, instead of, you know.

Friends.

Now he was mostly wondering how to save his own ass.

He should have known better than to take this job. Any time you got mixed up with the mob, sooner or later they were going to want you to prove yourself by killing somebody.

And not being a cold-blooded killer was what had gotten him here in the first place.

He’d had a perfectly good job in Kentucky, working security detail for a corrupt corporate executive—until he’d sort of turned on the guy to keep him from murdering a very nice person who didn’t deserve it.

Damien was loyal as hell, to the right people. But he also had a regrettable problem with innocent girls getting iced just for convenience.

He’d ended up with his boss in jail, no fucking severance pay, and torn ligaments in his left knee where an exploding building fell on it.

If that’s what he got the one time he tried to be a good guy, he didn’t even want to know what God had in store for him for all the bad shit he’d done.

After Kentucky, he’d told himself he was getting out of the business.

Problem was, he didn’t know how to do regular shit. And no legit security company would hire him—his rap sheet was too long. The only people who would take him were on the shady side of the street.

He was on the verge of broke. More than on the verge. Halfway down the slippery slope to Hell—where he’d take any kind of job to keep himself afloat.

Which led him to the here and now, standing around in a borrowed tux like an about-to-be-extinct penguin.

In a mansion in the middle of a fucking city, sitting in its own fenced-off park of grass and trees, bursting with art treasures, ceiling held up by pillars made out of malachite and lapis lazuli, for fuck’s sake. The floors were some kind of rare African wood, or else covered with thick Persian carpets.

The amount of money wasted on this place would have kept the whole neighborhood