The Enforcer's Bargain

A man engaged to a woman he cannot marry runs the door at an illegal bar for a family that is not quite his. Then somebody in expensive shoes walks in and asks for a favour, politely, in front of witnesses. Cigarette smoke hangs thick enough to taste the tar, layered over spilled whiskey and the sweat of thirty men pretending they are not breaking the law. Finn Dolan pushes through the curtain of glass beads that separates front from back and lets them clatter behind him. The place is not much. A former laundry with an off-key piano in the corner and a bar that looks salvaged from a church basement. But it is O'Malley territory, which makes it his to keep in line. He scans the room the way Tommy taught him, back when Tommy still talked to him like a brother instead of a rival. Three tables of cards. Two men at the bar. A woman in green laughing too loudly at the piano player. No police. No rival crews. Nobody who will carry tales back to Frank before Finn can spin them his own way. Then a pair of polished shoes with no scuffs and no mud, and a slim leather wallet already open in a gloved hand. *Who the hell are you?* *Julian Croft. I'm a friend of Louie's.* Louie's eyes go wide, and for a second there is something like panic on his face. What follows: a debt nobody asked for, an offer nobody can refuse, the girl he promised to marry, the art of deception, the truth behind a smile, a gambler's noose, a second opening night, and a raid that rearranges everything. *That sounds like a plan.* Will the arrangement the two of them build behind that bead curtain hold when the raid goes in and the family starts looking for somebody to hand over? Or does Finn keep the promise he made in a church, marry the girl, and say goodbye to the only person who ever asked him what he wanted?