Evan Arden 03 Otherwise Unharmed by Shay Savage

didn’t make any difference.  He had me, and we both knew it.
    “ Wait.”  I made eye contact with him as he turned around and crossed his arms over his chest.
    “Don’t waste my time,” Trent said.
    “There has to be something else I can give you,” I said.
    “The offer is as it stands,” Trent replied.  “You give me Morett i, and I give you your freedom to go fuck up your life some more.  I’ll still be riding your ass for the fun of it because I doubt it will last.  You’d have a bit of time to shove your cock in Miss Antonio for a while longer, though.”
    “No,” I replied , ignoring his crude remarks.  “Another way.”
    “I’m not having a fucking debate with you, Arden.”
    “Not Moretti.”  My mind raced.  There had to be an alternative—something else I could do to satisfy Trent that didn’t include bringing down the one person who held my undying loyalty—the one I couldn’t betray.  “It…it wouldn’t work.  They’d know if I was…doing something different.  Out of the ordinary.”
    It was a line of bullshit.  The people who worked closely with me were used to me doing the unexpected, and anything out of the ordinary would be consider yet another one of my idiosyncrasies.
    “Then I’m going to go have a visit with your little lady friend and see just what all she knows about your activities.”
    I took a couple of slow, deep breaths to focus myself.  I had to think—what else would a man like Trent want?  Nothing but a big takedown would work for him, and Moretti was it around here.  Maybe if we were in New York and I knew more about the people there, I could offer to infiltrate and bring down an organization larger than Moretti’s but not around here.
    But there were other organizations, other families…
    “I’ll give you Gavino Greco,” I stated.  My eyes met with his.  “Not just him, but the Severinovs, his Russian associates.  You’d get them all—two families for the price of one.”
    Trent eyed me carefully, and I could practically see the little wheels in his head spinning.  He didn’t care about Moretti specifically —he was probably just looking for the next big promotion, and any major crime lord bust would work for him.
    “How are you going to do that?” he asked.
    “That’s my problem, isn’t it?”
    “If I don’t believe you can do it, it’s my problem, too.”
    “I can do it,” I promised.  “Greco will jump at the chance to have me on his side.  He has so many enemies, his kill roll has to look like Santa’s shopping list.  I can get his trust as far as I would need to.”
    “You’ve taken out a few of his people.”
    I wasn’t going to respond to such a direct accusation.  Even though he had me, and the cameras weren’t rolling, I wasn’t going to make all this shit easy for him.  In the back of my head, I was hoping to just bide enough time to figure out what I could do to get both myself and Lia out of this completely.
    “He’ll buy it,” I said.  “I know he will.”
    He leaned over and tapped the tabletop with his finger.
    “You think you can do that?  Deliver them both to me?”
    “Dead or alive?” I asked.
    “Alive, asshole.   I need a bust, not a body.”
    “I can do it,” I said with conviction.   “But you stay away from Lia Antonio.”
    “I suppose I could agree to that.”  Trent nodded.  “You get me Greco and Severinov , and I’ll have that DNA evidence removed from the database.”
    His nasty little smile came back.  I wasn’t stupid enough to trust the asshole, but I had to ask.
    “How do I know you won’t just use all that shit against me later?”
    “Well, here’s the thing,” Trent said.  “You really don’t.  That’s not one of my problems, though.  You’ll just have to go with how trustworthy I look and hope for the best.  You don’t have much of a choice here.”
    “You going to let me take care of two families and then continue to suck me dry?”
    “If