Gangsters Wives Read Free

looks she gave him when his back was turned. Her father and his forefathers before him had been Cossacks. Men who were even more frightening in their capacity for violence than Connie and his gang. She was her father’s daughter. Niki wanted what the West could provide. She’d married Connie to get it all, and all she had was a well-decorated prison in East London. When she lay next to him in their bed at night, she often cried herself to sleep. But they were tears of rage, not sorrow. As he mounted her for his twice weekly orgasm, which gave her no pleasure, she knew that one day she would have to kill him to escape. How she envied Sadie, and Joseph and Robbo’s wives, their perfect lives nothing like hers. Except nothing in this world is perfect, as they’d all discovered one way or another.

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    Kate Ellis for instance. Beautiful Kate. She of the long red hair and porcelain skin. Married to Robbo Ellis and daughter of Johnny Wade, one of East London’s most feared villains of the latter half of the twentieth century. The good old days when anything went, on the dirty streets of Plaistow, Beckton and Canning Town, where Johnny made his fortune from protection and drugs, prostitution and money laundering, and where more than one chancer, trying to muscle in on Johnny’s territory, found himself trussed up in the boot of a stolen motor and sent to a watery grave in the old docks.
    Johnny was an old man now, but still had the kind of respect in the area that only fear can bring. Robbo had worshipped him, but Kate hated him. He had ruled his extended family with the same kind of violence as he ruled his manor. Four sons who’d accepted anything the old man doled out. Then Kate came along. A late child when her mother and father were already middle-aged. He tried the same medicine with her. Kate had lost count of the times he’d taken his belt to her when she was a teenager, only interested in clothes and house music. So when handsome Robbo Ellis had come along, all flowers, chocolates, flash motors, expensive restaurants and clubbing up West, how could she resist? The answer was she hadn’t. She gave up her closely guarded virginity in the bedroom of his flat in Limehouse one Saturday night and he was everything she’d dreamed of, passionate yet tender. Robbo proposed on a floating Chinese restaurant on Millwall Harbour next to Docklands Arena a few months later, where they’d seen Oasis play from the VIP area, and Liam Gallagher had smiled at Kate over chow mein after the concert, as the band dined at the next table. There were roses and an engagement ring worth fifty-grand, with a diamond as big as an egg. So how could she refuse? Once again she couldn’t, and the waiter brought champagne as the entire staff and clientele cheered at the news of her acceptance.
    Kate was nineteen at the time.
    The wedding was one of the biggest the area had ever seen. White Rollers ferried the family and guests to the Wren Church in Poplar, then a glass carriage pulled by four white horses took the bride and groom to the wedding breakfast in a five star hotel just opened at Canary Wharf. Enough Cristal champagne was drunk to sink the Titanic and Kate was glowing in a couture wedding dress that she’d seen in Vogue . The wedding pictures wouldn’t have looked out of place in the pages of a glossy magazine—if the whole thing hadn’t been funded by violence, extortion and drug money.
    Kate had never been so happy, but that was all about to change.
    Robbo quickly turned from the loving fiancé to an abusive husband. On their wedding night at the hotel he beat Kate black and blue when she refused his drunken advances. This was after leaving her alone for hours in the bridal suite as he drank whiskey with his mates in the bar, until dawn broke and the last of the guests made their drunken way home. But Robbo was no fool. He didn’t hit her where it showed. Not her face. Just her