“KEV AND DARREN aren’t going to be following us around all day?” Greta asked.
Siena gave the older of her two half-sisters an amused look. “You know, it would benefit you greatly to tone down the attitude when you use one of their names. Not because you have to like them, but because a little respect will go a long way with those two.”
Greta cocked a brow. “But I don’t respect them.”
“Yeah, I got that. Me, either.”
“I don’t get your point, then.”
Siena grabbed her bag from inside the hall closet, and skipped over a light cardigan or jacket. It was still boiling hot, even at the end of July. She didn’t need to be adding extra layers at the moment.
Turning to face the seventeen-year-old, Siena said, “But you like having a little bit of freedom, don’t you?”
“You call being taken from my school, and shoved into a private school freedom? Or losing my mom, and being forced to live with my aunt freedom? How about the fact I can’t even go to the movies with friends because one of them is a guy? That’s not freedom, Siena.”
No, it wasn’t.
Not normal freedom, anyway.
That was part of the whole problem neither of her two half-sisters realized. Nothing about their life was normal, and it was a damn shame, really. They had grown up almost entirely removed from the life Siena had lived as a principessa della mafia.
Maybe that had been because their mother demanded it from Matteo—that he already had one legitimate family to use to further his mafia agenda. Or, it could have been because her dead father didn’t believe his illegitimate daughters would do anything for him in the grand scheme of things.
Siena really didn’t know.
Frankly, none of that mattered, either.
Not now.
“Matteo is dead,” Siena said.
Greta flinched. “I know.”
It was strange to Siena in a way to see someone—other than her mother and brothers—grieve over her father’s death. It seemed, somehow, that her half-sisters had a different opinion from hers on the man who helped to give them life.
They loved Matteo.
They talked fondly about him.
Siena couldn’t say the same.
“And your mom, too,” Siena added. “She’s also dead.”
“Do you think I don’t know all of this?”
Greta’s angry tone was matched only by the red flush covering her cheeks. Siena had hit a nerve, but that was exactly her point.
Someone had not properly sat these girls down, and explained what their life was going to be like from here on out if they didn’t hurry up, and do something. What that something was, however, depended on the girl.
“Exactly,” Siena murmured, staring her half-sister in the eyes, and refusing to look away. “They are dead, and so everything that they promised you for your life will no longer happen. You want to go to college, Greta? Will it further the family—will it further Kev or Darren somehow?”
“Well—”
“Or better yet, will college or something else make you a better house wife when they find a man to marry you to like they tried to do with Ginevra?”
Greta’s mouth slammed shut.
Siena nodded. “Yeah, you get it, huh?”
“Will they really do that to us?” Giulia asked from behind Siena.
It was the first time the girl had spoken since the two had been dropped off for their day with Siena. Something was keeping the two very quiet, and sometimes, she could drag out of them what that something was. Today had not really been one of those days. The girls didn’t seem interested in talking—unless Greta’s attitude could be considered talking.
Siena turned to face the fifteen-year-old. “If it furthers their agenda, and they think they can get away with it, then do not put it past them.”
“I don’t see how respecting them will—”
“Because, Greta,” Siena interjected, tossing a look over her shoulder, “if you think the more you irritate them will make them want to keep you around, or give you anything that you want, you are sorely mistaken. And until they’re gone, your best bet, is to give them what they want.”
“Until they’re gone, huh?”
Siena cleared her throat.
Shit.
That had been a slip of the tongue.
“Pretend you didn’t hear that,” Siena said. “Now, are we going out, or not? I thought you two wanted to go swimming at Jacob Riis Beach, and then grab some gelato?”
Greta didn’t move, and instead, put her hands on her hips. Siena had never met the girl’s mother, but goddamn, when she did that, Greta looked just like Matteo. Tall, formidable, and un-fucking-moveable. Even the look in her eye was the very same. Like she was daring Siena to come closer, and try to move her.
Good luck Kev and Darren when you go toe-to-toe with this one, she thought. Her brothers deserved the trouble, anyway.
“You were the only one with Ginevra on the day she was supposed to get married,” Greta said.
“So?” Siena asked.
“Kev and Darren were very mad at you.”
“Listen, they’re always very mad at me, okay? Depending on the day, they don’t even look at me. There’s a reason they call me the stain on this family.”
Greta’s gaze narrowed. “They only really started that after Ginevra went missing. They say she’s dead. Is she?”
Siena cleared her throat again.
Dammit.
It felt like a giant knot was forming there, and she couldn’t get it out. The uncomfortable sensation only grew the longer she tried to come up with an acceptable response for Greta. Nothing was ever simple, or easy.
This answer couldn’t be, either.
“A lot of things happened on Ginevra’s wedding day,” Siena tried to say. “And a lot of things happened after. You have to consider—”
“Is she alive, or not?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Siena said.
“Why not?”
Greta might as well have stomped her foot, too.
“Because it wouldn’t be safe for me to,” Siena explained.
“I won’t tell, and neither will—”
“It’s not you or Giulia that I am worried about. It’s Ginevra. Do you know what would happen if she suddenly wasn’t missing anymore?” Siena asked.
Greta blinked. “No. What?”
“Let’s just say you should be grateful that Kev and Darren’s anger and hate is focused on me now. Being called the shame of this family is moderate and pleasant compared to what they would do if your older sister suddenly showed back up. So, she won’t. Not today, anyway.”
“Someday, maybe?” Greta whispered.
“Maybe.”
Giulia frowned as she pushed past Siena, and her sister. “Okay, can we go now?”
“Yeah,” Siena said, never taking her gaze off Greta, “we can go.”
Outside at the bottom of the steps, was the enforcer who Siena had skipped out on the week before when she went to see John. The man still wasn’t very pleased with her, but as far as she could tell, he had not yet run to her brothers about what she did.
Actually, Kev and Darren still hadn’t come home from wherever they went.
Like cowards, they were hiding out. Likely hoping that the Marcellos would have gotten all of their violence and retribution for Cella’s husband’s death out of their system, or something like that.
Problem was, this couldn’t end so easily. It was going to continue. It would grow. So was the way of war.
“Where to?” the enforcer asked, moving to open the back door of his black town car.
Siena gave the man a look. “I will be driving my car, thank you.”
She didn’t get to use her Lexus very often, anymore.
“Your brothers prefer—”
“I am taking my car,” Siena said. “And when Kev and Darren get home, I will go back to riding with you. Okay?”
The enforcer’s jaw tightened before he muttered, “Your ass, I guess.”
The most her brothers would do was yell. Siena cared little about that. Yelling she could handle, and besides, their focus was elsewhere at the moment.
Plus, they weren’t even home.
“Could we get gelato first?” Giulia asked as she slid into the backseat. “Before the beach?”
Siena nodded. “Actually, that sounds great.”
Greta glared at the enforcer before she slipped into the car, too. Siena smirked to herself, and closed the door to the Lexus, shutting the girls in.
Poor kid.
Greta just couldn’t help herself. She was a lot like Siena in that way. Hopefully, it never came back to bite her.
It wasn’t long before Siena had navigated the streets of Brooklyn, grabbed them all some gelato, and headed for Jacob Riis Beach. The three sisters sat in the parking lot of the beach with the doors of the Lexus thrown wide open while warm wind blew through the vehicle.
Silent, mostly.
They people watched. Kids squealing, and parents chasing. Water flying, and music blasting.
It was both nice, and sad.
For a moment, they could pretend to be normal people, doing normal things. And yet, they were far removed from all of that.
This was just another illusion.
One soon to be shattered.
“Are you jealous that we got a good dad?” Giulia asked suddenly.
Siena looked back at the younger of the two sisters. “You mean, about Matteo?”
Beside her in the passenger seat, Greta stuck a spoonful of gelato in her mouth. The older girl looked both interested and kind of worried what Siena’s response might be.
Giuia shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, I see what your face does when we say something nice about Daddy, and stuff.”
Siena didn’t realize her face did something at all.
She wasn’t surprised, though.
“No,” she said after a moment, “I’m not jealous. Happy, if anything.”
“Happy seems strange,” Greta muttered around her spoon.
“I can’t be happy that he was a good father to you two? That you have fond memories of him, and loved him?” Siena smiled faintly, and peered back out the windshield at the playing children, and relaxing people. “I am happy that you will have good memories of him to carry you through life. I can’t say that I have the same—I wouldn’t wish my memories of him on you two at all.”
“Oh.”
Giulia’s quiet response was only echoed by silence. Really, Siena no longer had anything to say about it. Not Matteo, or her life as his daughter. She meant what she had said about her half-sisters lives with him, though.
Out of the corner of her eye, Siena saw the enforcer approaching the car.
“What?” she asked him. “Jesus, we only got here a few minutes ago.”
“We have to go,” the guy said, offering no room for argument, “right now.”
“But—”
“Now, Siena. Your brothers’ homes are burning to the fucking ground. We don’t have time to argue. Leave the Lexus here—someone will come get it later. I’ve been ordered to deliver the girls to their aunt, and take you to your mother’s place.”
Siena straightened in the driver’s seat. She heard everything that the enforcer said, but only one thing really stood out the most. “Both of their homes?”
“Guess so.”
“Burning?”
“Looks like it,” the man uttered.
Well, fuck.
Where was she supposed to live, then? Oh, was Siena supposed to care that the Marcellos finally attacked back at her brothers after what they did to them?
Because she didn’t.
• • •
Siena stood on the side of the street, and watched as workers began the process of cleaning away the mess left behind from the fire at Kev’s brownstone. Two days after the blaze, and the smoldering and smoking bits had finally been completely extinguished.
The heat hadn’t helped.
Neither had the lack of rain.
Large dumpsters had been brought in to contain the rubble and ashes covering the space between two other brownstones. It would take them a couple weeks to clean up, or so they said, and then once the investigation was finished on the fire, Kev could rebuild if he wanted.
Siena didn’t know if that was her brother’s plan, or not.
At least the fire department had been able to save the homes connected to Kev’s. They contained the blaze enough that very little damage had been done to the main walls connecting the other brownstones, and the supports needed to rebuild.
The firefighters had made it their main focus to save the other buildings once they realized the fire was containable to the one brownstone.
Kev’s place, however, was gone entirely.
Nothing but a pile left behind.
The workers placed a large tarp along the bit of charred grass, and then began dressing in their safety gear. Apparently, they would place anything they found in the rubble on the tarp for Kev to look over. Anything that might have made it through the blaze.
By the looks of it, nothing did.
All of it was gone.
A few feet away, Kev and Darren hissed between one another. As usual, their conversation was not quiet enough to keep their words just between them. They still didn’t know the meaning of fucking privacy.
Not that she was surprised.
“Look at it,” Kev snarled.
“Well, there’s not really much to look at, Kev,” Darren replied.
“Oh, you got fucking jokes today, huh?”
Darren sighed. “My place is gone, too, man. What do you want me to say? We put a hit out on one of their people, it went through, and then what? You expected them to sit back, and do fuck all about it?”
“Well, no—”
“This is what they did,” Darren interjected, his voice a rough murmur. “Now, we answer back, or figure something else out.”
“Something else, huh?”
“What do you want to do, Kev? Focus on a place that means nothing to you? What did you have in there other than some documents, guns, and clothes? It’s not like you had anything you gave a shit about in there. Rebuild, or go buy somewhere else.”
“That’s not the point!”
“Well, if you want to get into semantics about all of this, and whose fault it really is that our places got burned down, let’s start with you, brother.”
Kev glared. “Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Why the fuck me?”
“You were the one who said it would be best if we dropped low for a while after the whole hit thing, you know what I mean? Maybe if we hadn’t ducked out for a week, this wouldn’t have happened. We would have been more present here, and whatever else. Kind of hard to burn a place down when you’ve got someone going in and out of it all the time, or somebody watching it. I mean, you didn’t really do that, and neither did I.”
“There was somebody here—Siena.”
Two gazes drifted in Siena’s direction. She quickly looked away as if to make her brothers think she was not paying any mind to their conversation at all.
She still needed to feed Andino and the rest of the Marcellos whatever information she could, after all. Kev and Darren were constantly predictable in the way they never looked at her—they never even considered she was smart enough, or had enough guts to be the one fucking them over.
Their mistake.
Her gain.
Darren stared hard at the empty space where Kev’s brownstone had once stood tall and proud. A sharp red brick against the brown bricks of the other homes on the block. It was more than just things lost, sure, but Siena wondered if that was only part of her brother’s problem.
Maybe Kev was starting to realize he had bitten off far more than he could chew where the Marcellos were concerned. Or hell, maybe not.
“Maybe we’ve gone about this the wrong way with them,” Darren said.
“Who?”
“The Marcellos—who the fuck else?”
Kev scrubbed a hand down his jaw. “I’m listening.”
“I mean, their control over this city has always been the fact they have connections, and so much territory. Not to mention, men. The largest Cosa Nostra family in North America, right?”
“What’s your fucking point?”
Ouch.
Even she could hear the jealous tone in Kev’s voice.
“Don’t get pissy at me,” Darren said. “I’m just saying. Anyway, we’ve got at them from the front, so to speak. We’ve attacked them, and caused violence on their streets. Brought attention to them, and whatever else. Figured it might make them take a step back, or reconsider their usual way of handling these kinds of issues.”
“And it did none of that,” Kev muttered.
“Nope.”
“So, what is your grand fucking plan now?”
“Well, that wasn’t my plan to begin with. It was yours—it didn’t work really well for us.”
“Keep taking those shots at me, man.”
Darren rolled his eyes. “I mean, let’s go at them from a different direction. From behind, in a way. Make it hard for them to do business. Rough up the streets where their Capos have control. Step in between their contacts keeping things under control.”
For a long while, silence stretched on between the two brothers.
Then, Kev spoke. “I like it.”
“Thought you would.”
“You know, I got word someone saw Johnathan Marcello around here shortly before the fire started,” Kev said.
Darren cleared his throat. Out of the corner of Siena’s eye, she saw Darren look in her direction before going back to the conversation at hand.
“That so?” he asked.
“Apparently.”
“Anything else?”
“So far, the investigator agrees an accelerant was used, and they’ve called it an arson.”
“Just like my place,” Darren muttered.
“But hey, we know who probably did it,” Kev said.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“We’ll get him.”
“Among many,” Darren agreed. “For now, though, where do we live?”
Kev laughed dryly. “Well, Ma wants me over there. You, too.”
“For a while, that’s fine. But you know how it is.”
“That won’t work with Siena, though,” Kev put in. “She’s the one handling Greta and Giulia, you know what I mean?”
“Ma won’t have Dad’s bastards going in and out of her house all the time. She puts on a good show, sure, but—”
“She’ll only take so much.”
“You could just say fuck the girls for now,” Darren offered. “Focus on everything else.”
“I need them compliant, just in case.”
“Sure, sure.”
“Siena’s enforcer said she did well while we were gone—never acted out of line.”
Siena smiled at that—faintly so it couldn’t be seen. All the while, she never looked away from the men cleaning up the mess that was once her brother’s home.
Good things were coming her way.
She could tell.
“She’s still got her apartment, too,” Kev added quietly. “A couple of months there with an enforcer looking after her won’t be a big deal. I even got the guy to check on the building—there’s an apartment available two doors down from hers.”
“You’re going to send her back to her place?” Darren asked, incredulity coloring his tone. “After everything she did with Johnathan, and even after Ginevra?”
“We don’t know that she helped Ginevra—”
“Suspecting is more than enough in this case, Kev! You’re fucking crazy to let her out of your sight, and you know it.”
“I have to,” Kev grumbled, “for now, anyway.”
Siena smiled wider.
That time, she hid it by looking up at the bright sky.
Good things had come for her.
• • •
Siena’s fingers ached from typing all day, and her neck and shoulders felt like rocks from sitting in an uncomfortable computer chair for hours upon hours. The last thing she wanted to do was climb stairs, but freedom was just a few steps away.
Her apartment, that was.
She had been back at her old place for a couple of days. Nothing was better than closing the front door to her apartment, and knowing that her brothers wouldn’t be hanging around a corner or something.
Sure, it left her out of the loop.
She didn’t have information to pass on.
You win some, you lose some.
Siena still kind of considered this winning. At least for her.
She ignored the ache in her feet as she climbed the stairwell, and opened the hallway door leading down the row of apartments on her floor. Behind her, the enforcer still tasked with looking after her followed close behind.
He didn’t speak.
He rarely did.
At her door, Siena pulled out her key, and stuck it in the lock. Like always, the enforcer opted to wait behind her until she had opened up the door, and slipped inside the apartment. She caught sight of his nod before he headed further down the hall.
The guy had gotten that extra apartment, after all.
Siena never left her place without the enforcer waiting outside her door. He drove her to and from work, and to wherever else she needed to go.
Now, with her brothers back, the guy didn’t let her have an inch. Likely because he knew Siena would turn around and take a mile back from him.
Smart.
Siena locked the front door behind her, kicked off her heels, and reveled in the cold floors pressing against her aching soles. She dropped her bag in the corner, and picked up the contemporary romance paperback she had left sitting on the stand on her way out that morning
Thumbing through the pages of the book, she went back to the spot she had left her bookmark. The heroine was getting ready for a date with a guy she despised, but felt she had no other choice given her circumstances.
Siena was so focused on her book, that she damn near rammed head-first into the tall form standing in the middle of her living room.
She knew it was him before she looked up.
Before he even spoke, she knew.
“John,” Siena whispered.
Her eyes found his, and John smiled sinfully.
“I see you’re distracted again,” he said.
Familiarity comforted her.
Love wrapped around her.
Hope held her.
Still, Siena’s gaze darted over her shoulder to the door. “How in the hell did you get in here?”
John shrugged. “Used the back door when someone was coming in, and picked your lock. I’m buying you a new one, by the way. No one else has a key, right?”
“The enforcer who watches after me.”
His gaze narrowed. “Yeah, I saw that prick, too. Is he fucking decent to you?”
“He’s okay.”
She wasn’t lying.
John nodded. “Can you change out his key?”
“Probably. Sometimes he’s leaves them sitting in the cup holder when he runs into a place.”
“Good enough for me.”
Siena shook her head. “What are you doing here, John?”
His grin deepened. “Do you not want me here, babe?”
How could he possibly think that?
“Of course, I do, but it’s danger—”
John interrupted her protests by grabbing her wrist, and yanking her in to him. Her book fell to the floor the second his lips crashed against hers. The kiss was enough to quiet her worries, make her wet between her thighs, and remind her of all the reasons why she loved this dark-in-his-soul man.
“They saw you,” she whispered against his lips.
John hummed a low note. “Saw me, what?”
“Around Kev’s place the day it was burned down.”
He stiffened.
Siena shrugged. “Was it you?”
“Yes—someone else, too. But they were there to keep a look out.”
“Because of what they did to Cella’s husband?”
John shook his head, and kissed her lips again. “Nope—maybe partly. But mostly, no.”
“Then, why?”
“Did you think I was just going to wait until I could see you from afar by chance again?” John laughed darkly, and kissed the tip of her nose. His affection was a bright contrast to how cold his voice and words were when he spoke. “No fucking way, bella. I am all in on this. Us, I mean. I tip hands to my favor, not the other way around. I needed a way to get you out from under their thumbs a little bit—now you are. See what I did there?”
Siena blinked.
John grinned.
Well, damn.