Didn’t think she’d be too thrilled with seeing me, but her happiness didn’t matter to me anymore. No, she had made her choice, just like I’d made mine. There was no going back for either of us. This thing was careening toward a cliff, and only one of us would be pushed off.
Hint: it wasn’t going to be me falling off that ledge, and it wasn’t going to be Laina, either. For the first time ever, Tessa was going to have to face her own consequences and live with them. The comeuppance that would come shortly already tasted sweet.
The Lucianos basically had most of the police force in their pocket, so it was easy to switch out Tessa’s police detail with men and women loyal to them, and that made it all too easy to find out where Tessa had been staying since the assassination.
I never thought my sister could pull the trigger herself, on anyone. She clearly had proven me wrong. I hated that Laina was caught in the crossfire of our family feud, that Laina had landed herself smackdab in the middle of it through no fault of her own. If Tessa had never set her sights on politics, my girl’s life would be so different. Unrecognizably so.
Anyway, it took a few days’ worth of planning, but eventually the day arrived. Tessa was meeting the funeral director and discussing the upcoming service for Vance. That meeting lasted an hour or so, which gave me and the others plenty of time to get to the house she was staying at and make ourselves comfortable.
Me, Fang, and Mike. For reasons that were obvious, my father didn’t join us. No, he could get close to our girl, but when it came to Tessa, that was where he drew the line.
Whatever. I didn’t need his help. Hell, I didn’t really need Fang’s or Mike’s either, but Laina wanted to be sure it was done right. Better to have all of us there than just me, I supposed.
The house was in a well-off district just outside the main city lines. It had security cameras installed on the outside, but the police knew exactly how to avoid triggering them to get us in—and we’d cut the power when it was time to bring Tessa out of the house. I was no stranger to dodging cameras, but Fang and Mike were not as practiced as me.
Once inside, the toughest thing we had to do was decide where we’d lie in wait for her to return. I assumed, since it was the early afternoon and she wasn’t pregnant, Tessa would come back and go for something to drink, so I took to sitting in the front room, on the opposite side of the liquor cabinet. It was a habit she’d picked up from Vance. From where I was, I’d see her when she rounded the corner, while Fang and Mike would be further down the hall, out of sight, ready to jump into action and up what I liked to call the intimidation factor.
If you took a look around the house, you’d see nothing too out of the ordinary. High ceilings, brightly-painted walls, a kitchen with a nice slab of marble on the island and pure wood cabinets. It looked like every other new house in the area; the average person would never think someone like Tessa was living in it.
A manipulator. A schemer. A killer. It was funny—for so many years, I was all that and more for her. I used to be her literal attack dog, and she put me to work. And for all those years, I was happy to do it, because she was the only family I’d ever known. Our father was caught up in his work so much, it was like he was never even there.
The man liked to say he instilled our family values, but did he really? I didn’t know. What kind of family ended up turning on each other like this? Families were all about dysfunction, but even I knew the Miller family was fucked.
I was no saint, but Tessa was just as bad, and the thing was, she thought she wasn’t. She thought she was better than me, better than everyone else. In her eyes, she had no equals. What kind of person did you have to be to have a belief like that?
I didn’t know how long I was there, sitting in that chair, waiting for my sister to return, and truthfully, it didn’t matter. I wore all black, including two leather gloves on my hands. The curtains on the windows in the room were drawn—left closed by her the last time she was here—which made the room dark even though the sun was still up outside. I was ready to end this.
Although, for Tessa, this would only be the beginning of the end. Laina had a little something planned for her, and I loved how diabolical it was.
My girl had taken after me. It made a man proud to know he rubbed off on the girl he loved.
The sound of a door opening and closing told me she was home. I made not a single sound as I sat there and waited. Of course, she could always head straight for a different room, but if I knew my sister at all, this was where she’d come first. It’d been half a year since we were on speaking terms, but in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t so long.
Seconds ticked by. Tick, tick, tick. Right when I began to doubt my thought process, the sound of Tessa coming down the hall made me sit a little straighter. She rounded the corner into the room. She hadn’t taken off her shoes yet, so her heels clicked on the wooden floor with every step.
I watched as she shrugged off her purse onto the first chair she passed and headed straight for the liquor cabinet, where half a dozen clean glasses were waiting. The sigh she let out rightthen could’ve shaken these walls right down to the studs. She had her choice of liquor, that’s for sure, and when she decided on one, she pulled it out of the cabinet and poured herself a full glass before returning said liquor to its rightful spot in the cabinet.
It was as she turned around—mere seconds before she would’ve seen me—that I broke the silence of the room and said, “Hello, sister.”
Tessa was in the process of turning around, so when she finished spinning on those heels, her eyes landed on me in the far corner. For just the quickest of moments, she looked like a deer in headlights: wide eyes, only semi-alert to what was happening, and completely frozen, not knowing what to do as her impending doom barreled straight for her.
And then, after a few seconds, that shocked expression faded.
“Kieran,” she spoke, acting completely sane as she drank another sip from her glass even though she was sporting a belly still. A fake belly, but you’d think she’d take it off or something now that she was behind closed doors. “I was waiting for you to show yourself. How’s that bitch doing? Does she miss her dear old daddy?” She chuckled softly as she said that, and I had to stop myself from clenching my fingers and appearing too pissed off.
I would not let her rile me up. I hated hearing her talk about Laina like that, but I had to play it cool. The upper hand here belonged to me, not Tessa.
“I thought you didn’t like getting your hands dirty,” I said.
She walked a few steps closer to me. The room had two entrances; one from the hall, and the other behind her, to the adjacent dining room. That was where Fang was—and the man was silent as a mouse. He appeared, and she had no idea.
“I don’t,” my sister said with a shrug as she took another sip. “But you taught me that, sometimes, doing it yourself isnecessary when you’re surrounded by fools. I don’t know why I waited so long. I should’ve killed that bastard a long time ago. The moment Laina returned, he was useless.” The way she was angled toward me, she didn’t have eyes on the chair where she’d dropped her purse. Fang could work with metal, but the man could also be a pickpocket with how stealthily he reached into her purse and rifled around in there. “In a way, it’s your fault he’s dead. If you would’ve listened to me before and got rid of the girl when I asked you to, things would be so different.”
“Is this when you say we can still be a family if I turn my back on Laina?” As I asked that question, Fang retreated back to the other entrance of the room, something small tucked in his hand.
The corner of Tessa’s mouth tugged into a smile, though it was a bitter one at that. “No, it’s too late for you, Kieran. Too late for us, but I think you knew that already. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Here to make me pay for hurting your precious Laina.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “You know me too well.”
