“Yup.”
Priest presses his fingers to his temples. “Who also happens to be my wife’s father.”
I nod. “Correct.”
“What the fuck?” Priest roars suddenly, his voice so loud that it echoes off the old warehouse walls.
I wince, because it hurts my ears. “My sentiments exactly.”
He rakes his fingers through his hair. “Our mother isn’t dead?”
I understand his bafflement. After so many years passed, I think we had all begun to suspect she was gone. That maybe our father had killed her and took the secret with him to the grave.
“Nope,” I confirm. “She just cheated on our father and ran off to raise another man’s children.”
He hisses out a breath. “Luna’s half sisters. Jesus, this is beyond fucked up.”
“Almost incestuous,” I agree, because I’m not above ribbing him about this new familial development.
How the hell else am I supposed to entertain myself? I’m falling hard for a woman I can’t keep, one who’s made no secret of the fact that she wants nothing to do with the Mafia world I inhabit. My mother is resurrected from the dead. I have two half sisters I didn’t know about last week. I flick a glance at my watch. And in about five minutes, I’m going to have to kill a man.
Yeah, I’ll take my laughs where I can get them.
“Too far,” he warns me with a glare. “This is going to tear Luna apart. She has no idea about any of this.”
“Well, since you left her at the safe house, I guess she’s finding it all out the hard way.”
“And without me.” He rubs his jaw, looking like he’s in physical pain, and all over his need to protect his wife. “Fuck. I should be there for her.”
I understand that protective mode he’s slipping into, because I feel the same when it comes to Isla. I want to save her from the world and everything in it. To tear apart anyone with my bare hands who dares to hurt her, then chop the shreds of their corpse into tiny pieces and dump them into the ocean for sharks to devour.
It’s violent and aggressive, in a way I’ve never felt before. How the hell am I going to let her go when this shit finally dies down?
“What’s with you?” Priest gives me a hard stare. “You look like you want to beat someone to death.”
“I do. Fucking Mikhail Sidorov.”
“I can’t believe the prick gave his blessing to a bomb being planted in Sergio’s.” Priest shakes his head, clearly misunderstanding the reason I want to destroy the new Pakhan.
I mean, yes, I want to slit his throat for destroying the restaurant we’ve been painstakingly building—a legit establishment with a damn good chef and rapidly growing street cred among the city’s upper crust, despite its ties to the Andriani family. We need all the aboveboard businesses we can get as a front. Losing even one sets us back. But if I’m honest, I’ll admit—at least to myself—that what makes me want to claw out his liver and feed it to him raw is what he ordered his men to do to Isla.
“He should have talked to us first,” I agree. “Aleksandrov would have. We could have cleared the air and gotten to the bottom of this mess with a whole lot less money lost on bothsides, not to mention all the scrutiny he brought us. Thank God we have guys on the inside who can sign off on it being nothing more than a gas leak.”
“Good thinking on that one.”
Is this my older brother praising me?
“Are you feeling okay?” I ask him, suspicious. “You’re not usually this nice to me.”
“Fuck off. I’m nice to you all the time.”
We grin at each other.
“Good to have you back,frattore mio. Sorry about the abrupt end of the honeymoon, but also not all that sorry.” My phone dings, and I extract it, glancing at the screen to confirm the message is the one I’ve been waiting for. “Panzeri and Colletti are here.”
We wait where we are while I pull up footage of the security cameras leading to the stock room where Panzeri thinks he’s headed to pick up the shipment. These will be wiped clean afterward, but for now, they’re instrumental in letting me know where I need to be and when.
“You good?” Priest asks me.
