The weight of my siblings' judgment sits heavy on my chest as we wait for him to return with Lanie. “I’m sorry.”
“The fuck are you apologizing for?” Elias grunts, his eyes narrowing. “Not like you went out of your way to run into her. Just a weird fucking coincidence.”
“I should have been paying more attention. I was so caught up in looking for a gift for Lanie I wasn’t watching my surroundings.”
“We’ve all gotten complacent.” At our siblings’ narrow-eyed glares, Colt shrugs. “It’s true. A decade ago, this never would have happened. Bram never would have been in town alone to start with, so one of us would have been with him, checking every face in the crowd, looking for hidden weapons. But after twenty years, this has become our safe place, so we stopped being as vigilant. Which is agoodthing.”
Surprise jolts in my chest as I stare at my twin. “It is?”
“Of course it is. This is the life we wanted for ourselves. If we’d wanted to live the rest of our lives on guard, constantly looking over our shoulders, we would have stayed in New York. But we wanted safety, for ourselves and especially for Gray, so we came here. Nobody is going to judge you because you finally felt safe, Bram.”
I force myself to look around the table, meeting all my siblings’ gazes in turn, and I find Colt’s same reassurance reflected on all their faces. Even Gray’s, which settles me the most.
Returning to the table with Lanie in his arms, Axel once again takes his seat, and everyone is suddenly on guard again. After a brief silence, he drags in a deep breath.
And tells Lanie the truth about her new family.
“Lanie, Daddy has to tell you something and I want you to listen. You’re going to have a lot of questions, and I promise we’ll answer as many of them as we can, but I need you to wait until I’m done talking. Okay?”
Wide-eyed, Lanie nods solemnly. “Yes, Daddy.”
“Good girl.” With another deep breath, he launches into the story we all know by heart. “We aren’t from Forbidden Pines. Not originally. We actually grew up in New York City. Our family was… well, I suppose you’d say we were raised in the mob.”
Lanie’s gasp echoes around the room, but true to her word she doesn’t interrupt and Axel continues. “Our father was thehead of the Irish Mob. He and his brother, Liam, ran things. But Liam wanted more. More power, more money, more everything. So he had our parents killed. And then he came for us.”
As he speaks, that night plays over again in my mind. Axel, covered in our parents’ blood, his face ashen as he held a sobbing Gray in his arms. Gunfire in the distance as the army our parents had surrounded us with went to war on our behalf. Twenty years later, the terror and horror of that night is still fresh in my mind, and I imagine my siblings’ minds as well.
“We ran,” Axel says, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. Not because he doesn’t feel it, but because if he lets himself feel it too much right now, he won’t be able to get through it. “We took all the cash we could find, everything in our parents’ safe, and we fled our home in the middle of the night. For months we just… drove. Swapped out the license plates on our cars in every state, and then kept driving some more. We didn’t really have a plan, other than to keep each other safe. Eventually, we came to Forbidden Pines. Met a man who happened to have a cabin he was willing to let us rent for cash, no questions asked. I don’t think any of us really intended to stay, we were just happy to have a place to call home, even if it was just for a few months. But the man who rented us the cabin, he started teaching us everything he knew about lumberjacking. So we went to work and we built a new life for ourselves here in the mountains of Colorado.”
By the time he’s finished, tears are streaming down Lanie’s sweet face. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers, first to him, but then turning to look us all in the eye. And I realize with a jolt she isn’t our baby niece, but grown-up Melanie. “You didn’t deserve what happened to you. Thank you for trusting me with the truth. But what does this have to do with the woman Bram ran into in town?”
Axel looks over at me, and I nod.
My turn.
“Josie was my girlfriend when… when we left New York. She grew up next door to us, so we’d all pretty much known each other forever. Then one day I looked, reallylooked, and she was all grown up. And that was it. We started dating her freshman year of high school—my senior year—and we never looked back. Her parents somehow managed to overlook what our parents did for a living, even though everyone knew. It was simply the way of our world, I guess. We were going to get married.”
The memory of her, ofus, so young and innocent before that fateful night sits heavy in my chest. My parents had been adamant that all of us go to college before getting involved in the family business, so Axel was the only one who actually knew anything about how our father’s empire ran. The night they were killed, Colt and I had been less than a month from graduation. I know enough now, between seeing the bloodshed myself and the few stories I’ve been able to get Axel to tell over the years, to know exactly how sheltered we were as children. And how very rare that was for families like ours.
“What he’s not saying,” Gray breaks in, her voice strong despite the pain I know this conversation is causing her, “is that Josie was the love of his life. His soulmate, if you believe in such things. But she was also one of my best friends and like a sister to all of us. And for the last twenty years, we’ve let her believe we were all dead.”
“Oh, poor Josie,” Lanie whispers, her voice trembling. “That must have been so hard for her. And all of you.”
Swallowing hard against the emotion lodged in my throat, I nod. “It was. But now she knows we’re not dead, and she knows where we are.”
I watch as the realization slowly dawns on our sweet Little niece. “You can’t let her go back, can you?”
“We could,” I say slowly, painfully aware of the gazes of my entire family on me. “But it would mean leaving Forbidden Pines. It would mean shutting down our business, liquidating everything we possibly can overnight. If we let her go back to New York, we’d need to leave again, change our names, start all over somewhere new.”
“We could go to the island,” Colt says, his own voice thick in a way that tells me he’s only pointing it out because it is an option and not because he actually wants to uproot our entire family again. “Maxwell and the others would welcome us with open arms.”
“But what about my parents?” Lanie twists around to stare up at Axel. “Would we have to let them think I’m dead? I can’t do that to them again.”
“Yeah, baby, we would.” Pulling her close, Axel presses a kiss to her hair. “I’m sorry, I know it isn’t fair.”
“Fuck that.” The words burst out of my sister as she shoves away from the table, her movements jerky and agitated as she paces the dining room. “We didn’t fight tooth and fucking nail for the life we have now just to turn our backs on it at the first sign of trouble. There are other options. There have to be.”
“Like what?” Ford’s question isn’t unkind. If anything, it’s almost painfully full of compassion as he rises from his chair to take Gray by the shoulders. “If we let her go back, it’s only a matter of time before Liam comes looking for us.”
