A Beautiful Funeral (The Maddox Brothers #5) - Jamie McGuire Page 0,18

asked. “You mean Liis? What about my brother?”

Dad’s eyebrows pulled in. “Trenton … call the twins home. Do it now.”

CHAPTER FIVE

TRAVIS

ABBY WAS STANDING AT A WINDOW near the front door of our French Provincial home, peeking out from behind the gray sheer curtains she’d picked five years before to replace the old ones she’d picked three years before that. So much more than just the curtains had changed in the last eleven years. Weddings, births, deaths, milestones, and truths.

We’d rejoiced in the birth of our twins and mourned Toto’s death. He was the twins’ personal bodyguard, following them everywhere and sleeping on the rug between first, their cribs and then, their toddler beds. The hair around his eyes began to gray, and then it was becoming harder for him to keep up. His was the second funeral I’d ever attended. We buried him in our backyard, the Bradford pear his headstone.

Just a few months before, on our eleventh anniversary, Abby had confessed to knowing I worked for the FBI. Swollen with our third child, she’d handed me a manila envelope full of dates, times, and other pertinent information between her father, Mick, and Benny, the mafia boss I’d just shot in the face for threatening my family.

Abby’s SUV usually sat parked in front of my silver Dodge truck, but it was notably missing, and my wife wasn’t happy about it. We’d traded in the Camry years ago for the black Toyota 4Runner Abby drove to her teaching job. She’d always been good at numbers, and she’d begun teaching the math lab for sixth grade almost right after graduation.

College seemed like a week ago. Instead of dorms and apartments, we had a mortgage against a two-story, four-bedroom home and two car payments. The Harley had been sold to a good home before the twins arrived. Life had happened when I wasn’t looking, and suddenly, we were adults making decisions instead of living with someone else’s.

Abby put a hand on her round middle, rocking back and forth to relieve some of the aching in her pelvis. “It’s going to rain.”

“Looks like it.”

“You just washed the truck.”

“I’ll take yours.” I smirked.

She glared at me. “Mine is totaled.”

I pressed my lips together, trying to suppress a smile. My shoulder burned from where a bullet had grazed me and drove through my seat, and my head was pounding from slamming into a tree on the side of the highway. I’d just begun to heal from the beating I’d taken beneath the streets of Vegas by Benny’s men, and now, I had a fresh black eye and a one-inch vertical cut through my left eyebrow. I just happened to be driving Abby’s SUV to pick up some ice cream, being a model husband while also using that time to get an update on Thomas from Val. The Carlisis thought I was in California, so they went there first, but Val said it was only a matter of time before they arrived in Eakins. That was when the first bullets shattered the passenger side window.

Abby was pissed, but she chose to be angry about the truck because she couldn’t be mad about the situation. Anger was easier than fear. Even after I’d already eliminated the threat, I wanted to empty my clip into every single one of them when I saw the photos in the vehicle that had run me off the road. They had pictures of my wife, my kids, my nieces and nephews, my brothers and their wives. Even Shepley, America, their sons, and my aunt and uncle. They were planning to wipe out the Maddox family.

They chose the wrong family.

“They’ll replace it,” I said, trying to mask my growing anger.

“They can’t replace you,” she said, turning with her arms crossed and resting on her belly. “Are you going?”

“To meet Liis when she lands?”

“You should. She’ll need to see your black eye and the cut on your eyebrow, to see the danger is real and has extended to the rest of the family,” Abby said.

“I can’t leave you here alone, Pidge.” I sighed. “I didn’t realize how much we’d used Lena until she left.”

Abby shot me a knowing grin. “You miss her, don’t you? She’s the little sister you never had.”

I smiled but didn’t answer. Abby already knew that I did. Lena was a tiny thing, shorter than Abby. She was an exotic beauty, as deadly as she was stunning, handpicked by the Bureau to protect our children before they were born. Because my undercover