pair of jeans that Frankie had brought for me to change into. Rocco had pulled the bullet from my arm and stitched it up and Enzo had stuck me with a healthy dose of morphine which stole away the pain and left me floating on a cloud of happiness where I could focus on my intense desire to cut Ramon Hernandez’s heart out and lay it at Winter’s feet.
I looked between my three brothers in the darkened space as the engine growled and the boat bobbed on the water before moving away from the dock. Rocco was humming low beneath his breath, it sounded like Hickory Dickory Dock and I raised an eyebrow at him in question.
“Rocco always associates murder with nursery rhymes,” Enzo supplied with a roll of his eyes as he twisted a mean looking flick knife between his tattooed fingers.
“Maybe it’s because our mamma was murdered when I was most attuned to hearing them,” Rocco replied with an arched eyebrow before glancing at me.
We hadn’t spoken about our dead mamma really. But sometimes I felt like he wanted to ask me about her, like he wondered if I remembered her too. Enzo and Frankie probably didn’t. They’d been too young when she was killed. But if I strained my memory back as far as it would go, I was fairly sure I could remember some things. The touch of her hand on my cheek, the way she laughed when she danced with us, the songs she sang when putting us to bed at night...
That was a conversation that could wait though. Right now, I had a member of the Dominguez Cartel to execute. More than a member actually. There weren’t many people who the Romeros were cautious about mixing with, but the drug cartels were one of them. They were big enough and brutal enough to cause real problems in Sinners Bay if they had a mind to. Just as the Romeros could cause them a serious headache in return if they decided to try and interfere with them too much. As such, there was a weighted peace between the two crime organisations. The mobs and the cartels didn’t mix unless they had to and then deals were carefully struck to avoid blood loss. There wasn’t going to be anything careful about what we were doing tonight though.
What we were about to do could quite easily start a war. Which was why we couldn’t leave any witnesses alive on this boat. It was also why we were waiting until we were far out at sea to strike where no one else could possibly see us. The Santiago Cartel would happily take credit for this hit anyway. Besides, they’d struck at us first by trying to kill me. And as terrifying as the Dominguez Cartel might be. No one struck at the Romeros and lived to talk about it.
Frankie fiddled with the silencer on his pistol, seeming to be lost in thought as he adjusted it unnecessarily.
“In all of my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined ending up on a job like this with all three of my brothers,” he said in a low voice, glancing up at me with a smile. “Do you think it was fate that brought us back together or just dumb luck?”
I grunted, shrugging but no, I didn’t believe in fate. If it was fate for me to find my brothers again and to find Winter lost in the snow that day then it was also fate for me to have been stolen in the first place, for my mother to die, for my savage girl to have been tortured for months on end. I didn’t believe in any form of destiny or in any deity that could choose such cruel things to happen to people.
“I think fucked up things just happen,” Enzo said. “Especially to fucked up people like us.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Rocco muttered.
My fingers were itching with the desire to wrap them around Ramon’s throat and as the engine noise grew louder and the tug in my gut said the boat had picked up speed, I pushed to my feet.
“Time to go,” I said. Not asking, telling. I didn’t care if they thought we were far enough from shore or not yet, my savage girl was on this boat somewhere with that monster and I refused to leave her with him for another moment.
My brothers seemed to realise this and they stood too, each of us drawing our pistols