and that Aunt Lia was perfectly willing to let her own niece stew in isolation. Obviously this wasn’t the hugs-and-kisses kind of family. But it was the only kind I had left.
My dad had been a mechanic and an amateur musician who smiled with his eyes, even when his mouth took a firm stand. My biological father had been the head of one of the largest, most dangerous Skilled crime families in the country who, according to my mom, probably smiled as he ordered people hunted down and executed.
I hadn’t come into the Tower house with blinders on.
Finally out of patience and buzzing with nerves, I crossed the room and pulled the study door open.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to wait inside,” the guard posted in the foyer said.
“Or what?” I propped my hands on my hips. “You’ll shoot me?”
His hesitation and confusion told me two things. First, he was accustomed to intimidating people with his size and his gun. Second, he wasn’t actually prepared to shoot me in broad daylight, in the middle of his boss’s formal entryway—an admirable trait in a human being, but quite possibly a liability in a syndicate muscleman.
“Fine. Shoot me,” I called over my shoulder as I marched past him on the marble tile, headed for an office whose blurry occupants I could see through the frosted-glass door. I was halfway there, irritated guard on my heels, when something small and mechanical raced across the tile in front of me, and I stopped inches short of tripping over it.
I bent to pick up the remote control car just as two small children stumbled to a stop in front of me.
“Sorry.” The little girl pushed tangled brown hair from her face and stared up at me through huge, bright blue eyes. “Ms. George says Kevin drives like a maniac.”
“She also says you suck your thumb like a baby.” The boy—Kevin, evidently—snatched the toy car from my hand. I started to tell him exactly how rude he was being, but then I saw his face and the words froze on my lips. It was like staring at a younger version of me, with shorter hair. He had my pale skin and ruddy cheeks, and those greenish eyes no one else in my family had. And based on the utter disdain for adults that shone in his eyes, our similarities went far beyond the physical. I’d never met an authority figure I hadn’t challenged.
If my mother hadn’t had the patience of a saint, life would have been very difficult for us both.
“Where is Ms. George?” The voice—feminine, but completely lacking in warmth—was accompanied by the click of heels on the marble floor. I looked up to find Julia Tower, the aunt I knew only from my mother’s description and photos found online, crossing the foyer toward us, looking not at me, but at the children.
The little girl clasped her hands at her back and stared up at her—our—aunt. “She fell asleep during Charlotte’s Web.”
“She lost interest when I told her the spider dies,” Kevin added. “I shoulda told her they’d butcher the pig.”
Julia exhaled slowly, as if clinging to her patience, then frowned at the guard coming to a stop behind us. “Take them back upstairs and wake up that worthless nanny.”
“Should I tell Mrs. Tower—”
“No.” Julia’s features scrunched up with the word as though she found the thought revolting. “There’s no reason to bother Lynn.”
As the guard herded the children back upstairs, my aunt finally looked at me for the first time. The weight of her gaze made me want to squirm, but I knew better. Show the wolf a weakness, and it’ll rip out your throat. Stare it down, and it might back off.
But Julia Tower didn’t back off. She didn’t rip my throat out, either, but I couldn’t dismiss the certainty that she was holding that option in reserve.
“You’re Sera?” She studied my face as intently as I studied hers. In person, her eyes were bluer than they’d appeared online, but the real-life version lacked the warm, approachable quality she’d evidently worn like a costume at various social and political gatherings.
In person, her eyes were more of an ice-blue, as if I were looking into the soul of a glacier, rather than that of a warm-blooded human being.
When she’d finished her silent assessment of me, she gestured stiffly toward the office I’d been headed for in the first place. Two large men dressed in black followed us inside, and I wondered what it