They were standing behind me, all right. Locked and loaded.
These guys might not be brain surgeons, but they’re not stupid either. They see an opening, they’re going to take it. In their eyes, “the kid” taking the reins of the Delgado organization was an opening they could drive a Mack truck through.
Dog eat dog.
Or more likely, it was our mob rivals. There are plenty of them, but if I had to put my money on just one, it’d be Oliver Savoca. Pop took his dad down, put him in lockup for the foreseeable future. The Savoca clan can’t let that stand and save face in Chicago. It makes sense that this was their payback.
Until I know for sure who contracted the hit that nearly left me and all my siblings dead in our family home on Christmas eve, I’m helpless.
“God fucking damn it!” I slam my fist into the shingles next to the door. My knuckles come away with a gash, and blood trickles down the length of my fingers. So I pound it into the house again, putting my bloody fist right through the shingle this time. I punch the house over and over until the back of my hand looks like raw hamburger.
Pain is something I understand. I can get my head around it. It calms me down. I lean my hands into the rail, hang my head between my shoulders, watch the rain wash away the bloody evidence of my meltdown, and try to see our way out of this.
I’ve been just on the edge of losing it since this all started two weeks ago, but I can’t risk my siblings knowing that. We’re holding it together by the most tenuous thread. It wouldn’t take much to snap it. Lee might be the parent to this crew, but I’m the one who will need to keep them in line if we’re going to have a prayer of surviving this.
Which means I need to keep my shit together. I’ve never had the luxury of showing weakness or fear. Everything else about my life might have just gotten turned on its head, but that hasn’t changed.
I haul in a deep breath, straighten up, peer through the lifting gloom at our surroundings. We’re on high ground. A short distance from the front of the house, the bluff drops sharply twenty feet or so to a narrow swath of beach, which is currently under siege by the rising sea. In every other direction, the sandy earth slopes gradually away from our house on its perch over the ocean. There are a few scrubby shrubs here and there and some tall palms dotting the edge of the bluff. Otherwise, nothing but sand. This is good—easier to defend if it comes to that.
I’ll feel better when I have the solid weight of my Glock in my hand.
I duck back inside with the intention of retrieving it from my luggage in the trunk of the Lumina. Before I’m even to the door at the bottom of the staircase, I hear the twins squabbling. I brace my hand against the doorframe and steel my nerves before opening it on the fray. I don’t have the patience for this. Parenting is so not my forte, and at twenty-one, these two shouldn’t need to be parented anyway.
You’d think, since Ulie and Grant are twins, they’d look something alike. They don’t. Ulie is a female version of me and Sherm, with Pop’s thick brown hair, olive skin, and brown eyes. Grant and Lee ended up with Mom’s sandy waves and hazel eyes.
“Why should the girls have to share a room?” Ulie shrieks, throwing her hands in the air, as I swing the door open. “You and Sherm are the youngest. I think you should have to share!” Ulie wields the fact that she’s fifteen minutes older than Grant like a weapon whenever it suits her purpose.
“I’m not sharing a room with Sherm,” Grant shoots back. When he turns and sees me, he scowls. “This place is way the fuck too small, Rob.”
I shove him against the wall with a hand to the solar plexus. “Lee told you to watch your mouth,” I say low in his face, “so I’d suggest you make a concerted effort to do so before I ask you much less nicely than she did.”
He grabs my wrist as his eyes narrow. “You’re not the boss anymore, Rob. Get the fuck over yourself.”
Grant is only a few inches shorter than me, and though