Chapter 25 Romeo
Chapter twenty-five
Romeo
“Since you’re talking about purging the rot,” Romeo said, “you should probably know that it looks like Asshole’s guys iced your front security.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder as he spoke, indicating the bodies their guys had just piled together.
He watched his newfound cousin turn her gaze outward, following his motion, and again allowed himself to study her.
She wore boots that added about two inches to her natural five-foot-five, but her build wasn’t as petite as their mother.
Of course, she was young and by all accounts healthy, too.
Her hair was a mess, beginning to spill free of the braid she’d pulled it into, and her face held so much emotion it was impossible to separate one from the other.
Her clothes were ruined, smeared and torn with scrapes and stains.
And that was discounting where her shirt had been cut away from her shoulder to allow for the cleaning and bandaging of a new wound.
He could tell it was newer from the blood in the surrounding fabric.
Romeo shoved his hands into his pockets as he took it all in and his mind tumbled back to the morning’s conversation.
Of course he’d heard about suspicious activity concerning their mother.
Up until Sunday, everything had been online and painfully amateurish, to the point it had almost felt like a misdirect.
A sloppy one. But then they’d heard some new information from Cris, Dante had made a call, and it felt like someone had flung their world around like a yo-yo.
A fucking cousin they’d never known existed. Even looking at her, it blew his mind.
It also pissed him off.
He remembered, as a boy, hearing his mother talk almost reluctantly about a sister.
She’d spoken with a sadness he didn’t understand and always described her sister as “lost.” Lost, because her own father had abandoned her as soon as the ink was dry on her arranged marriage, and of course he’d taken his much younger daughter with him.
Their grandfather—a man none of the De Salvo boys had ever met—had used both his girls as pawns in a fruitless attempt to further himself in the world. And as far as Mikey’s research had found, all he’d really gotten for it was a middle-class home and a mockery of protection.
The whole notion made Romeo’s blood boil.
As a father himself, a father of two beautiful girls with an eerily comparable age difference, he couldn’t fathom it.
His mother had forbidden the continuation of the arranged marriage tradition, so much so that she’d been rather angry with Mikey when Mikey had negotiated a similar contract for himself.
But even if she hadn’t, Romeo couldn’t imagine signing away his girls’ futures.
Grace was already teasing him about how terribly he was going to handle it when Lucia took an interest in boys. And she wasn’t wrong. He had a gun picked out for the first Boyfriend Interview and everything.
Because family fucking mattered in their house. That was how they’d been raised.
Yet they’d been denied this one, this branch of family, for a quarter of a fucking century.
None of them had quite known how to feel or what to expect when they’d piled on their jet that morning.
All they’d had was a rough plan, a couple of pivot directions, a short list of semi-local contacts in case of emergency, and a goal.
The goal, of course, being to establish direct contact with Evelina Nikolaev and hopefully get started on filling in the chasm none of them had caused that had, for so long, held their families separate.
Romeo doubted any of them had expected to roll up on a house that had obviously recently been lost to fire, find a scattered line of bodies around the propped-open gate, and have to introduce themselves by way of dropping a few more. But hell, that at least wasn’t so foreign.
When he’d seen the oversized dickbag standing out in the open, strangling his newly discovered cousin while simultaneously using her body as a shield, Romeo had done the only logical thing.
He’d have preferred to shoot the fucker in the head, but there was that off-chance the guy moved at exactly the wrong time, or that his skull was as thin as his brain matter and Romeo’s bullet accidentally took a second and highly undesirable victim. So he’d aimed lower.
Then Dante had given him the warning look that meant he wasn’t to squeeze the trigger again.
Romeo did understand. They didn’t know the guy, but either his death belonged to their cousin—an heir by birthright to her own organization—or she at least deserved a say in his fate.
The poor girl had clearly already been having a shit day.
So, they would stick around a bit, not more than forty-eight hours, and help her put things right. Or put them better.
“Oh,” Evelina said, giving herself a small shake and shifting her weight as she lifted a hand. “This is Otto. He’s—”
“The bodyguard?” Dante asked, a subtle note of amusement in his voice. None of them were blind.
Her cheeks reddened, but she let her arm fall and replied, “He’s mine.”
Mikey snorted.
Otto snapped his gaze toward her, and it looked like he struggled to hold his expression in neutral.
Romeo felt his own amusement bubble, until his earlier comparison kicked him in the gut. “Fuck. I need to fire Enrico.”
Evelina turned her confused stare back to him.
Dante arched a brow at him.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Mikey said on a groan.
Romeo gestured at Evelina and Otto. “I can’t take the risk. We need to find a female crew for bodyguard work or something. Think we can convince Alessa to come back to Newark?”
“Did you get shot?” Mikey asked.
Dante reached out and swatted Romeo upside the head in a swift, sharp movement. “Get yourself under control. Lucia’s eight. If you couldn’t trust Enrico with her, you would already know.”
Romeo opened his mouth.
Evelina started laughing. The sound snorted out of her, developing into a breathless, gasping chortle that had her latching onto Otto’s nearest arm for support. “Sorry,” she wheezed. “I’m sorry.” She waved a hand in their direction. “It’s just—that’s so—ridiculous—but in the best way—I can’t—”
Romeo grunted. “My girls are important to me.”
Evelina managed a smile. “They’re lucky.
Otets would only have cared about anything developing between Otto and I, even now, because it wasn’t his choice.
And God forbid I risk tainting the bloodline even further.
” She composed herself, but didn’t step away from Otto.
“I’d forgotten, I read you’re all married?
” Her brow furrowed briefly. “With kids?”
Romeo chuckled. “Yes, married. No, not all with kids.” He tilted his head toward Mikey. “This one’s just planning to kidnap ours when he gets lonely in his big mansion.”
“Uncle perks,” Mikey said with a shrug.
“And most of them are too young to never remember not having an Aunt Evelina in their lives,” Dante said as he turned. “Why don’t we find somewhere more comfortable to sort all this out?”
Romeo thought he saw tears gloss over her eyes for a dangerous second, but their little cousin pushed past them and nodded.
Otto made a low grunting sound almost as soon as the group of them started walking, and a moment later he’d tugged his phone from a pocket.
Evelina glanced his way. “Oh, crap, I should tell Artem about this disaster, too.” Her words lost steam at the scowl on Otto’s face. “Otto? Is that not Artem checking in?”
Romeo glanced over at Mikey curiously. He had no fucking clue who Artem was.
Mikey shrugged, so apparently, neither did he.
“It’s my old man,” Otto said, as if that were cause for concern. He barely waited for Evelina to bob her head before putting the phone to his ear. “Somethin’ up, Pa?”
Romeo didn’t know Otto beyond a few base statistics from Mikey’s report and the display of protective loyalty he’d shown for Evelina in the past few minutes.
But a man didn’t need to know anything particular about another to recognize the blend of terror and anger that overtook Otto’s face in the next moment.
Evelina raised a hand to Otto’s chest.
Otto’s words came out in a tight growl. “The fuck do you want with my old man, Grisha?”