21 - Adrian
The private dining room at La Sirena wraps around us like an old friend’s embrace. Mismatched chairs that somehow work together, candles I insisted on months ago still burning in their holders, wine bottles I selected to suit everyone’s mood.
This is where we become more than employees. This is where we just exist together.
I lean back in my chair, watching my family scattered around the scarred wood table.
Filing away every tell and weakness even as warmth spreads through my chest. Marisol gestures with her wine glass, telling some story about a tourist who tried to pay in cryptocurrency.
Gabriel adds commentary that makes Sera laugh, her hand finding his across the table.
Logan sits with perfect posture even here, but Wren has him relaxed enough that he's on his second glass.
Gunner occupies the far corner, the weight of his gun visible beneath his jacket, silent as always but present.
Daphne sits beside him sketching something in her notebook, her fingers stained with charcoal.
The Siren hums softly, unconsciously, filling spaces between conversations with melody.
Juliet perches near Isa, the two of them having some quiet exchange I can't hear but that has Juliet smiling.
And Isa. My Isa, wearing my shirt under her jacket because she came straight from my apartment, her hair still damp from my shower, my soap all over her skin. The casual intimacy of it makes my cock stir, makes something possessive and satisfied purr in my chest.
This is what I rebuilt after losing everything.
After Efrén bled out in an alley while I scrubbed dishes three blocks away.
After Zoila disappeared into the system, placement unknown, probably doesn't even remember my name.
After my world collapsed, I assembled this.
Person by person, year by year, creating the loud warm table my mother would have loved.
"Speaking of schedules," I say, cutting into the general conversation. The warm confidence that usually makes everyone lean in flows through my voice, the tone that opens every door in Miami. "Isa and I can't make tomorrow night's shift. We've got that thing with the Brickell property developers."
The words land soft, casual, the kind of minor scheduling conflict we navigate every week. I deliver it smoothly, certain that my friends will bend around this small inconvenience the way they always do. Someone always has something. We work around it. That's what family does.
I smile, that genuine warmth that makes everyone feel special, already moving past this minor detail to whatever story Marisol was about to tell next.
Marisol's wine glass hits the table hard enough to crack.
The sound cuts through the conversation like a blade. Someone's breath catches. Wren maybe, or Sera. The candle flames flicker.
"Another shift you're missing?" Her voice carries an edge sharp enough to cut glass. "That's the third this week, Adrian."
I blink, caught off-guard by the heat in her tone. My usual confidence wavers. This is not how the room typically responds to me. "It's just one meeting, princesa. Logan can handle—"
"Logan handles everything lately," Gabriel cuts in, and there's something cold in his voice that makes my jaw clench. "While you're busy playing house."
The temperature drops. I feel it in the way Gunner's hand drifts toward his hip, the way Logan's fingers drum once against the table, his tell before violence. Even the Siren stops humming.
"Playing house?" I keep my voice light, but underneath, something darker stirs. The same cold that made me put a blade between that predator's ribs at The Aviary. "That's what we're calling it now?"
"What should we call it?" Marisol stands, champagne-bright energy turned lethal. "You're distracted. Both of you. Making decisions with your cock instead of your head while the Zayas circle our territory."
"Our judgment—" I start, but Nico interrupts.
"Is exactly the problem." He squares his glass on the table, and I catch the scent of his cinnamon gum.
"You're our strategist, Adrian. She's the Blade, our security, shadow ops.
You two fucking each other blind is a weakness our enemies will exploit.
Santiago Zayas was spotted at the port yesterday, and neither of you noticed because you were too busy—"
"Enough." The word comes out sharper than intended, that cold thing in my chest spreading.
But Nico doesn't stop. He reaches inside his jacket and sets a photograph on the scarred wood, sliding it to the center of the table with two fingers. A crate, splintered, four words gouged into it deep enough to catch candlelight.
"Weeks ago, a Zayas port boy named Lito walked into the Aviary and never walked out.
Cousin to one of Santiago's captains. Tuesday they took the Ochoa Street shipment and broke Ruiz's hand in three places asking after him.
" His voice stays level, mission-report flat, which is how I know how bad this is.
"And Teo at the door remembers who Lito followed toward the private rooms that night.
" His eyes move to Isa and stop. "You were there on our business.
He cornered you. And now he's dead and we're bleeding for it. "
The room goes silent. Every face turns to Isa. To the Blade, our knife specialist, who was alone in that corridor with a man who put his hands on her.
Isa doesn't flinch. "I didn't kill him." Flat. True. And I watch it land on a roomful of people who love her and don't believe her, and something in my chest makes the decision before I do.
"She didn't kill him." I set down my glass. "I did."
Nobody moves.
"He followed her from the bar. Cornered her against the wall by the private rooms, put his hand around her wrist, told her nobody listens to screams at the Aviary.
" I keep my voice pleasant, which is somehow worse, I can hear that it's worse.
"So no. She didn't notice a Zayas soldier dying ten feet behind her, because I made sure there was nothing to notice.
He was cooling in the shadows before she reached the door. "
Logan sets down his glass. When he speaks, each word comes out cut and filed. "My crew found him after close. I paid the cleaners a fortune and buried a made man's death in my own house, blind, because someone left him there like a tip." A pause that has weight. "You watched me do it."
"Yes."
"We'll discuss that privately." And that's all — Logan folding his rage into a drawer for later, which from Logan is both mercy and sentence.
"You started a war for her." Marisol's voice has gone quiet, which is the most frightening register she owns. "And you didn't even tell us we were in it."
“It’s handled,” I say, the anger bleeding through every word.
"No, it isn’t," Gabriel says, standing now too. "You want to tell me you could send Isa into a room full of Zayas soldiers if the family needed it? That she could watch you walk into an ambush and keep her position instead of blowing cover to save you?"
The worst part is the kernel of truth in it.
Would I send Isa into danger for the family?
Would she let me die for the mission? We all know the answers, and that knowledge sits like poison in my chest. But what makes my hands curl into fists is that they're questioning my claim on her, challenging what's mine.
"So what are you saying?" My voice drops, the warmth bleeding out completely. Something else takes its place, the thing that knows exactly where to hide bodies in the Everglades. "That we should what? End this? That I should give her up?"
Isa hasn't moved. Hasn't spoken. But I feel her beside me, that perfect stillness she adopts when she's calculating which arteries to open. The walls I spent weeks dissolving are sliding back into place, brick by brick.
"I think they're saying exactly that," Logan says, setting his glass down slowly.
His voice cuts through the tension like one of his contracts, precise, lethal, legally binding.
"Which is remarkably shortsighted for people who claim to value this family.
And hypocritical from people who would slit any of our throats to protect their lovers. "
"Logan—" Nico starts, and that's when I see it. The Rosetti blood asserting itself. The moment the family splits along bloodlines I thought we'd transcended.
"No, Nico." Wren's quiet voice surprises everyone. She rarely speaks at these gatherings, but when she does, we listen. "You don't get to decide who deserves happiness. Not after everything they've survived."
I can see the lines now, drawn with razor wire.
My chest caves in on itself, that panicked, helpless rage from childhood threatening to swamp everything.
The helpless rage I felt holding Efrén's bloody shirt.
The same suffocating panic when Zoila's social worker said "placement unknown. " My family. Fracturing. Again.
But this room is different. This is not the family I inherited, but the one I built with my own two hands, brick by battered brick. Which means if it falls apart, it’s my fault, too.
I watch as the factions crystallize. Marisol and Nico gravitate to one side of the table, their arguments silent but palpable.
Gabriel follows, the old guard retrenching, Sera trailing after him like a ghost. On the other side, Logan plants himself next to Wren, shielding her in the same way he would take a bullet for her.
Gunner moves to stand behind my chair, a silent protector, his presence enough to tilt the balance of power.
Daphne closes her notebook with a snap and looks at me, waiting for orders.
The Siren doesn’t move, but her eyes are on Isa, and I realize with a start that she’s afraid we’ll lose her too.
And in the middle, me and Isa. Always in the middle.