With one foot on the curb, he stops and says, “She can’t get a license without a social security card. She can’t get a social security card without a birth certificate, and unless we get them today, I have to bring her back to get them herself. I won’t put her through that.”
“Are we leaving them alive?” Nico asks, unconcerned with the detour. “Three dead bodies in a town like this might stir up some shit. Let me know so I can send someone in after to clean up the mess.”
Grinning, Wilder looks over his shoulder and says, “I’m not killing my in-laws.”
The nails in the porch are rusted and wood bends under my weight, creaking as I climb the steps. Before I knock on the door, it opens and a short woman with the same hazel eyes as Camilla peeks through the crack. Sadness hits me like a wall, but I don’t climb it like one of Lydia’s.
I turn my smile all the way up and slide my hands into my pockets. “Good morning. Can we talk about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?”
Mistrusting off the bat, she staggers back until I can no longer distinguish the color of her eyes. From what I can see over her head, the house is as closed up and dark as she is. A deep feeling of dread rests over my shoulders like a thick blanket, but I shake that shit off. I’m not a little girl she can ignore.
I’m the motherfucking mafia.
“We don’t have any Mormons around here. If you’re selling something—”
“I was raised a Catholic myself,” I say kindly, made difficult by the sadness escaping this place. “But I’m not here to sell you anything. You don’t know me, but we share someone in common. I need to come in and talk to you.”
“That’s not possible.” She shakes her head, motioning to close the door. “My husband doesn’t allow strangers inside.”
“Ma’am.” My smile never falters, and I stick my hand between the door and the frame. The gray-haired woman gasps and lurches back at the intrusion, and I can’t begin to understand how such weakness managed to raise a strong daughter. “You don’t understand. We’re not giving you a choice.”
“We’re?”
Coming from around the front of the old house, Wilder and Nico step in front of the porch. A flash of recognition crosses my brother’s face, caught between recognizing Camilla in her mother and remembering the neglect she inflicted upon her. Nico’s dried his flask, and the intention behind his drunk smile sends chills up my spine.
He lifts his shirt, flaunting the weapon at his waistband set before a tattoo that readsBorn Sinner.“With all due respect,” he says, thinking better of it. Pulling the gun, he points it in the general direction of the door. “Get the fuck out of our way.”
Holding the door open as they pass through, I scope out the neighborhood. I thought Grand Haven was small, but this … this is hell on earth. “Hey, dipshit, you can’t just wave your gun around. It’s nine o’clock in the fucking morning. What if someone saw you?”
Nico parts the blinds with the muzzle of his gun, sunlight streaking across his face like a cross. “If I killed everyone in this godforsaken town, no one would even notice. Can we hurry up? This place is giving me the creeps.”
“Did you break into our house last year? Was that you?” the woman asks. She backs up into the small living room, standing between a floral print couch and a small table with a television. It can’t be the same one they had when Camilla was growing up, which only further enrages me.
“No ma’am,” Nico says. He pulls out drawers in the kitchen, swings open cabinets, and rejoices when he finds a bottle of liquor. “Thank your lucky stars you weren’t home when that man was here.”
Wilder is too big for this place. His legs are too long, his shoulders too wide, and his love for Camilla is too fucking much to be contained by rusted nails and rotting siding. He considers the woman before his stare moves around the room, trying to picture his wife on the couch as she watched the other kids play outside, sitting at the kitchen table with a family that didn’t want her, and locked inside the closet behind a wooden door at the end of the short hallway.
“Is your husband here?” he asks in a grave tone.
Before she opens her mouth to answer, a back door through the kitchen opens and a tall man with thinning hair, dressed in a pair of oily coveralls walks in. “Mary Ann, whose car is that out front?”
“Mine,” Nico says, pressing the gun to the man’s temple.
Lifting his hands in surrender, Camilla’s father takes one look at Wilder and says, “I know who you are. You married my daughter. I saw it on the internet.”
It’s Wilder’s undoing.
“Fuck,” I whisper as he rushes into the kitchen. The woman—Mary Ann—screams, and it grates my nerves more than anything. I point my finger in her face and say, “Shut the fuck up before I tape your mouth closed.” If Wilder is going to keep his word and leave these people alive, we need to get what we came for and go. I ask, “Where’s Camilla’s birth certificate? I need her social security card, school records—whatever you got.”
The man doesn’t flinch as Wilder runs up on him, but he makes the appropriateplease don’t kill me facewhen my brother grabs him by the throat. Nico unscrews the bottle of liquor, watching the show with a mouthful of syrupy liquid. He’s as unconcerned with the fading light in the man’s eyes as I am, maybe even a little thrilled about it. That’s how it goes when you were raised by villains.
I don’t know how things with Nicolai will play out, but our history doesn’t change. This way of life, one built on secrets, motive, and power, is what we were made for. We might have started on separate sides of the coin, but we’re on even playing ground now.
Payback is going to be a motherfucker.
“She’s not yours anymore,” Wilder says through clenched teeth. “You have no claim on her.”
“Show me where they are,” I say, nodding toward the back of the house.
