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“Great.” Lucas’s green eyes glint with pleasure as he jerks his head, inviting me to come stand next to him near the counter. “I’ll give you an easy job. Promise.”
He’s already set everything out on the counter—an array of vegetables, meat, spices, baking goods, bowls, spoons—and he sets me up with a cutting board and gives me directions on how to cut the vegetables.
As I get started, Lucas begins to work on a sauce, mixing and measuring with ease. Zaid grabs a few more ingredients from the pantry and takes over another section of the large kitchen counter. We continue in silence for a little while, and I find myself smiling as I watch the two of them work together.
“Do you guys ever just heat up a microwave dinner?” I ask, my eyebrows pulling together as I chop carefully. “Or throw a frozen pizza in the oven?”
“That’s no fun.” Zaid winks at me. He’s working on some kind of dough, his hands dusted with flour as he kneads it. He’s rolled his sleeves up in a way that shows off the muscles of his forearms, and I watch them ripple as he works, trying not to notice how fucking sexy it is.
“You guys put me to shame,” I say, dragging my gaze back up to his face. “I’ve never been great in the kitchen, and Brian wasn’t much of a cook either.”
“Brian wasn’t much of a man,” Lucas says shortly. I get the feeling the twins have been trying to keep the atmosphere in the kitchen light and relaxed, but there’s a hard edge to his voice that he can’t hide.
I don’t mind it though. If anything, hearing the anger in his voice makes warmth spread through my chest.
Brian wasn’t much of a man. He was a lying, slimy worm who didn’t deserve even a second of the time I spent with him. And knowing that Lucas and Zaid see it that way too unwinds the knot that tries to form in my chest every time I think of Brian.
He’s gone. I don’t have to let his betrayal wreck me.
“Well, I’m impressed,” I say, distracting myself from my own thoughts.
“Hey, we aim to please.” Zaid waggles his eyebrows at me, and I blush a little.
Lucas chuckles, but his expression grows serious as he turns away from the stove and catches my gaze. “We want you to be happy here, Grace. I don’t know quite how to make it happen, but we’re trying.”
The sincerity of his words knocks me back a little. It’s the most open and honest I’ve ever heard him be, all joking and charm pushed aside until only the truth remains.
They want me here. And they want me to be happy.
My stomach flips, and for the first time, I wonder why I’m fighting so hard against the pull I feel toward these men. I wonder what would happen if I stopped fighting. If I just let go and trusted that they would catch me.
“Can I ask you a question?” I clear my throat slightly, wondering if I should proceed. I know a little bit of their history, but not everything.
“We might not have an answer,” Zaid says, “but you’re more than welcome to ask.”
“Do you talk to your parents anymore?”
I know it’s a pushy question and I shouldn’t ask it, but last I heard, Zaid and Lucas’s parents weren’t in their life anymore. Not because they were dead, but uninterested.
There’s a beat of silence as Lucas looks at his brother, a rapid, silent conversation happening between the tw
o of them.
Thinking about cooking reminds me of families, for some reason. My mother cooked all the time, although she never taught me more than the very basics. She was a perfect mafia wife in that respect, running the household while dad dealt with business for the syndicate. For a while after her death, after we fled from Chicago, my father tried to replicate things she used to cook—but we both knew it would never be the same, and he eventually stopped trying.
“We tried for a little while,” Lucas says simply. “They just never reciprocated.”
“Not long after they handed us over to Damian to pay their debts”—Zaid says the last word sarcastically—“they dropped out of our lives.”
“I’m sorry.”
Anger burns inside me at their parents. I never even met them, but I know their father essentially traded Lucas and Zaid into Damian’s service to clear a debt he owed when they were twelve. They did low-level tasks for the syndicate for a few years, but by the time the term of their service was up, they’d become friends with Hale and Ciro. They stayed, working their way up the ranks to where they are now.
“Don’t be sorry.” Lucas shrugs. “We have a new family now. This is our family. Family isn’t decided by blood. It’s decided by the people who take care of you and who you care for. I don’t miss the old man, or our mom. She put up a sort of half-assed fight when he made the bargain with Damian, but she never really cared.”
“It was shitty growing up knowing we weren’t wanted by the two people who should’ve mattered,” Zaid says, his voice low. The light atmosphere in the kitchen has slipped away again, but unlike the tension that’s been hovering over us for the past week, this feels… different. It feels intimate. “But the only reason we have what we have now is because of them. And I wouldn’t trade this life for the world. They’re the ones who lost out in all of this, not us.”
I smile at him, even as something twists in my chest.
