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“I know it is,” I retorted.
“Well, I like seeing them. They’re my family too.”
“Poor you,” I joked even as I squeezed her. “They’re pains in the ass, but they’ll kill for you so that’s better than that piece of shit father of yours, I guess.”
She tilted into me so she could rest her hand on my stomach. “They are my pains in the ass too.”
“They are.” I bopped the tip of her nose with a kiss. “You ready to eat?”
“Ten thousand different vegetables and potatoes four ways?” she mocked. “Sure.”
Grinning, I started to make my way out of the room, and it was quite by chance that I saw it.
Hovering in front of one of the picture frames, this one in a spotty black and white, I squinted as I took in my grandfather on Ma’s side.
“What is it? He’s your grandfather, right?”
Humming under my breath in confirmation, I pointed at his arm. “You see that?”
“It’s a tattoo.”
“It is.”
“Wasn’t Lena’s grandfather a wealthy man?”
I peered down at her. “How do you know that?”
She sniffed. “I was Russian Bratva—”
“Past tense is right, baby,” I slotted in with a growl.
“—they do their homework on the enemy. I know plenty of things about our family that I learned before they were mine,” she tacked on dryly.
I grunted, “Nice save.”
“Yeah, I’m pleased with it too.” She squinted at the picture. “Wealthy men didn’t have tattoos back then, did they?”
I moved us closer, trying to make out what was happening in the picture, saying, “I guess they could do whatever they wanted.”
Grandfather had his shirt off and was wearing a wifebeater beneath it. He was laughing as he ducked his face into a barrel of apples as he bobbed for them.
All around him, there were boys—Ma came from a bigger family than ours—and they were laughing too. Some had wet hair that had nothing to do with Brylcreem and everything to do with a turn in the barrel.
“They have tattoos as well,” Camille pointed out.
She wasn’t wrong.
Brow furrowed as I tried to make out what the tattoo said, I heard laughter coming from the hall before Conor hurried in.
“You have to see this,” he boomed as he ran over to the window.
Not wasting a second, we joined him. I was well aware that one of the last times we’d been huddled around a fucking window in this house, we’d been waiting for a goddamn battalion of Sparrows trying to smoke us out.
On this occasion, however, there was no truck full of soldiers.
There was Finn’s Range Rover.
I didn’t even have it in me to be smug over the fact that I was right about Sunday dinner being sacred in this house, not when said Range Rover was making donuts in the front yard.
