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The niggling thoughts I’d been managing to dismiss over the last few days crept in more insistently. Rafael was doing okay—but he still hadn’t revealed anything further about the guys who’d jumped him. What had their warning even been about? What did they expect him to do now to avoid the threat of additional retaliation?
I understood where my mom was coming from, but what if they came after him again too?
And how did his brother fit into all this? I hadn’t even known hehada brother. He’d never really talked about his family.
I should have pushed more. Asked more questions. Privacy was a precious thing in our line of work, but our lives were totally entangled now.
A soft grunt reached my ears from the direction of the farthest bedroom on the left, the one I knew belonged to my bodyguard. It was followed by the rustle of blankets as he must have turned over, and then a restrained sigh.
I hesitated for a second and then shrugged off my own blanket and pushed to my feet. If neither of us was sleeping, it couldn’t hurt anything for me to go talk to him now. I didn’t think he’d want to have this conversation in front of the other guys anyway.
I padded through the dimness to the dividers that framed Rafael’s “room” and eased open the one that served as a door, just long enough for me to slip past it. As I pulled it closed again, Rafael was already raising his head to peer at me.
“What are you up to, brat?” he murmured with drowsy fondness.
Despite my worries, a smile tugged at my lips. I climbed onto the bed and tucked myself close against his brawny frame under the covers—both out of a craving for his warmth and out of necessity, given the size of the bed. Hooking one leg over his uninjured one, I rested my head on his shoulder and tipped my face toward his ear so I could speak quietly and not risk waking the others.
“I couldn’t sleep. Too many thoughts spinning in my head. It sounded like maybe you were having a similar problem.”
“And you figured misery loves company?”
I teased my fingers up his chest, rumpling the thin fabric of his undershirt. “Are you miserable that I’m here?”
Rafael let out a light chuckle. “Never, Lou.”
I could have taken the moment in a very different, much more enjoyable direction right then, but the questions I’d been grappling with gripped me too tightly. “Rafael… the guys who attacked you talked about your brother. Would you tell me how he fits into all this?”
There was a long stretch of silence. Rafael’s muscles had tensed against my body, but he reached over to stroke my hair with his good hand as if to show he was still with me, just figuring out what he wanted to say.
“It’s a long story,” he said finally.
“That’s okay. I mean, you don’thaveto talk about him. But it’d make me feel better having a clearer understanding about what happened that night and why.”
His fingers grazed over my hair in another gentle caress. When he spoke again, his voice was still low but rougher.
“Edmundo was my older brother—five years older. It’s because of him that I got into this kind of life. My parents would never have expected it. They were totally law-abiding, just regular people. They ran a gardening and flower shop together, if you can believe that.”
I pictured a tiny version of Rafael wandering between shelves of potted flowers and grinned. “You know, I think I can.”
“It was their dream,” he went on. “They worked their asses off getting the business off the ground, every bit of that a labor of love, and by the time I was in elementary school, it was just starting to take off. We weren’t getting rich or anything, but they could buy take-out for dinner once a week, and we got a big TV to replace the old crappy one we’d bought at a garage sale. Stuff like that.”
“That’s great.”
He nodded. “Yeah. But a successful business can attract the wrong kind of interest. There was a gang in the neighborhood that started hitting my parents up for protection money like they did other places in the area. Just a little at first, but then the demands grew. My dad got frustrated and made some snarky remark one time when they came around, and they took it as an insult to their authority.”
My body stiffened. “Oh, no.”
I felt more than saw Rafael’s grimace. “Yeah. They broke into the shop one night and smashed up the place—the windows, the furniture, the merchandise. Most of it wasn’t salvageable. It put my parents even deeper in the hole than when they’d first started out, and all they could do was struggle to get the store off the ground again. In most of my memories from after that, they were always stressed and overworked.”
A lump rose in my throat. “I’m so sorry.”
Rafael gave a brief shrug. “It is what it is. But Edmundo—he was twelve when it happened—it really got to him. Maybe because he’d been more aware of how hard they’d worked in the first place to build the business up, when I’d been too young to really pay attention.”
“He must have been furious.” I was plenty pissed off myself, even hearing about it decades later.
“Furious and determined. He decided he was going to get tougher than the gang—and make tougher friends—so they couldn’t intimidate our family ever again. He ended up getting involved with another gang through some friends he met in high school. And when I was old enough that they could find some use for me, he brought me on board too.”
The pieces clicked together in my head. “The guys who beat you up—they were part of that gang?”
