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“Sloane,” she said, her voice heavy with sleep and sex. She listened for several long moments, then closed her eyes and nodded. “Got it. Yes, I’m with him. Yes, we’ll head in.”
She hung up and turned to me, the shadows in her eyes deeper than they had been half an hour ago.
“What?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“That was Sloane.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “So I heard. Get to the point, Brooks.”
“Right. Okay, well Joseph and Michael are putting their families in a safe house. Hiding them away. They’re meeting up with Irish Brennan to figure out what to do. Word’s reached them that the Massimos are planning an answer to last night, despite the fact that the Rossis and Brennans had nothing to do with it. Evidently Ercole doesn’t believe them when they say that.”
She gave me a pointed look that told me she thought this was somehow my fault—or that I could do something to change it—and then continued. “No one is safe. The Carusos have announced that they’re on the Massimo side of things, not that that’s a big surprise, and the Massimos are threatening all-out war.”
I blew out a breath. “So things are bad.”
“Things are bad,” she agreed. “And I have to go home.”
I stared at her, trying hard to wrap my mind around everything. I finally had Brooks in my arms, her body hot and ready under my fingertips, and out here...
“We’re safe out here,” I said quietly. “What if we don’t go back? What if we run?”
She brushed her fingertips gently across my cheekbone, bringing chills up on my skin and sending my back into an arch of pleasure. “You know we can’t do that.”
I hated that she was right. But neither of us could desert our families. Not right now. Even when we were going to find ourselves on opposite sides of the line once again.
“I’ll get dressed,” I said. “You better do the same. I have a feeling we’re going to need to move quickly once we get back to shore.”
I sat up and pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead, hating that this was over and knowing that we couldn’t do anything to stop the way this was going to go.
She was with the Rossis and I was with the Massimos. We both had family to take care of.
And I didn’t think either of those families was going to listen if we told them there was a way to be allies rather than enemies. The truth was, we’d probably be killed for saying so.
14
BROOKS
The minute we docked, I knew something was wrong. The dock and all the buildings around it seemed to be completely deserted, and that made no sense. It was 6 in the morning. On the docks. The place should have been teeming with people coming and going from different boats. Making deals. Fighting over their shipments.
Selling fucking fish or something.
Instead, it was like the inside of a tomb out there. If a tomb included a bunch of people who were about to start murdering each other. No, I couldn’t see them, but people with guns always managed to color the air around them, and I’d been around that sort of thing often enough to know when something was about to go down.
Right now, the air was fucking dripping with the menace of a war about to start.
“Shit,” I breathed.
“My thoughts exactly.”
I didn’t know when Anthony had arrived—moments ago he’d been steering the ship—but I looked over to find him standing next to me, his shoulder against mine and his gaze on the dock. He’d seen this sort of thing too, then.
He knew what was coming.
I didn’t know why they’d chosen the dock or if they’d known we were here. It could be that the Rossis had come after Anthony and the Massimos were here to stop them, or vice versa. Either way, we were both targets.
“You ready?” I asked, slipping my favorite Glock out of the holster on my thigh.
“No,” he breathed. “But that never stopped a fight from happening.” He pulled a gun out as well— a Sig, I saw—and held it up in front of him. “How are we going to play this?”
