Page 9 of The Broken Queen
“Should we stop and see tía?” Gio asked, looking a little nervous by the way he rubbed his neck. We were still trying to make up for the shitstorm we’d brewed all those months ago that put her and her two sons at risk. She and her boyfriend, Archer, were more than gracious about forgiving us, but it took effort to make relationships work, and I knew we had both agreed to try and make one work with her and our two cousins.
“We should see if she’s in town, might be nice to see her and the boys,” I replied and added, because I knew he’d be nervous about it, “I’ll text her.”
His nod of appreciation was slight before he was back to business.
“Do you want to go in through the front together or are we splitting up?”
Henry was more than capable of handling things without us. “Let’s go in through the front, together.”
My brother fell into step next to me as we exited the house. I tried to relax, feeling the peace of having him nearby again calmed me. It had been lonely these past three months, all alone in my thoughts. I hated being inside my head, full of regrets and stupid dreams that would never come true.
We drove back to the farmhouse in our armored car in comfortable silence. Having my brother with me again had me thinking of our old Camaro that was parked and covered, inside the barn. I didn’t know why I had bothered to keep it, but I wasn’t ready to let it go yet.
“Where do you sleep?” Gio asked as he exited the SUV.
I tilted my head toward the barn. “I renovated it a bit, so it’s more like a room…”
Gio’s blue eyes flashed with something like curiosity as he glanced at the refurbished structure behind me. The barn was the first thing I’d poured my time into. There were fresh boards all along the exterior, and a new roof was added just last month. The inside was newer too, but I kept most of the original setup so when Presley moved back, she’d be able to put her animals inside.
“How about you?” I asked, still curious as to where he’d been.
“I was in one of the outlier buildings, we’d used it as an outpost over by where we store military grade weapons, and the helicopter. But I just moved back in with Mom and Dad after I heard they were wanting to leave.”
Guilt tugged at some broken place inside of me for being here instead of there with him, but while we were making progress, I knew it was too soon to be under the same roof again.
“How about the house…there’s visibly less holes than the last time I saw it.” My brother turned toward the two-story farmhouse, inspecting it as if he were going to go inside. He might have found me in there the other day, but he hadn’t gone through and looked at all the changes. He probably didn’t even know I had finally ripped out all the old wood on the top floor. We’d been trying to get to the top floor forever.
“It’s coming along.” Was all I said because he still seemed erratic, as if one wrong word and he’d dash away and go no contact with me again.
Gio stepped closer, twirling a familiar-looking hair tie around his finger. “How many rooms will it have?”
The gravel crunched as I slowly stepped closer until I was a few feet behind him. “Four, and an office.”
“That’ll be good. She’d like that…” Gio mused, trailing off.
I stared at the side of his head, seeing that his hair had grown out and his skin looked paler than usual. “Would you?”
His head snapped over as if I’d just struck him. “What?”
“Would you want the four bedrooms and the office? Our whole plan here is to get you two back together…is this what you envisioned?”
The way he glared at me made something dark and uncomfortable shift in my chest. As if someone had come and shoved the stone over my heart and realized it was infested with insects and decay.
“So what, you’ll build us our dream house and then walk away?” he asked skeptically.
Glancing back at the house, I tilted my head to take in the height. I wanted fresh shutters on the outside of the windows and to build out the porch. I wanted her to be able to sit on it one day, holding a baby that had my brother’s eyes, while she watched rain fall on a world that was so different than the one we’d come from.
I shrugged, indifferently. “Gives me something to do, but I can stop if you’d prefer.”
My twin waited, watching me intently while the muscle in his jaw feathered. There was a shit ton he wasn’t saying. “Saves me a ton of work. Knock yourself out.”
With one last glance at the house, he turned toward the path that connected the farmhouse to the manor without looking back.
Chapter 5
Gio
Our Aunt Wren lived at the end of a cul-de-sac just about an hour outside of New York City. The second we parked our car, her five-year-old son, Cruz, and her boyfriend’s little brother, Kane, burst from the front door with happy smiles. Two five-year-old boys acted like my brother and I were the coolest people in the whole entire world.
