Page 8 of Her Keeper
I pulled ahead of Joseph and sprinted up the stairs toward the living areas, my mind screaming that we needed to stop and be more careful in case the shooter was still in here. But my family was in here somewhere, and they might be in trouble. I was far more concerned about finding my parents and my little sister and saving them from whatever might be happening.
I paused when I got to the end of the stairs and backed up to the wall, peeking around the corner to peer down the hall.
“What do you see?” Joseph hissed from behind me.
“Nothing,” I answered sharply. I let my eyes snap from one doorway to another in the long, richly decorated hallway, but I didn’t see anything. And because my mother had always believed in using a few classy pieces rather than cluttering an area, there was almost nowhere for a shooter to hide.
As far as I could see, the hallway was secure.
And I didn’t hear anything. No shouted threats. No footsteps. No sounds of a gun being reloaded.
Where the fuckwaseveryone?
Then I heard a sob coming from the end of the hall, and I recognized the voice.
“Mom,” Joseph breathed.
We broke and ran for the suite at the end of the hallway, our strides matched and increasing in speed. Neither of us said anything and I didn’t have to guess to know we were once again thinking the exact same thing. Joseph and I were close enough in age to have grown up as nearly twins, and we’d always been on the same page when it came to the family. His blood might run with fire while mine ran with ice, but that had never changed our absolute belief in each other, and the family.
We burst through the door to my parents’ suite to find my father on the ground, my mother and little sister leaning over him, and my heart stopped.
Oh my God, he was dead. My father was dead.
Then my sister looked up, her enormous blue eyes wet with tears… and furious. She looked like she’d been through a war zone, her hair erupting in a curly blond explosion around her head and her face smeared with blood.
She also looked angrier than I’d ever seen her. And that girl had a temper that rivaled Joseph’s.
“Where the fuck have you been?” she snapped.
She jumped to her feet and grabbed my arm, pulling me quickly toward my father—who I now saw was very much alive, and looking nearly as angry as my sister.
I dropped to my knees next to him and took quick stock of the damage. He’d been shot in the shoulder, I saw, but it looked like it had gone clean through. He wasn’t bleeding out and he wasn’t bleeding from anywhere else.
He was alive.
He was alive.
Which meant I needed to stop worrying about him and start worrying about what had happened here. Family spoken for. Time for business.
“What the fuck happened?” I asked. “And how?”
My father frowned like he was annoyed that I’d just glossed over his wound, but he didn’t bring it up. Even he knew not to mess with me when I was trying to get shit done.
“They came in with the lunchtime delivery,” he said shortly. “We had groceries delivered and the man who delivered them had another surprise for us. Caught us unaware.”
“You had groceriesdelivered?” I asked, hardly believing what I was hearing. My father, one of the leading mafia bosses in the city, allowed someone into the house under the guise of deliveringgroceries?
And he’d never bothered to mention this before?
He glared at me like he was daring me to say anything and snapped, “Same company has been delivering to us for years, Michael. I don’t want to hear it.”
“And yet this time they tried to fucking kill you,” I hissed, going over the rest of his body with my hands and looking for any wounds. “Who was it?”
My father snapped his mouth shut and glared at me, and though I asked again, and then again, he refused to say anything else about it, telling me he was still the head of the family and that it wasn’t my place to come in here and act like I was running the show.
Getting shot, it seemed, didn’t improve his attitude when it came to realizing that he’d been sharing ‘running the show’ responsibilities with me and Joseph for years, now. He’d always hated that we were taking larger roles in that particular realm—though he’d fucking trained us to do exactly that—and lately it had been getting worse.
Maybe because he was so obviously failing when it came to this war with the Carusos.
