Page 46 of The Woman with the Target on her Back (Grassi Family)

“No, I think she just got up,” I said, waving toward the room. “Seems like she needed the sleep,” I said.

I wasn’t lying, not really.

And it was better for everyone if we didn’t have Aurelio knowing we were fucking.

“What’d you get?” I asked as I followed him into the kitchen.

“There’s a breakfast place down the street,” he said, pulling out cartons of food. “So I just got a serving of almost everything. Pancakes, hash browns, eggs, sides of bacon and sausage… oh, and a bowl of mixed fruit,” he said, producing that. “I can practically hear our mothers bitching about us not eating anything healthy the past few days,” he added. “I figured we could all just pick at everything. There she is,” he said as Traveler came walking out.

She’d dressed for the day in a pair of jeans and a simple blue tee. Her hair was pulled into one of those claw clips. She looked perfectly put together.

But I knew exactly what put that flush on her cheeks and that guilty look in her eyes as she moved into the kitchen.

“Good morning, angel,” Aurelio called to her as he put out the little packets of plastic silverware and napkins.

Traveler eyed the plastic, but, surprisingly, said nothing about them. She was probably too flustered from getting fucked silly with my cousin just a few feet away to get on her ‘single-use plastics are evil’ kick this morning.

“Hey. How’s your back?” she asked.

Conversation became light and easy, but it didn’t escape my notice that her gaze kept slipping to the exact spot where I’d fucked her just moments before.

“Okay. So the shop?” Aurelio asked after cleaning up the mostly eaten breakfast.

“Then the hospital,” I agreed.

With that, we headed out, with everyone just naturally walking toward the stairs instead of the elevator.

“Nervous?” I asked, watching her jiggle in her seat as we got closer to her street.

“A little,” she admitted.

It didn’t escape me that, just a few days ago, she never would have admitted that to me.

And it seemed to matter to me more than I could have anticipated that she was letting her guard down with me, was letting me in a bit.

“Nothing’s gonna happen to you,” I assured her as I parked out front, right behind Aurelio.

I let her climb out first, going toward the door to unlock it, before I leaned into the car to grab my gun, tucking it into the waistband of my slacks.

I caught the glint of Aurelio’s gun as he tucked it into a shoulder holster, and gave him a nod.

Sure, it was the middle of the day. People were milling around. Witnesses could be anywhere. But that didn’t mean we weren’t going to be prepared.

“Feeling really fucking watched right now,” Aurelio said as my own gaze moved around the street, catching a lot of fucking eyes pretending not to look in our direction.

“Yeah,” I agreed, making my way toward the door.

Inside, we found Traveler standing in the middle of the ruins of her workplace.

“It’s all fixable,” I said, watching her empty expression, wondering if she was going to burst into tears at all the damage to the hard work and love she’d put into this place over years of her life.

It wasn’t tears I got, though.

No.

What she did was even more unsettling.

She threw her head back and laughed.

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