Darwin touched Emmet’s arm and told him, “Don’t worry, Dante would never hurt you.”

  The redhead still looked panicked. “But why does he have a fucking gun?”

  “When Nana invited you to stay here, she was open about the fact that her family used to be in organized crime,” Darwin said.

  Emmet’s voice rose. “Yeah, used to be, that’s what she said. But if they’re law-abiding citizens now, why is her grandson carrying a concealed weapon?”

  “Even though they’re retired, they still have enemies,” Darwin said, keeping his voice gentle as he tried to calm his frightened companion. “A year and a half ago, someone tried to hurt the Dombrusos, probably a person with an old grudge. Now Dante’s just trying to keep his family safe. He’s one of the good guys, I promise.”

  The kid went right on staring at me like I was a monster as he asked, “Hurt them how?”

  “There was a fire in a nightclub during Ollie’s bachelor party,” Darwin said. “It turned out to be arson, and almost the entire Dombruso family was trapped inside the burning building. The people responsible haven’t been caught yet, so Dante carries a gun, just in case something else happens and he has to defend his family.”

  Since Darwin hadn’t been dating my nephew at that point, I was surprised he knew so much about the fire. But then, of course Josh would still be talking about it. He’d nearly lost a lot of people he loved that night, including both his dads. I felt a sharp pang of guilt, not for the first or last time, because Josh and the rest of my family couldn’t put that night behind them, not as long as the arsonist and the people who’d hired him were still at large.

  Emmet whispered, “Jesus.”

  “But Nana’s house and the people who live here really wouldn’t be a target. Plus, there haven’t been any more incidents since the night of the fire. Maybe the bad guys gave up.” I highly doubted it, but I didn’t bother to chime in. Darwin added, “I feel safe living here, Em. You should, too.”

  The kid looked like he wanted to cry. “I did, but I should have known there’d be a catch to getting to live in this big, beautiful home. I was so scared when I was living on the street, but this is worse. I’ll gladly take getting mugged over winding up in the middle of some kind of mafia war. I thought stuff like that only happened in the movies!”

  I took off the shoulder holster and placed it and the gun on the porch as I said quietly, “I wish this shit was confined to a movie screen. I really do. But the fact is, we have plenty of enemies who wouldn’t think twice about causing us harm, and like Darwin said, I need to protect my family.”

  Emmet asked, “Why do you have enemies?”

  “Some are a result of choices I’ve made for my family, but most are old grudges that go back generations. None of this is your problem though, and you don’t have to keep living here, Emmet. That goes for you too, Darwin. I really don’t think this house is unsafe, otherwise I wouldn’t let my grandmother or anyone else stay here. But you shouldn’t have to live under a cloud of fear, so if you want to move out, I’ll pay for a hotel until you can come up with other options.”

  Darwin raised his chin and let his long, black bangs fall away from his eyes. “Thanks for the offer, Dante,” he said, “but I’m not going anywhere. If something did happen, I’d want to be right here to help Nana and Ollie.” No wonder my nephew was so crazy about that kid. I could have hugged him for wanting to stand by my grandmother.

  “I’m sorry,” Emmet said, “but guns freak me out, and I don’t want to be a part of this. I’ll go get my stuff, if you’re serious about putting me up someplace until the shelter opens.” When I nodded, he left the porch, went around the house, and disappeared through the side gate.

  As I dialed a cab company, I asked Charlie, “Would you mind going with him and checking him into a hotel? Find him someplace nice, and use my credit card.”

  “Consider it done.” My husband pulled out his phone too and began browsing hotel listings.

  After I requested a cab, I pocketed my phone and turned back to the huge pink dong. I was totally over it by that point, and grasped it tightly, threw my weight into it, and wrenched it out of the doorway with an undignified grunt. The doorframe squealed as wood rubbed against wood, but fortunately it didn’t splinter.

  The artist and his friend scrambled out the door after it, and one of them exclaimed, “Awesome, dude! We’ll go, like, put this in the backyard. That way the neighbor won’t get all bent out of shape. I think maybe he’s cockphobic or something.”

  Surprisingly, Bill and Ted were actually able to lift the thing, though not without some effort. I decided to give them a hand and hoisted up the base, and the three of us carried it around to the backyard. As soon as we stood it up, the dog burst out the backdoor, ran up to the thing, and started licking it. I really didn’t want to know why.

  By the time we returned to the front of the house, a cab was waiting, which had to be some kind of speed record. A minute later, Emmet appeared with a single, plastic shopping bag. When I realized that was everything he owned, I felt like such an asshole for scaring him out of my grandmother’s house.

  Charlie kissed me and said, “I’ll see you at home,” then called goodnight to everyone before accompanying Emmet to the cab.

  “Hasta la vista, good people. Enjoy Moby’s Dick,” Bill said, and he and Ted took off, too.

  “Come on in and have a drink, Dante,” my grandmother said. “It looks like you could use one.”

  I picked up my things and moved them to the living room, then joined Nana, Ollie and Darwin in the kitchen. While Ollie made some hot chocolate, the rest of us got comfortable around the kitchen island and I said, “I’m sorry about scaring Emmet away. That really wasn’t my intention.”

  “I know it wasn’t, sweetie,” Nana said.

  “Out of curiosity, how many people are living here now?”

  “Besides us,” she said, “there’s also Kevin, and Lucy, who you met, and as of this past weekend, a lovely boy named Jayden and his older brother Joely. Jayden got kicked out when his parents found out he was gay, and Joely went along to take care of him. Is that not the sweetest, most heart-wrenching thing you’ve ever heard?”

  “It is,” I conceded, “but I’m still worried about you bringing home people you don’t know.”

  “I know you worry about me,” Nana said, “but there’s no need to. I’ve always had a real good sense about people. In fact, I can spot a bad apple a mile away!”

  “Why don’t you do what I just did and rent someplace for these kids until the shelter opens? That way, you can still help them without potentially putting yourself at risk.”

  “I like having them here, Dante. This house is way too big for just the three of us. It feels empty. But when there are young people around, the whole place comes to life! Honestly, I should have thought to do this a long time ago. And you might as well get used to it, because the shelter will only be able to accommodate a dozen kids at a time, so I’m going to keep inviting people to stay with me.”

  I asked, “Can’t you at least go through proper channels, like the foster care system? That way, at least you know something about their backgrounds.”

  “I thought about foster care, but see, the kids I’ve brought home are over eighteen, except for Jayden. They’ve aged out of the system, and now they just need a helping hand while they get on their feet. I love this city, but let’s face it, it’s a pretty tough place to try to get by if you’re young and broke.”

  I fought back a sigh and let the subject drop for the time being. After a minute, Ollie asked Nana whether she wanted brandy or peppermint schnapps in her hot chocolate, and while the two of them consulted the liquor cabinet across the room, Darwin said, “She really does have a good sense about people. Everyone she’s brought home is really nice.”

  “So far.”

  He told me, “I promise to keep an eye on things and call you if it seems like she’s about to run into trouble.”

  “Thanks. Where’s her makeshift Brady Bunch, anyway?”

  “She gave them money for a movie. They should be back soon.”

  I lowered my voice so my grandmother wouldn’t overhear me and said, “Make sure they don’t take advantage of her generosity, okay? I’m not saying these are bad kids or anything, but I could see a lot of people getting greedy in a situation like this.”

  Darwin grinned at me. “Your grandmother’s no pushover. She knows when someone’s trying to play her.”

  I considered that, then conceded, “You have a point. I remember how she was when my brothers and I were little. We never got away with anything.”

  “I almost forgot she raised you,” Darwin said. “You were pretty young when you moved in with her, right?”

  “I was seven. My brothers were younger.”

  A shadow fell across his features, and he said, “I’m sorry about what happened to your family. It always makes me sad when I see the picture on the mantel of your mom and dad and all of you guys as kids, knowing it was taken just days before….”

  He couldn’t even say it, because it was too horrible. He couldn’t give voice to the fact that my parents and baby sister had been murdered in our home while they slept. And he couldn’t talk about what I’d had to do to save myself and my brothers.

  Even though I was separated from it by a quarter century, I’d relived that night a thousand times in as many nightmares and remembered every excruciating detail. Dad’s hunting rifle had been heavier than I’d expected. My hands were shaking as I pointed it at the men who’d come to kill all of us, while my three younger brothers climbed out the window. I was so small back then that the men had seemed like giants, looming over me. Again and again, I felt the cold breeze that swayed the sheer, white curtains and pierced my pajamas, and I felt the terror clenching my chest as one of those strangers lunged at me. The smell of gun smoke was sharp and acrid when I pulled the trigger, and the sound rang in my ears….

  I cleared my throat and tried to force the memories from my mind as I muttered, “Yeah.”

  “I get why you carry a gun. They scare me, but still. I know you’re just trying to keep your family safe, and after everything you’ve lived through…I mean, it’s not like you need me to sign off on it or anything, but after the way Emmet reacted to you tonight, I guess I wanted to tell you I understand.”

  All I could do was nod. Darwin meant well, but I knew how I looked to someone on the outside. And somehow, the fact that this young, fragile kid felt like he needed to comfort me just made me feel pathetic.

  I got to my feet and told Nana, “I have to go. Raincheck on the spiked hot chocolate.”

  She called, “You and Charlie are still planning to come to my New Year’s Eve party on Saturday, right? We’re celebrating your wedding anniversary too, you know!”

  “We’ll be here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Darwin said as he stood up, too. “I said something wrong, didn’t I? Is that why you’re leaving?”

  “No, not at all. There’s just something I need to do. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I returned to the living room, slipped the holster onto my shoulders and buckled it over my heart. It felt like a part of me, and I didn’t even notice the weight of the gun. When I pulled on my overcoat, all of that became a secret I kept from the rest of the world.

  It would probably be a while before Charlie made it home, so I decided to go for a walk and clear my head. I tried not to bring all that darkness into our house and into our marriage, but sometimes it seemed to cling to me like an odor, permeating my skin. My husband had to notice. He never said anything, though. Charlie was good at pretending our life was normal. I was good at letting him pretend.

  It took less than fifteen minutes to reach the house where I’d spent the first seven years of my life. That was the thing about San Francisco. Outsiders thought it was a big city, but it wasn’t at all. Lifetimes, a million memories, countless histories best forgotten were jam-packed into just forty-nine square miles, layered beneath the here and now.

  It hadn’t been a conscious decision, but I wasn’t particularly surprised when I ended up there. I stood across the street and studied the tidy, white Victorian. There was a stuffed pink cat on the windowsill in an upstairs bedroom. Kids lived in that house. A family. They probably didn’t know about the horrors that had happened within those four walls. They couldn’t. Otherwise, how could they possibly choose to live there?

  I tried to remember which had been my room. I knew it was toward the back of the house, because the men who’d come to kill my family had started at the front, where my parents’ room and my baby sister’s nursery had been. The layout was hazy, because after that night, my brothers and I never went home again. We moved in with Nana, and my uncles took care of everything else. They brought us our things and sold the house soon after.

  When my phone buzzed in my pocket, it startled me. I pulled it out and read Charlie’s message, which said: Hey, I just got home. Are you still at Nana’s?

  I wondered how long I’d been standing out on that sidewalk. My fingers were cold and stiff when I texted that I’d gone for a walk and would be home soon. I glanced at the house one last time and wondered if the current homeowners would be willing to sell it. If I bought it, then I could do what my uncles should have done in the first place and burn it to the ground.

  Chapter Two

  When I got home, I reset the alarm before securing the weapons in one of my gun safes. My brother Mikey’s three little boys were over a lot, so I couldn’t go with my preferred decorating scheme, which would have included a gun on every end table. I mulled over the gun-always-in-reach thing as I hung up my coat and holster and wondered if that was kind of paranoid.

  Soft music drifted down the stairs as I wandered through the ground floor. The music meant Charlie was in our bedroom, waiting for me, but I needed to get my shit together before I went up there. I shook out my hands and arms, as if to physically dislodge the funk I was in. I’d been off for days, which was probably why I’d let Emmet’s reaction and Darwin bringing up my parents and sister get to me. Normally, I could deal with shit like that. I dealt with it every day. But it didn’t quite bounce off like it should when my nerves were raw.

  It had been eighteen fucking months since an arsonist tried to kill my entire family. Some piece of shit had tried to take out everyone I loved, and he was still sucking air, a year and a half later! I’d spent months chasing down every lead, every rumor, following every breadcrumb. So had the police department, but in all that time, we hadn’t learned a thing. The person responsible was still out there. My family was still in danger. And I was too goddamn useless to do anything about it.

  With each passing day, the stress of it all compounded and was taking its toll on me. I was usually much better at dealing with all the negative shit in my life. Well, okay, maybe what I was usually better at was keeping the stress hidden, but that was something anyway.

  I went into the living room, poured myself a generous measure of bourbon, and tossed it back. The burn as it went down was reassuring somehow, maybe because I knew it preceded a much needed blurring of all those sharp edges in my mind. I had a second one for good measure, then paced around the room, trying to make myself relax before I went upstairs to my husband.

  I’d accepted the hand I’d been dealt in life a very long time ago, but I hated the fact that it was my husband’s now, too. I just wanted him to be safe and happy, and to have a shot at a normal life. It should have been such a simple thing to ask for, but our life together had been so far from normal, right from the start.

  Soon after Charlie and I met, I finally tracked down Sal Natori, the man who’d broken into my family’s house that night with a bunch of thugs, intent on slaughtering all of us, and I’d killed him. Since Natori had also been trying to kill me at the time (and had nearly succeeded), it had been easy to pull the trigger. The full impact of my actions didn’t hit me until later.

  I’d been seven years old the first time I ended a life. There was just no processing that one. But I did eventually come to terms with killing Natori. He’d been a monster, a man who would murder innocent children to send a message to his enemies. Killing him was like exterminating a cockroach.

  It had taken twenty years to track down Natori. Afterwards, I thought my work was done. I’d finally avenged the murder of my parents and sister. I retired as head of the Dombruso clan and put my cousin Jerry in charge, and then I built a restaurant for Charlie and me. Not that I’d had the slightest interest in being a restauranteur, but my grandmother had owned one when I was growing up, so there was a comfort and familiarity to it, somehow.

  I’d been naïve to think Natori’s death would be the end of it. Yes, things did settle down for a couple years. Charlie and I got married and made a life together, and we ran the restaurant while I slowly tried to exorcise my demons.

  But fate had other ideas. My cousin Nico fell in love with a man named Luca Caruso, who turned out to be one of Sal Natori’s sons. Jerry went ballistic and took out a hit on Luca, even though the guy was perfectly innocent and never had a thing to do with his father or the family business. That showed me Jerry’s judgement couldn’t be trusted, and I had to step back in and assume control of the family again. Needless to say, that further infuriated Jerry.

  In all likelihood, that was the chain of events which led to the fire. Jerry disappeared after I demoted him. I learned he’d gone to work for the Messinas, a rival family with years of bad blood between us, and maybe they’d conspired to take out all the Dombrusos in one fell swoop. It would have satisfied Jerry’s need for revenge while making us pay for decades of perceived wrongs against the Messinas, and it also would have cemented their position as the most powerful family on the west coast.

  Admittedly, it was all just speculation. I didn’t have any evidence to back it up, and the Messinas were nowhere to be found, so I couldn’t get any answers out of them. But it made the most sense to me. After generations in organized crime, my family had made a lot of enemies, and certainly any of them could have seized the opportunity to wipe us off the map once and for all. But to me, it felt like cause and effect, not just a random attack for some old grudge.

 

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