Page 232 of John + Siena: The Complete Duet

Kev’s place, however, was gone entirely.

Nothing but a pile left behind.

The workers placed a large tarp along the bit of charred grass, and then began dressing in their safety gear. Apparently, they would place anything they found in the rubble on the tarp for Kev to look over. Anything that might have made it through the blaze.

By the looks of it, nothing did.

All of it was gone.

A few feet away, Kev and Darren hissed between one another. As usual, their conversation was not quiet enough to keep their words just between them. They still didn’t know the meaning of fucking privacy.

Not that she was surprised.

“Look at it,” Kev snarled.

“Well, there’s not really much to look at, Kev,” Darren replied.

“Oh, you got fucking jokes today, huh?”

Darren sighed. “My place is gone, too, man. What do you want me to say? We put a hit out on one of their people, it went through, and then what? You expected them to sit back, and do fuck all about it?”

“Well, no—”

“This is what they did,” Darren interjected, his voice a rough murmur. “Now, we answer back, or figure something else out.”

“Something else, huh?”

“What do you want to do, Kev? Focus on a place that means nothing to you? What did you have in there other than some documents, guns, and clothes? It’s not like you had anything you gave a shit about in there. Rebuild, or go buy somewhere else.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Well, if you want to get into semantics about all of this, and whose fault it really is that our places got burned down, let’s start with you, brother.”

Kev glared. “Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

“Why the fuck me?”

“You were the one who said it would be best if we dropped low for a while after the whole hit thing, you know what I mean? Maybe if we hadn’t ducked out for a week, this wouldn’t have happened. We would have been more present here, and whatever else. Kind of hard to burn a place down when you’ve got someone going in and out of it all the time, or somebody watching it. I mean, you didn’t really do that, and neither did I.”

“There was somebody here—Siena.”

Two gazes drifted in Siena’s direction. She quickly looked away as if to make her brothers think she was not paying any mind to their conversation at all.

She still needed to feed Andino and the rest of the Marcellos whatever information she could, after all. Kev and Darren were constantly predictable in the way they never looked at her—they never even considered she was smart enough, or had enough guts to be the one fucking them over.

Their mistake.

Her gain.

Darren stared hard at the empty space where Kev’s brownstone had once stood tall and proud. A sharp red brick against the brown bricks of the other homes on the block. It was more than just things lost, sure, but Siena wondered if that was only part of her brother’s problem.

Maybe Kev was starting to realize he had bitten off far more than he could chew where the Marcellos were concerned. Or hell, maybe not.

“Maybe we’ve gone about this the wrong way with them,” Darren said.

“Who?”