And all I could think of was good.

Behind me, I heard the footsteps stop, heard the sound of something hard hitting flesh.

But nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Miguel and Rip kicking the crap out of my cousin. My cousin who was on the ground, curled up on his side in a tight ball. Like the coward he was and always had been.

I added another thing on my list of stuff I was never going to feel bad over, and that was standing there watching them kick him. At least until I cut the distance between us and then aimed a hard kick right at his tailbone with my booted foot.

“What the fuck, Rudy!” I shouted at him, reeling back and kicking him in the ass again, seeing out of my peripheral vision that Rip stopped and took a step back, watching me, his handsome, harsh face flushed red, his hands hanging at his sides.

“You okay?” he asked, eyes going down to my forearms and wrists, taking in what I hadn’t even seen were scrapes all across and down them.

I looked at him, breathing so hard, I couldn’t catch it, breathing so hard I didn’t appreciate Miguel aiming another kick at my cousin’s lower half. “He just… ran up behind me and pushed me…” I tried to explain, losing my words between my breathing and just how fucking mad I was.

My cousin was going to jump me in the parking lot of my job.

He’d put his hands on me.

“Stop! God! Fucking stop!” my cousin yelled. “Jesus Christ!”

Miguel looked up at me, foot poised in midair, his normally easygoing features rearranged into genuine freaking anger and disbelief. “Want me to stop?”

“No,” I told him without thinking. “What are you doing, Rudy?”

The man only a little older than me stayed in the fetal position as he said, “Fuck you!”

“My wrist is broken, Rudy!” the man I’d thrown my boot at cried.

We all ignored him.

Rip kicked Rudy in the ass that time, way harder than I had.

“Fuck!” my cousin shouted again. “Stop!”

“What are you doing here?” I repeated, totally caught off guard by this entire situation, by the fact that he was here. In Houston. At my job.

How did he find out—

My dad had found my number. How hard would it be to find out my job in that case?

Had my dad put him up to this?

“We told you not to go back to San Antonio!” Rudy had the nerve to yell in his raggedy but pained voice. “We told you what would happen if you did!” he tried to use as an excuse, but all it did was make me freeze. “Should have gotten you outside your fuckin’ place—”

He was here in retaliation for me going back there? For Grandma Genie’s funeral? Was he for real?

This terrible sensation of dread hit me right then. Should have gotten you outside of your fucking place. Something clicked inside of me, and I looked down at my cousin and wanted to kick him in the balls as hard as I could. I didn’t want to believe it, but this was him. Them. None of this should be surprising.

“Rudy, did you break into my house?”

I saw his hand jerk. Saw him flinch.

“Did you break into my house?”

“Am I gonna get kicked again if I answer that?” he had the stupid nerve to ask.

He’d done it. This little asshole, sack of shit had done it. It hadn’t been random burglars.

It wouldn’t even be the first time I’d overheard about him going into someone’s house to rob them. He’d been doing stuff like that since we had been kids.

I was too busy staring at him to look and see who kicked him again, but I knew it happened because he cried out again, “Goddamn it!”

He had been the one to break into my house.

He’d gotten onto private property to jump me. To hurt me. And it wasn’t the first time.

If I had thought things had gone red a minute ago, I would have been mistaken, but things definitely went red then. Anger surged through me. So strong, so piercing, I couldn’t breathe.

But somehow, some way, it also calmed me to know it had been him.

It calmed me to know I knew exactly what I was going to do.

And so it wasn’t so hard to stand there, staring down at him. It wasn’t hard to say, “Rudy, my dad never told me not to go back to San Antonio. He told me never to go back home. If you want to play the specifics game, he never said San Antonio.”

Because it was true.

Maybe my cousin hadn’t come to kill me, but he had come back to wreck my life. To wreck me. To hurt me.

I wasn’t okay with that. I was never going to be okay with that.

A Miller never went back on their word, and maybe I was an Allen now, but I had been a Miller first. My cousin reminded me of that. Unfortunately for him.

“Fuck off, you stupid bitch,” Rudy kept venting, stupidly.

But I was past it.

“Do you remember what I told you at the funeral?” I asked him, calmly, knowing I wasn’t going to get a response. He didn’t let me down. So I crouched by him, not close enough to be within striking distance if he was dumb enough to try and get another shot in, but close enough so I could speak more quietly, so he would know I wasn’t talking irrationally. Rip had taught me how much more effective that was than yelling.

And just in case he had forgotten, I answered my own question. “You came and you tried to hurt me, and I’ll live with that. But I told you at the funeral if you ever put your hands on me again, I was going to break your hand.”

His entire body froze, and I heard a noise from Miguel, but I didn’t turn to look at him. I was too focused. I was in this zone I had forgotten how well I was familiar with.

“And you know what that means, don’t you?” I asked him again.

“Oh, fuck,” I heard Miguel mutter.

But I didn’t look away as I asked my boss and my friend, “Will one of you hold him for me?”

Miguel didn’t hesitate. He dropped to my cousin and kneeled over his curled legs, pressing his hands down on the arm Rudy had closest to the ground. If he was a little too good at that, I was going to ask him later about it.

Just as I reached for Rudy’s hand, another one landed on my shoulder, and Rip’s voice was clear as he asked, “Let me do it.”

I didn’t look at him. Instead I took in my cousin’s face, pained and angry and furious—a reminder of a time in my life I never wanted ever again after this. “I can do it,” I told Rip.

“I want to,” he assured me quietly.

And it was that that had me glancing up at him again. His face was still red, his breathing was still pretty off, and he looked… furious.

For me?

“Go take care of your scrapes. We’ll handle this,” Rip said in that cool, cool voice, watching me with a face that I had never seen before. One that made the hairs on my arms stand up at the same time it made my chest tight.

There was an emotion behind his eyes that I didn’t know what to do with. That I didn’t know how to handle.

I nodded at him, knowing I was leaving my cousin to get his hand broken.

And all I could think was that he deserved it. After everything he’d done and had been willing to do, he deserved it.

But I knew there was one more thing I needed to do, and I glanced down at the man on the floor, thrashing by then, and said, “Tell my dad that if I ever see any of you again, if he ever calls me again, I’ll do more than call the cops and tell them there are drugs in the house. Tell him that I still remember a whole lot of things from ten years ago, do you understand me?”

“Fuck—” Rudy started to hiss before crying out loud when Rip took his hand.

“Remember what I said,” I warned him, taking a step away. It should have bothered me how okay I was about all this. I’d think about that later. Maybe. “I asked you to leave me alone, Rudy. Remember that. I warned you.”

“Grab your boot,” Rip said quietly. “Then go in, Luna.”

I nodded at him, looking at the big man crouched over my cousin, holding his hand in a position I knew well. I heard a moan from somewhere in the lot and I headed toward it, finding my boot just feet away from a man sitting between two cars, holding his forearm and looking at his hand, or wrist, with horror.