Rafferty wasn’t the only one oversharing though.
I told him my favorite memory—a fishing tripwith Kyler off the coast of Isla Mujeres. I admitted how much it’d hurt when everyone, save for my cousin, had turned their backs on me after my arrest.
“Then why didn’t you bargain for immunity from the beginning?” he asked.
My face went hot when I thought of my answer, and I shook my head.
“Loyalty,” he guessed, zero judgment in his tone.
“Stupidity, more like it,” I said, shaking my head. “Didn’t take me long to work out that some of the attacks on the inside had been ordered by my father.”
Rafferty nodded in agreement, and it reminded me that he’d doggedly pursued my family for months and probably knew us—and my father—better than almost anyone. I confessed that I wasn’t quite the stone-cold killer the courts had made me out to be.
At that point, he took my hand in his and kissed my knuckles. “I know.”
My eyes widened at his certainty.
“I’ve known since I saw you taking meals to Mrs. Adaluz,” he explained, a soft look in his eyes.
“My father put a gun in my hand at the age of sixteen and said I had to start earning my keep.”
“But that wasn’t what you wanted to do.”
I shook my head. Just a few months into my sentence, with multiple targets on my back and my father’s betrayal fresh on my mind, I hadn’t hesitated when the prosecutor’s office gave me a second chance to turn state’s evidence. I was tired of paying for a life I’d never had a shot at avoiding.
“I threw up the first time I…” I stopped abruptly, shaking my head. I had full immunity, but I didn’t know where any of that stood in this moment. “Wow. You are way too easy to talk to.”
“I am,” he admitted with a proud smile. I wondered how many criminals he took down by merely being charming. “And while I can promise that nothing leaves this conversation, I’ll understand if you prefer to keep a few things to yourself.”
Our hands were still linked. And it felt important that he understood the kind of man I really was inside.
“Hypothetically, if I were the kind of person who had to kill people, I’d make sure they were very, very bad people first.”
“What if—hypothetically—you were told to kill someone good?” he asked with a quirked brow.
“I’m sure that would have been a rare occurrence. Almost exactly as rare as my fail rate would supposedly be.” I shrugged. “Sometimes people get away before you can complete the order.”
“So, if someone got warned ahead of time that you were coming…”
“Well then, that’s just bad luck.” I brought his knuckles to my lips. “Hypothetically.”
The one thing I didn’t share with Rafferty was that I didn’t know what I was going to do after this, but it might involve stealing his truck. I’d been promised a new life, a new identity, but never once had I felt safe. After being attacked in the open with two heavily armed Texas Rangers driving me around, I knew Icouldn’t trust law enforcement to protect me from my family.
“Can you tell me more about what happened yesterday?” Rafferty asked as we shuffled the tiles in the middle of the table.
“What do you want to know?”
“Do you think they knew where the safe house was?”
I wondered if he’d already guessed my plan. Still, I answered, “We were only a few minutes away from our location when they ran us off the road, so…yeah.”
“You said everyone was dead. How did that happen?”
“Arnold, the Ranger who was driving, tried to correct for the impact, but there was already ice on the bridge, and”—I pause, the screeching metal loud in my ears—“we got hit again. Both cars went over.”
“Did you see the other car underwater?”
I started choosing tiles.
