My jaw clenched. I hadn’t even realized until I felt the ache.
“Please, Alejandro,” Levi prompted quietly, anguish in his expression. “Tell me you’re not trafficking people for their organs, tell me I can still trust whatever is between us.”
There it was—the push.
Not shouting and not threatening. Only constant pressure.
“There’snothingbetween us.”There can’t be.
He stepped closer, gripped my arm, and tilted my chin with a finger. “That’s a lie,” he murmured, and for a moment, I was lost in velvet brown eyes. What would it be like to have something real? Would it be total trust? Acceptance? No secrets?
No! It was just sex. I recoiled from his touch and shook him off.
He was shocked for a moment, but I’d seen the distrust in him, heard the accusations. There was nothing real between us because I’d been carrying secrets.
He continued after that pause. “A massacre wiped out an entire cell, the first iteration of the Águilas Cartel.” Levi stoppedas if he was waiting for me to fill in the gaps. “No witnesses. No suspects. But you knew Ortega’s name. You called him Raven. So, I’ll ask you again.” His voice dropped. “What is your connection to him?”
The air left the room.
Not in a dramatic way. No whooshing, no roaring in my ears. Just… gone. As if someone had opened a valve in my chest and everything leaked out, leaving me hollow. I went still, and my gaze fixed on the tiles by his boot. When we’d moved in, Marisol had hated those tiles, said they looked like hospital flooring. I’d left them. Easy to clean. Blood wiped right off.
Think of something—any lie. I’ve been lying for so long.Lie. Deflect. Twist. I’m good at this.
Nothing came.
“It was me,” I heard myself say. “All of them.” The words pushed their way out, slow and unstoppable. “Nineteen men. Seven poisoned—five shot in their sleep. Four with their throats cut. Two just acid and fire.” I listed them as if I were counting instruments on a tray. My tone was flat, distant. The numbers slotted into place in the air between us.
Levi’s face lost color.
“Then one more. Raven was last,” I added, because if I stopped now, I would choke on it. I swallowed hard. “I killed him,” I said, still confused that Levi thought he was still alive. “I killed all of them.”
Silence. I lifted my head.
Levi was staring, shocked, as if someone had yanked the world from under him, and words spilled out of me at a furious rate.
“Raven was a murderer. A rapist. Evil. He hurt people because it amused him. Tortured them because no one stopped him. Raped and killed my mom with his friends and lieutenants because it made him feel powerful. He broke my mom, andstarted on my sister, and I waited, and I planned every moment, and I killed him. He wasn’t the first. He was the last, and I made him watch so he was sure to feel every second of it—used a poison that kept him awake, tied him so he could watch, cut him open, threw acid on him, and watched him burn.” I paused.
Levi’s jaw worked. No sound came out at first. Then: “How old were you?”
“Fourteen.” My mouth answered before my brain could shut it up, then I tipped my chin and owned this shit. “Almost fifteen.”
His fingers flexed at his side. “Do you understand what?—”
“Yes.” My temper flared, sharp. “I understand exactly what it is.” I met his gaze. “I was there, and they were all dead. No one survived. I thought we were safe.”
Levi stared at me as if he was trying to reconcile the version of me he’d built in his head with the one standing in front of him now. Shock, horror, calculation, pity—his expression flickered through all of it, too fast for me to pin down. For a second, I thought he might pull out his gun and arrest me. Or shoot. Or run. Or freaking hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay. The uncertainty twisted in my gut.
“And the transferred money?” he asked, finally.
“I had everything I needed from Raven, forced him to hand over passwords, took his finger.” I held up my hand and stared at it, remembering taking the finger first, the way he’d screamed and cursed me. Coward. “When we got away from the authorities, I used what I could to start over here and dispersed the rest to other victims.”
“Alejandro—”
“I killed them all,” I repeated. Summarized. Wanted to make sure heknewthat.
I heard a sound behind me; I knew it was Marisol. “He killed them all for me,” Marisol whispered, and I turned to face her,glancing behind to see if Bradley and Molly were there. “I sent them upstairs,” she added. They didn’t know the full horror; they never would.
“No, I did it for me,” I said. “This isn’t on you.”
