She gave me a stubborn chin tilt—stoic, dry-eyed, not shedding a single tear, although grief was carved into every line of her face. She held it the way she always had—locked down, silent, the kind of silence that had once kept her alive. No shaking hands, no hitch in her breath. Just that terrible, practiced stillness. It was the silence that scared me sometimes—the kind born from surviving too much, too young, the kind that said she’d learned long ago crying never stopped anything, never saved anyone, and never made the monsters go away.
She came close to me, slid under my arm, and stared at Levi. “I won’t let you take him.” She curled into me.
“You need to go upstairs with the twins,” I said. Begged. I didn’t want her to know that Raven had made it out.
How had he survived what I did to him?
“And Raven being in the country?” Levi asked.
I felt Marisol stiffen in shock. “What?” she asked, horrified. “What do you mean?” She eased away from me and glanced up, her expression broken. “You said they were all dead.”
“I killed them all, I…” I didn’t know what to say. “Somehow, Raven crawled out from death. I will find him, Lucia, I promise you, and I will finish this.”
“What if he thinks the twins… what if they’re…”
“No, don’t think that,” I said, a little desperate. We didn’t know which of the cartel members was actually the father of the twins, but it didn’t matter; Bradley and Molly would never have to deal with this, and neither would my sister. “Where is he?” I asked Levi who was watching the exchange between my sister and me.
“We’re working on finding him.”
“Cops?” I laughed, a sound that tasted like metal. “Forgive me for knowing they won’t find anything at all.”
“I have other avenues to explore. A different team. We’ll find him.”
And then it hit me. Not a thought—an impact. A jolt so violent it felt like the floor pitched under my feet. The photograph Molly had sent. The man who’d been staring. The scars. The posture. The wrongness I couldn’t name at the time. The attack on Marisol. My hand slipped on the phone. I caught it on the second try, fingers shaking as I scrolled, my other hand fisting tight in Marisol’s T-shirt because I needed the anchor to stay upright.
The face on the screen, which I held out of her reach, swam into focus.
No. No, no?—
My heart slammed hard enough to hurt, a thick, sick thud that clawed up my chest and stole my breath.
It could be him.
Itwashim.
He was breathing the same air as we were, and walking the same streets.
Ravenhadsurvived.
Every drop of blood I’d spilled. Every cut. Every scream. Every flame. All of it—undone.
He’d found me.
Worse—he’d found my sister and her babies.
NINETEEN
Levi
I watchedAlejandro shift from shock to something empty and cold, and it happened so fast I couldn’t keep up. One moment, he was unsteady on his feet, breath stuttering, color drained from his face as if the past had reached straight through his skin and wrapped a hand around his throat. The next, the panic vanished as if it had never existed at all. His eyes went flat, his posture settled, and an eerie kind of calm rolled through him.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet. Controlled. Terrifying.
I’d seen people harden themselves before—cops facing down their first shooting, victims giving statements with trembling hands—but nothing like this. Nothing that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was like watching a whole person disappear and something colder step into place, neat and practiced, as natural as breathing.
And standing there in his kitchen, with the faint hum of the fridge and the smell of stale coffee mixing with whatever tension he was giving off, I understood—maybe for the first time—that most of what I’d seen of him before had been a version built carefully over years. The performance of a man who flirted when he was irritated, who rolled his eyes at danger, who stitched upstrangers without asking for thanks or caring if they lived. Not a lie exactly, but definitely not the whole truth either.
Because the person in front of me now… this was the core. The part carved out of violence—the part he’d been forced to grow into.
