Are bad guys after me again? Is this going to be like theTakenfranchise, and—
“Your cousin has been murdered.”
Chapter Seven
IT WAS HIS FIRST TIMEattending a funeral without being the killer.
Or wishing he was the killer.
The thought should have disturbed him. Instead, Zacharie found it almost amusing in a grim sort of way, standing in the back of a funeral parlor in Glendale while mourners filed past a closed casket draped in white lilies.
Trina de los Reyes had been twenty-six years old. Pretty, if the photographs displayed on easels were accurate. Smiling in every single one, her arm slung around Mira’s shoulders, their faces pressed together like sisters rather than cousins.
Like family.
Like someone who hadn’t sold her own blood to human traffickers for what his sources confirmed was a mere fifty thousand dollars.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The mourners lined up to extend their condolences to Mira, but all eyes were on him.
He was used to this. The weight of strangers’ gazes, the ripple of recognition that followed him through any room in Southern California. One of their homegrown billionaires, the society pages liked to call him. Self-made. Mysterious. Perpetually single despite the endless parade of women who threw themselves at his feet.
Today was no different. The whispers started the moment he walked in. Women straightened their posture, touched their hair, found excuses to drift closer. Men sized him up with a mix of wariness and envy. The elderly aunts from Bakersfield clutched their purses tighter, as if his wealth might be contagious. Or dangerous.
Let them wonder.
Let them stare.
His attention was elsewhere entirely.
Mira stood by the casket in a simple black dress that skimmed her knees, her dark hair pulled back from her face, a single strand of pearls at her throat that he didn’t recognize.
She looked lovely.
Fragile in a melancholic way, like a watercolor left out in the rain. The kind of beauty that made people want to protect her, shelter her, wrap her in cotton and keep her safe from the ugliness of the world.
