“Said she used to volunteer for AA. Alcoholic in the family.”
“But there was alcohol present on the tox report?”
I narrow my eyes and nod. “Yeah.”
He taps his fingertips on the marble. “Maybe it was postmortem fermentation?” he asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “If body recovery is delayed, as it was in this case, sugars break down. You can get false positives.”
“Never heard of it.” But more importantly, why is Rio telling me this now? “You think she wasn’t drunk driving?”
His nostrils flare. “I think Freya was right to keep digging.”
“Interesting development.” I cross my arms and lean on the counter behind me. “Why did you feel the need to come here and tell me this tonight?”
“The case I told Freya to pull?” He looks at me dead in the eyes. “She was my girlfriend.”
The breath in my lungs stills.
“Mariana and I weren’t supposed to exist.” His gaze goes dark. “Different worlds. Kept it quiet. If anyone found out, it would’ve cost both of us.”
“Why’s that?”
He pins me with a look that carries no apology. “She was the sister of a man in a rival motorcycle club.”
Rivals are the same kind of person, just standing on opposite sides.
Rio was patched?
His smile is humorless. “You didn’t think the money for all this came from rodeos and horses alone. Or Enzo’s early tech jobs. Or my time in the city.”
Now that I think of it, the place must be worth at least twenty million. And their company was just valued at more than a billion.
“I had an agreement with my club to get out,” he says. “To wrap things up cleanly and finish what I was responsible for.” He pauses, choosing his words with care. “Once that was done, I was supposed to be free to fully join Enzo with what was the dawn of GhostEye.”
I’ve never heard Rio apologize but his tone rides the edge of one.
“I wasn’t going to risk getting caught with anything that could stain it. Or drag my past into everyone’s future.”
Heavy silence settles between us. He’s standing in the memory, deciding how much of it deserves daylight.
“When I told Mariana how close I was to being out, she asked if we could leave together,” he continues. “She’d found a property in the countryside, one with a rental attached. Said she could get the down payment, that she’d have enough for both of us.”
A soft, humorless breath leaves him. “She was desperate to be done with that world.”
His jaw tightens as he looks past me, the memory settling in his shoulders.
“I told her I couldn’t,” he says. “I had too much tied tomy family to disappear. We fought. Neither of us gave ground.”
He lowers his gaze now, features heavy. “I let her leave. I thought she’d go home.” He pauses. “Instead, she drank. And ended up at the bottom of that quarry.”
Rio has been carrying this for years—no wonder he keeps people out.
There’s too much to see.
I watch him for a beat. “And when Freya kept the case open, you wondered if Ingram missed something in Mariana’s case, too?”
He gives a sharp nod. “If he cut corners now, he could have cut them before. Mariana’s file was thin even then. I always knew that.” A brief pause. “But now…there seem to be more coincidences than just the quarry.”
I lift my eyebrows in question.
