I buried my face in my hands, drowning in the weighted silence sucking the air from the room. My forearms hit the table and I covered my head, even when I heard a chair shove back and another set of damn fucking footsteps on the hardwood floor.
Saint.
He didn’t approach me.
No one did. With Decoy gone and Embry a million miles away, in a room full of people, I was alone.
“I am who you think I am.” Juana shattered the quiet, answering Alexei. “Mateo said we’d be safe if we ever ran here, but that was before you. Am I right to be scared?”
“Of me?” Alexei clicked his teeth. “That is a complicated question, no? There is much to talk about before I answer it.”
“Lexi.” Cam’s voice held a calm he likely didn’t feel. “Let them speak.”
“Is your enforcer going to speak, Cam? Or will he hide from this as much as he seems to have done for... how long, Ms Esteban? How old is your daughter?”
“She’s ten.”
“Ten?”
I raised my head as Cam’s confusion hit me.
He tilted his head. “If she’s ten years old, then you were...”
“Sixteen.” Speaking lanced my throat. “When she was born. I was fifteen when, um...”
“When she was conceived,” Juana supplied. “We both were.”
Cam scratched his beard. “Okay... that seems a good place to start. Keep talking.”
I had nothing. I met Juana’s gaze with a desperation I felt deep in my bones, eroding them and shattering my nerves.Tell him, Ju.But Cam wasn’t letting me off that easy. He rose from his seat at the head of the table, king of the fucking castle, and stalked towards me, towering over me when he reached my side.
“You kept this from us for a reason. I want to know what that is before I rip your fucking head off, but don’t think I’ll wait if you hold out on me. Speak,now, or it’s fucking over for you.”
I didn’t need to see beyond the literal meaning of his words to be scared. I’d have felt better if he’d held a knife to my throat, and I needed him out of my face cos I couldn’t fuckingbreathe.But the longer Cam glowered at me, looming closer with every second, the more stuck I became. Our story was so fucked up, I didn’t have the words.
“Cam, give him some space.”
Embry. Another piece of me died, then roared to life as Cam rounded on him too.
“I’ll give him some space when he tells me what he’s fucking hiding, but if you want to tell me why his kid knows your name, speak now, father. I’m listening.”
Embry laughed, quiet and distant. “You think I knew?”
Cam skewered the love of my life over my shoulder. “I don’t know what to think.”
“Hedidn’t know.” I ground out. “Liliana knows who you are—all of you—because I told her so she knew where to run if I wasn’t here no more.”
Cam’s eyes narrowed. “Run from what? From who?”
“My father,” Juana whispered, her gaze on Alexei. “If you knowmyname, then you understand.”
Alexei rose and moved closer to Juana, placing his fists on the table and leaning over her like Cam was me, a smaller man but four times as deadly. “I do understand. What does not make sense to me is how a gopnik from Islington fathers a child with the only daughter of the heroin king of Europe.”
Cam shut his eyes. I doubted he understood whatever the fuck Russian word Alexei had deemed me either, but the rest of it made his fists clench and the muscle in his jaw tic like a motherfucker.
He took a deep breath and faced me again. “My head is about to spin off my shoulders and detonate to the fucking moon. Brother, if you have any respect for me at all, I need you to start talking.”
I felt heavy, like the devil himself had his hand on my head, holding me under the darkest fucking sea. But as Saint moved again, behind me, toEmbry, something inside gave way. The walls I’d built to keep me alive came tumbling down and I found my voice. “I grew up on a scummy estate, but I played football like a fucking boss so I got bussed out to a sports academy in the next borough. Juana went to a posh girl’s school down the road. They used to come watch us play in the park while they were waiting for their drivers to pick them up. I knew she was hot shit, but I didn’t know about her dad until a month or so after... when he found out little old me had knocked her up.”
