“You weren’t little.” Juana smiled across the table, unfazed by her position between Saint and Nash. Unfazed, even, that our daughter was out of her sight with a man she’d never met. “You were a giant even then.”
“I’m not a giant now.”
“English,” Cam snapped.
Alexei waved his hand. “Is okay. I understand them.”
Of course he did, an unsurprising fact that seemed to annoy Cam more than it did me.
“What are they saying?”
“That Mateo was a tall child, but there are bigger men in this room right now.”
Awesome. He got the subtext too, if that was the right word. My head turned on autopilot to ask Embry, but he wasn’t there.
“What happened when her old man found out?”
Dazed, I swung my gaze back to the table. Nash had voiced the question, his face carefully blank, waiting on Cam to pass judgement like the good soldier he’d always been.
I made him look at me before I answered. “Exactly what you’d expect a father to do when his teenage daughter comes home pregnant. Then he amped it up by a thousand percent, reeling me in so it would hurt more when he finally came for me.”
“Gonna need details, Mats. However hard it is to talk about.”
I took a shuddering breath, cringing at how empty my arms felt without Liliana or Embry to hold close. “He was reasonable for a while. Let me come around, as long as I didn’t tell anyone else. Said it was a hard sell for his catholic family, so he was gonna break them in gently. He was all right with me, so I believed him, and I was fucking fifteen. I had no clue who he was or what he was capable of.”
In my peripheral, Saint movedagain. He took Embry’s seat and leaned forward, saying nothing, just listening. In a weird way, his silence was comforting, but it terrified me too. Perhaps more than anyone, Saint was my friend, and I was his. He’d trusted me with shit he’d never told anyone, and I’d given him nothing but lies in return.
Lies that had put Cam in danger.
“Keep talking,” Nash rumbled.
“Can I smoke?”
He tossed me his cigarettes. I lit up before I remembered Juana.
I stubbed the smoke out again, blocking out Nash’s frown. “He kept Juana at home while she was pregnant. I was allowed to visit her, and I was there when Liliana was born on the bathroom floor of his big fucking house. He let us name her and make little casts of her feet. Then he—”
Goddamn. The pain in my chest was unbearable. I shot a desperate glance at Juana and she took over.
“My father was never going to let us raise Liliana together. I knew this even before I told Mateo I was pregnant. So we had a plan to escape before she was born, but she came early, and someone betrayed us, so it didn’t happen that way. My father was there, and the moment I put her down after her first feed, he took her away. He told me I couldn’t have her back until Mateo was dead, and I knew he was telling the truth.”
The atmosphere in the room changed, dark energy flowing as my brothers braced themselves for the worst still to come. Cam rested his fists on the table. “Who betrayed you?”
Juana held my gaze, as strong in the face of fear as she’d always been. “Mateo’s mother. She didn’t know our plans, and she couldn’t comprehend the depths of my father’s cruelty. She approached him at his office, believing she could help, but he charmed her, manipulated her, then he stole her grandchild and made her watch as he cut her son from his eye to his mouth.”
The scar on my face throbbed as a humourless smile twisted my lips. “Turns out he didn’t mean a literal death, eh? Just a slow burn of fucking misery.”
“He let you go?” Cam asked, surprise raising his dark brows.
I nodded. “After he’d showed my carved-up face to every soldier under him so they’d remember me forever, he kicked me out. Told me I’d never see Lili or Juana again and that he’d kill them, and me, if I told anyone they existed at all. Then he locked them up, and they’ve been locked up ever since.”
Work-hardened fingers touched my face.Saint. He turned my head this way and that, peering at the macabre mess. He had something to say. I saw it in the frustration cinching his brows together, but his lips didn’t move. Whatever it was, I’d have to wait. I couldn’t read Saint’s mind.
Not like Alexei, who studied him now, before his flat stare returned to me. “The child who waits for you is not one who does not know her father. How did that come to be?”
My fingers itched for another smoke. Juana eyed my restless fingers and rose to stand by the windows.
I sparked up and took a drag deep enough to sear the nagging pain from my chest. “I was sixteen by the time Liliana was born. When they took her and left London, I jacked in school and talked a mechanic into giving me a cash-in-hand apprenticeship. When I had enough money, I bought the shittiest 125 I could afford and followed them—I knew where they’d gone. Juana told me about the estate in Surrey and I found a way in. Dug a fucking tunnel under the fence and into the cellar. Snuck in there twice a month for three years until she started riding horses in the field at the back of the estate. It was easier after that.”
