Sinaloa. The cartel. Massacres and drug wars and bodies hanging from bridges.
My hands stayed folded. My face stayed pleasant. Inside, my world cracked like dropped porcelain.
Richard glanced back, noticed where my eyes had been. Something flickered across his expression—calculation, concern, assessment. He minimized the email window completely, but we both knew it was too late.
"Let me call you back," he said into the phone, then pressed a button. Speaker mode.
"Marco, you there?"
My father's voice filled the office, warm and familiar and wrong. "Still here, Richard. Everything on schedule?"
"Perfect. Just confirming the Tuesday timeline with our associates. Standard protocols, warehouse three."
"Good. Valentina's there, isn't she?"
The ice in my stomach spread to my lungs.
"Just arrived," Richard said, watching me now with eyes that had gone flat and calculating. "Looking beautiful as always. We're going over wedding details."
"Excellent. Make sure she understands how important this union is. To both our families."
Both. Our. Families.
The truth slammed into me with the force of a physical blow. My father wasn't the legitimate businessman he'd claimed to be for eighteen years. He was still in the life. Had never left it.
And I was the bridge between him and a corrupt senator who smuggled weapons for Mexican cartels.
"She understands," Richard said, still holding my gaze. "Don't you, darling?"
Every instinct screamed at me to play along, to pretend I hadn't seen, hadn't heard, hadn't processed the nightmare unfolding inside my photographic memory.
"Of course," I managed. My voice came out steady. Academy training—four years at Miss Porter's, where they'd taught us to smile through anything. "I understand perfectly."
Richard's expression shifted into something that might have been relief. It might have been the look of a man deciding whether to kill someone.
"We'll talk later, Marco," he said, and disconnected.
The silence that followed felt like drowning.
I ran. Not immediately—that would have been too obvious. I finished the meeting with shaking hands and a smile that felt like it might crack my face open. Discussed orchids versus roses. Agreed on the Château Margaux for the reception. Kissed Richard's cheek when he walked me to the elevator.
The doors closed. I counted to ten, breathing through my nose because I thought I might vomit.
Then I left the building and didn't stop.
My personal account held forty-three thousand dollars—modest by my family's standards, but enough. I emptied it at three different ATMs, hands trembling so badly I could barely work the keypads. Ditched my phone in a dumpster behind a Starbucks. The SIM card went down a storm drain two blocks later.
The Chanel suit had to go. Too recognizable, too expensive, too much like the woman I'd been that morning. I ducked into a Goodwill in Dorchester, grabbed the first things that fit—jeans too big for my frame, a sweater that swallowed me whole. Changed in their bathroom, left the Chanel suit folded on the sink like a shed skin. Five hundred dollars of couture abandonedin a thrift store restroom. The old Valentina would have been horrified. The new one didn't look back.
My phone was gone, but the images in my head weren't. Account numbers. Names. Dates. Shipment routes. Every detail from that computer screen burned into my visual memory with perfect, damning clarity.
I wasn't just a witness. I was evidence. Living, breathing proof that could send both Richard Caldwell and Marco DeLuca to prison for the rest of their lives.
They'd kill me. The moment they realized what I'd seen, what I'd heard, what my photographic memory had captured and could never forget—they'd have no choice.
The gun came from a pawn shop in Dorchester. The clerk didn't ask questions when I paid cash. I'd never held a weapon before. It felt heavy and foreign and terrifying in my hands.
I drove. Put miles between myself and Boston. My hands clenched the steering wheel until my knuckles went white.
