It didn't. Nothing saved her. And when she was gone, when the bills came due and the collectors started calling, I was the one who picked up the pieces. Not my father.
Me.
I've been picking up pieces ever since. Other people's messes. Other people's failures. Running packages I didn't ask about, walking into buildings that smelled like death and piss and shit, keeping my head down and my mouth shut because survival required it.
But this is different.
For the first time in my life, I'm not cleaning up someone else's disaster. I'm building something. The Apex Meridian analysis. The shell corporation map. The money trails that could unravel a conspiracy neither family knew existed. This is my work. Mycontribution. My value, measured in something more than the packages I can carry.
Leone sees it. He saw it from the beginning, before I did. He brought me documents when I was still a prisoner because he recognized something in me that I'd stopped recognizing in myself.
I'm smart. I'm capable. I'm worth more than my father's debts.
And now I have someone who believes that. Someone who loves me. Someone who killed fourteen men and walked through a building full of bodies and broke down crying in my arms because the thought of losing me was more than he could bear.
I have someone worth staying for.
The thought locks into place. I'm not running anymore.Click. It opens. The thing that's been closed for years, forever really, finally swings wide.
I'm not running anymore.
I'm not surviving.
I'm choosing. Actively, deliberately, with my eyes open and my hands steady. I'm choosing this life. This man. This war.
He found me.
And I'm keeping him.
Chapter Fifteen: Leone
Ileavehersleeping.
It's the hardest thing I've done in twenty-four hours, and I spent most of those hours killing people. But the sun is up and Aurelio is waiting and the longer I delay this conversation, the worse it gets.
She's curled on her side, one hand tucked under the pillow, the other reaching toward the space where I was. Her hair is a mess of tangles across her face. The bruise on her cheek has deepened overnight, purple and blue spreading toward her eye. She looks small in the bed. Small and tired and mine.
I bend down and press my lips to her temple. She stirs, mumbles something, doesn't wake.Good. She needs rest more than she needs to watch me walk out the door.
I write a note on a scrap of paper from the kitchen counter.Gone to see Aurelio. Emilio is outside. I'll be back. Don't leave.
I add one more line, then fold the paper and leave it on the pillow beside her.
I love you.
Emilio is waiting in the SUV at the curb. He looks like he hasn't slept either, dark circles under his eyes, but he's alert, coffee in one hand and a pistol in the other.
"She okay?" he asks as I climb in.
"Sleeping."
"And you?"
I don't answer. He takes that as the answer it is and pulls away from the curb.
The compound is quiet when we arrive. Too quiet. The kind that happens when everyone knows something big went down and no one wants to be the first to mention it. Soldiers watch me as I walk through the corridors. Some nod. Some look away. None of them speak.
Word has spread. Of course it has. You can't slaughter men in a Castillo safehouse without the entire underworld hearing about it by morning. By now, every crew in the city knows that LeoneCosta went off script, and they're all waiting to see what happens next.
