I rise, stalk toward him, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ache. If I’m going to purge this, I’m doing it face to face.
“That’s what you did to me. Five years of being your fuck toy so you could avoid your own fucked up regrets. And now I can’t touch someone I love without becoming what you made me. Without your voice in my head. Without disappearing into the thing you needed me to be.”
My voice cracks on the next part, but I make myself say it anyway.
“It wasn’t always a lie. What I felt—some of it was real. And you took that and you twisted it until I couldn’t tell the difference between wanting you and being afraid of you. You destroyed any chance we ever had of something true.”
Vicente’s face has gone pale. His mouth works but nothing comes out.
Then the armor snaps back into place. “You were a federal agent. You were there to destroy me from the start?—”
“So what?” The laugh that comes out of me is ugly. “You didn’t know that. When you were breaking me down, when you were conditioning me to perform, you thought I was just some guy you’d captured. Some nobody you could own.”
“I never?—”
“You treated me like property because that’s what you do. What you are. So don’t hide behind my betrayal like it justifies anything. You did what you did because you wanted to. Because you could.”
His jaw tightens. I see the anger flare—the old Vicente, the one who never bent, never admitted fault. For a moment I think he’s going to double down, throw something else at me, keep fighting.
But Arturo’s watching him. And Nina. Vicente’s eyes cut to Wyatt’s throat one more time, and I see it land—really land. What his conditioning did. What it’s still doing. The poison he put in me that’s now leaking onto people I actually love.
It’s Arturo who breaks the silence. “Vicente, is this true?”
Vicente’s expression fractures like the mirror I just held up in front of him. He looks to Arturo, his face a silent plea for understanding. Then back to me.
“Christopher.” His voice is barely a whisper. “I didn’t... I thought I was making you stronger. Teaching you to survive. But I was just—” He stops. Swallows hard. “You’re right. What I did to you—there’s no excuse. I told myself things that let me sleep at night, but the truth is I used you. I broke something in you, and I didn’t care because it gave me what I needed.”
His eyes are wet. I’ve never seen that before. Not once in five years.
“I’m sorry.” The words seem to cost him something vital. “I know that’s not enough. I know it doesn’t fix?—”
The clerestory window explodes inward.
Glass everywhere, raining down in a thousand glittering pieces.
Vicente jerks backward, a red bloom spreading across his chest. Someone’s screaming. It might be me.
Then everything is chaos.
Nina’s moving before I can process it, dropping to her knees beside Vicente, reaching for his wound before Wyatt hauls her away, through a door into an adjoining bathroom that has no windows. Arturo’s face is white with shock, bent over Vicente slumped in the desk chair. His face is still stricken from his apology, his confession, as if he hasn’t caught up to the fact that he’s just been shot.
“Shooter on the roof!” Lucia’s shouting into her radio. “East side, I need eyes—Vaughn, Tabrizi, anyone copy?” Then, “Longo, secure Amador and Flores!”
I leap into motion, shoving one of the towels at Arturo who presses it to Vicente’s chest, then urge him to help me move the other man out of sight of the windows. I haul Vicente through the doorway where Wyatt took Nina, lay him on the rug where Arturo and Nina both bend over him. Wyatt shares a glance with me and then we’re both up, no words needed. We grab our firearms from where we left them on a side table.
“Two shooters!” Lucia again, listening to something in her earpiece. “We’ve got two—one on the roof, one east side. The east one took the shot.”
Two shooters. Professional hit team.
Two. The word echoes in my skull. Nina said it hours ago—the Yakuza sent “one of their own.” If Kedmi is the Mossad contractor, and the Yakuza sent a separate operative?—
I should have caught that. I was too busy drowning in my own bullshit to put it together.
54
Chris
“Wyatt, with me.” I’m already moving toward the door. “Lucia, stay with them.”
