I take a step closer.
"But you didn't. You drove across Denver with a bullet in your side and climbed four flights of stairs to my door." My voice cracks. I hate that it cracks. "Why?"
He doesn't answer right away.
His dark eyes hold mine. Searching. Weighing.
I can see him deciding. Choosing his words. Figuring out how much to tell me and how much to keep hidden.
"The truth," I say. "I want the truth. Not 'I don't know.' Not some joke about nurses. The actual truth."
Dante is quiet for a long moment.
Then he tilts his head slightly toward me. Not meeting my eyes. Thinking.
"You want the truth?"
"Yes."
"All of it?"
"Yes."
He nods slowly. Like he's accepting something. Like he's making a decision he can't take back.
"Okay," he says. "Then sit down. Because this is going to take a while."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dante
Some stories need to be told from the very beginning.
I look at Marina standing there, arms at her sides, waiting for answers I've never given anyone. Not Lorenzo. Not Pietro. Not even Bruno, who took me in when I was nothing but a bleeding kid with nowhere else to go.
The truth is, I don't know if I'm going to survive this war with the Mendoza cartel.
Lorenzo thinks I'm going to stay put. Heal. Wait for extraction like a good soldier.
He's wrong.
I'm buying time. Letting my body knit itself back together just enough that I can move without collapsing. Just enough that I can hunt down the men who are hunting me.
But I don't tell Marina that.
Instead, I look at her face. The face I see every time I close my eyes.
If I end up dead in some warehouse with cartel bullets in my chest, I want her to know. I want the only woman I've everloved to understand exactly who I am. Where I came from. Why I became the thing I became.
"I was twelve," I say.
Marina's brow furrows.
"Twelve?"
"When it started." I lean back against the couch cushions. The movement pulls at my wound, but I ignore it. "When everything changed."
She doesn't sit down. Doesn't move.
