But that was then.
This was now.
A lot could change in the course of five minutes. Big things, of course—a car accident that leaves someone paralyzed, an abduction that steals a child away from their family, a fire that burns down a home, a random act of gun violence that ends someone’s life—but little things could change, too.
And for Cam, it was simple. Her motivation, her energy, had simply dissipated.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, you should believe me.”
Alex shifted again, but he made no move toward the door.
They stood there, a face-off of sorts.
He sighed. “I’ll try to answer some of your questions,” he finally said.
She blinked. “What?”
He raked a hand through his hair. “I owe you that much.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
His jaw tightened, and she could see he was struggling with something.
“I owe you more than you’ll ever know.”
18
Sunday, September 9th
11:45 am
Alex sat down on the couch. His ribs protested the compression and he shifted, trying to find the most comfortable position.
“What are you doing?” Cam asked.
He offered a small smile. “Sitting down.”
She stared at him. “Why?”
“So we can talk.”
“Why do you want to talk now? What made you change your mind?”
She was being cautious, and he couldn’t blame her. He’d literally changed his tune in the span of a heartbeat.
He couldn’t tell her, of course. He wasn’t going to just offer up the fact that seeing her broken and defeated had completely wrecked him. And how kissing her for the first time in over a decade had nearly brought him to his knees.
No, those were admissions he wasn’t ready to make.
Not now.
Maybe not ever.
“I told you,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “I owe you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He shrugged. “Remember how you just changed your mind about keeping me here?” He paused. “Well, I changed my mind about talking to you. It’s as simple as that.”
Her eyes narrowed, and a thrill ran through Alex. That small spark—of doubt, of irritation—was back in her expression.
Thank God. He’d rather see that than the deadness lurking there just minutes earlier.
“Okay,” she said cautiously. She inched closer to the couch. “So talk.”
“You’re not going to ask questions?” he said. “I thought you had a bunch.”
She responded by folding her arms across her chest. A defense mechanism.
Fine. He would start the conversation.
“So all you know about the BOLO is that my name was attached?”
Her nod was almost imperceptible.
“Nothing else?”
A small shake of the head.
“I pulled it up.” He reached for his phone. “I took a screen shot.”
She finally spoke. “Through your department?”
“Uh, no.” He almost rolled his eyes at the absurdity of that suggestion. “There’s a Reddit site for BOLOs and other police documentation that usually isn’t released publicly.”
Her eyebrows inched up a fraction but she said nothing. He could tell what she was thinking: what kind of asshole would upload sensitive material? And why didn’t anyone stop them? It was a question he often asked himself.
Alex accessed the photo he’d taken of the document and then held his phone out to her.
After a moment’s hesitation, she reached for it. He watched as her eyes scanned the screen. When she was done, she looked at him.
He saw it right away. The confusion. The questions.
He bit back a grim smile.
The Cam he knew was back. One hundred percent.
His heart rate escalated and he tried to focus on his breathing to get himself calmed down.
He knew he’d have to be careful. He wanted to give her info, but he still worried about telling her too much. That fear of danger was still with him—had actually intensified. But something else had intensified, too.
His feelings for her.
He didn’t want to be a disappointment to her ever again.
So walking a fine line of giving her what she wanted—hell, what she deserved—and protecting her was the balance he would seek.
“Well?” he said. “What did you read?”
She stared at the phone, reading. “Double homicide. Possibly gang-related.” Her gaze shifted to him.
“What does it say about responding officers?”
“Gang task force unit responded. An undercover officer may have been involved. And to be on the lookout for Alex Castillo as a person of interest.” She swallowed, her words coming out haltingly. “Is…is the undercover officer you?”
He nodded.
Her eyes widened.
“I didn’t shoot anyone,” he said quickly.
“But…?” She glanced back at the phone still in her hands.
“I told you, it’s complicated.” He rubbed his temple. This was going to be harder than he thought. “I think I’m gonna need a drink.” He shot her a look. “Any chance you have some beer in the fridge?”
She shook her head. “I…I drank the last one the other night.” She sounded embarrassed. “I have a bottle of wine. Some tequila, I think.”
Wine gave him a headache. Tequila, he could do. Even if it wasn’t quite noon yet.
He struggled to get to his feet. “Where is it?”
“I can get it.” Cam stood up, too.
He tried not to clutch his ribs. Sudden movements still hurt, especially since he’d opted not to take another painkiller. He didn’t like how fuzzy they left him, especially when they wore off. Besides, they might knock out the pain, but they also put him immediately to sleep. If he was going to share his story with Cam, he was damned if he was going to have his guard down again, and that was what the pills did to him.
Alex watched as she headed into the kitchen. She moved quickly, purposefully. The tequila bottle was in a cupboard next to the fridge, sitting alongside the bottle of wine she’d mentioned. She pulled one glass tumbler from another cupboard, hesitated, and then grabbed another.
She walked back to the couch and set the bottle and glasses down on the table. Alex eased himself back down. She sat next to him, far enough away so there was no danger they would physically come in contact with each other.
She uncapped the bottle and splashed a generous amount of tequila in one glass, a smaller amount in the other. She handed him the fuller glass, then picked up hers.
Alex brought it to his lips and swallowed a huge mouthful. He winced as it went down. Tequila had never been a favorite of his.
Cam drained her entire glass in one easy swallow and set it back down on the table.
He was reluctantly impressed.
“I guess I should start from the beginning,” he said.
She dragged her pointer finger across her lip, licked the tip of it, and waited.
Alex blinked, trying to focus. He knew she’d done it to get the lingering alcohol off her lips, but damn…
Focus. He needed to focus.
“So let’s walk it back ten years,” he said.
“You’ve been undercover for ten years?” Her voice was filled with disbelief.
“No, but that’s where the story starts. How I got here. You said you wanted answers, right?”
She nodded.
“I knew I couldn’t stay in the neighborhood,” he said. “Especially not after what happened to Juan.”
“Juan?” Her brows drew together. “Your brother?”
It was his turn to nod.
“What happened to him?”
A knot formed in his stomach. “You didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
> The knot tightened.
Of course she wouldn’t know.
She’d left.
Gotten the hell out.
And probably never looked back. At least not on his fucked-up family.
“He died.”
Her eyes rounded.
“Drive-by. An alley off Lake. A few blocks south of Midtown Global Market.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “I didn’t know.”
Alex pressed his lips together, fighting to keep his emotions in check. Ten years had passed and it was still hard to talk about. “They shot him in the head. He died instantly.”
She looked horrified.
“He didn’t suffer,” he said. “That was what mattered to me, you know?”
It was the truth. He’d spent half of his childhood knowing the odds were stacked against him and Juan. Everyone in the hood, really. He knew their odds of making it out of the neighborhood were slim. They were poor. They goofed off. Stole shit. Joined gangs. To everyone, they were expendable. All they could count on to hopefully save them was luck.
And Juan’s ran out that night.
“After that happened, I made a decision.” He picked up the glass, stared at it as he swirled the remaining liquid. “I decided I was getting out.” He drained the glass. “I’d just lost my brother, I’d already lost you…”
Cam stilled and Alex stopped. He couldn’t dwell on that part of the story. Not now.
He refocused. “You remember Mrs. Kowalski? She taught art?”
Cam nodded, her eyes clouding with confusion.
“She knew what happened with Juan. I mean, obviously she did. Everyone knew.”
“I didn’t,” Cam said softly.
“You were already gone.” He saw the guilt in her expression. “It’s not your fault, Cam. You’d gotten out. You made your exit. If I were you, I wouldn’t have spent time looking back, either.”
She was quiet.
“Anyway, I saw her when I picked up Juan’s art portfolio. That was the one class he liked, the one he always made sure he didn’t ditch, you know? I wanted his art. Just because…”
He still had that portfolio tucked away, in a cardboard box on the top shelf of his closet. He’d look through it twice a year: on Juan’s birthday and again on Christmas. That was all he allowed himself.
“So I went in to pick it up, and she wanted to know what I’d been doing with my life.” He chuckled, a harsh-sounding noise. “I didn’t give her the details but she pretty much knew. What she didn’t know was that I was trying to come up with a plan to get out. And she offered me a way.”
Cam’s eyebrows drew together. “How?”
“Her brother had a farm, just south of St. Cloud. He was looking for field hands. Told me if I could do the work, he’d give me a place to live and pay me decent money. I hopped on a bus the next day.”
“You worked on a farm?” Cam asked.
“I know.” He gave her a small smile. “Kind of hard to believe, huh?”
In answer, she reached for the tequila and poured herself another shot. She pointed to his glass and he held it out to her.
She knocked back half of hers. “So then what?”
“So I busted my ass that whole season, spring to fall. And when crops were done, Doug—that was Bev’s brother—asked me to stay on. He gave me some odd jobs around the farm, which he ended up needing to teach me how to do since I didn’t know a wrench from a hammer.”
Cam smiled.
“I knew what he was doing,” Alex said. “What he and Bev both were doing. Keeping me out of trouble. Giving me a taste of what life could be like doing honest work. Earning money instead of stealing it. And giving me a sense of worth.”
He felt the familiar lump he always felt when he talked about the two of them, and what they’d done for him. They’d changed his life. Literally altered the course.
“I stayed on through the winter and then again when planting season came back around. And then, that fall, with Doug’s encouragement and a little bit of a loan, I enrolled in school.”
Cam’s eyebrows went up.
“Just community college to start,” Alex said. “I didn’t have the grades or test scores to do much else. But I worked my ass off. Bought a beat-up pickup and drove myself to school from the farm two days a week. Worked forty hours or more the other five days. I finished my generals in three semesters and applied to St. Cloud State. Got my degree in criminal justice and went to the academy right after graduation.”
Cam’s eyes were wide.
And her glass was empty again.
This time, he was the one to pick up the bottle and splash more tequila into her glass. He didn’t pay attention to how much he poured, only stopping when he realized he’d filled it more than half full.
He reached for his own and downed a mouthful. His stomach was warm, his ribs less achy.
“When I started, my superiors found out pretty quickly about my gang connections down in the cities. They had a choice between putting me on gang detail or running me undercover. They decided undercover was the way to go. Figured they’d give it a shot and see what happened. It wasn’t supposed to be a long-term thing. Take down a couple of people and then sort of regroup and figure out where to put me next. And I was game, you know? I didn’t have any firm ideas on what I wanted to do. I just knew that for once in my life, I wanted to be on the right side of the law.”
Something flashed in Cam’s eyes. Sympathy? He couldn’t tell.
“It became obvious pretty quickly that something big was going down. The gang in Bentley was growing. La Gente. That’s what we called ourselves. And rivals were popping up, claiming turf, trying to take over territory. It exploded about a year ago, with more and more kids getting dragged in and the drug deals getting bigger. I don’t know why they trusted me but they did. I wasn’t just some street-level kid; I was at the top with the movers and shakers. So I kept doing my thing, playing my part. Negotiating bigger buys, all that shit. Just gathering all the evidence I could to bring them all down. All of them. Not just La Gente but the other gangs, too. I was gonna get them all, dammit.” He slammed his fist on the coffee table, the stinging sensation barely registering with him.
“What happened?” Cam’s voice was a mere whisper, almost as if she were too afraid to ask.
He looked her dead in the eye. “It all went wrong.”
19
Sunday, September 9th
12:30 pm
Cam picked up her drink.
She wanted to drain the entire glass.
No, the whole damn bottle.
Alex had dropped one bombshell after another, and he wasn’t done.
In fact, she was pretty sure he was just getting started.
She’d never been one to hide from her problems, to drink herself into oblivion, but it sure felt like a good coping mechanism at the moment.
Because she didn’t know how else to handle everything he had just thrown at her.
Juan was dead.
The younger brother she never had, the round-faced boy with golden eyes and dimples that carved deeper than his brother’s, that popped into existence with just the hint of a smile. The boy who, when he wasn’t holed up with pens and markers, creating sketches and drawings on whatever scrap of paper he could get his hands on, would scour the neighborhood for bottles and cans to turn in at the recycling center, hoping to save enough for better art supplies.
Juan.
Cam sucked in a shaky breath at the memory and swallowed another gulp of tequila. It slid easily down her throat, warming her chest and stomach, dulling her thoughts.
Too bad it couldn’t do the same for her emotions.
Alex had continued with his story; in fact, Juan’s death had been the starting point instead of the ending. How he’d decided to turn his life around, getting help from an unexpected source.
She remembered Mrs. Kowalski. Cam had taken one year of art, just to meet the requirement, and as the class progressed, she wished she
were better with the subject matter. Not because she enjoyed creating paintings or drawings but because Kowalski was the kind of teacher every kid deserved to have: warm, kind, encouraging. Cam didn’t have a creative bone in her body, but that didn’t stop Mrs. K from pouring the same amount of time and energy into teaching her that she did every other student in that class.
Knowing Mrs. K was the one who had pulled Alex out of the neighborhood, out of the bleak future he was almost assured to have, was fitting. If anyone could have done it, it was her. She’d gotten him out. She’d made everything okay for Alex.
“Until it all went wrong.”
Cam looked at the man seated across from her, his words reverberating through her. He was holding his glass, clenching it tightly between his fingers. He wasn’t drinking nearly as quickly as she was.
“What do you mean, it all went wrong?” she asked.
She had a feeling she knew exactly what he meant. He’d been undercover. If things had gone wrong, it was probably because his cover had been blown.
He didn’t respond right away. His eyes focused on something across the room, close to the kitchen. Cam was tempted to look that direction, too, to see what had grabbed his attention, but she knew there was nothing there. The thing he was focusing so intently on was in his head, visible to him alone.
He lifted his glass and drained it in one long swallow. His gaze shifted back to her and she knew.
He was ready to speak again.
“Friday night,” he said. “We were set to move in. We had enough to bring down the guys at the top and the suppliers, too. We’d set up a buy, a new supplier, and my unit was on standby, waiting to make their move.”
Cam sat absolutely still, listening.
“Car shows up, we do the deal. I give the signal for my team to move in.”
He paused. A muscle in his jaw twitched, and Cam could tell he was trying to get his emotions under control. But his expression was unreadable, and she didn’t know what he was feeling: anger, sadness, frustration. Maybe a mix of all three.
“Then what happened?” she asked quietly.
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