I followed his lead and tasted the cool liquid, holding it on my tongue a moment before swallowing. It was definitely smoother than the drugstore vodka my friends and I drank at school. “You’ve been to Russia?” I asked, hoping for a clue as to what he’d been doing during the years he’d disappeared.
“Da. That means yes. I’ve been many places, but like you, I’ve returned where I belong. I’ve come home.”
I tucked the information away for later. “This isn’t my home.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want this life.”
“Ah.” He clicked his tongue like a wink. “But it lives in you, Natalia, and its roots never stop growing.”
It was one of my greatest fears—that I’d seen and learned too much to ever lead a normal life. That no matter what, I’d always be the nine-year-old girl who could trip over the dead body of a loved one at any moment—and then be forced to get right back up and defend my life. “Like a cancer,” I said into my shot glass.
“No.” He tilted up my chin with his knuckle. “Like a heart. Like blood in your veins. Like bones.”
“You’re wrong.” I tried to focus on anything but his skin on mine, but it only made me more aware of his touch. “Every day I cut more and more of this cancer from my body, and I’m still standing.”
“You can’t remove it completely. Pretend it’s gone if it helps you sleep, but the poison’s already in you. You grew up feeding on it, and any predator who comes after you will get a bitter taste. Because you’re a survivor. Like the monarch. Like me.”
Taken aback, I blurted, “I’m not like you.”
He finished his shot and signaled for another. “Let’s hope you’re never forced to find out.”
“With a bounty on your head, you strolled back into our lives. That sounds more like a death wish than a will to survive.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he asked. “I was driven from the only life I knew with nothing but what was on my body. Now, I’m back with the world at my fingertips.”
“But it’s not enough.”
He tilted his head at me almost imperceptibly. “Meaning?”
“You want more than you have. I know that’s why you’re here.” I rested my elbow on the bar. “Give me another reason that makes sense. There is none.”
“What about history? A sense of home?” He raised his glass to someone across the room and drank. “I’ve found myself a family who’d die for me and I for them, but I’ve discovered a man can travel the world and never find home, Natalia. And you will never escape it.”
Cristiano was more machine than man, always calculating, always locked and loaded to kill. Perhaps he couldn’t help what he’d been taught, but it didn’t make it any less true. “Maybe my father trusts you,” I said, “but I don’t. I know what I saw that day. I believe what I’ve heard, both when you worked for us and after. You’re not here out of nostalgia.”
“Why am I here then?” he asked. “Tell me, Lourdes.”
“Power. Revenge. If you take out my father and steal his business, you get both.” I hadn’t meant to say so much, but with Cristiano, candor was best. It was becoming clear he and I could talk each other in circles—I needed answers, though. “And don’t call me Lourdes.”
“Why not? Because your mother did?”
My heart palpitated once. That was exactly why. It surprised me he remembered. “Yes,” I said. “It reminds me of her, and for you to use it is a slap in the face.”
“It suits you, though,” he mused after another sip. “Natalia is a girl’s name.”
He thought he had me pegged, but he’d been gone a long time. I wouldn’t try to change his perception of me. Any misconceptions could only hurt him—and help me.
“What if you’re right about my plans?” he asked, setting his glass on the bar. “Will you stop me?”
I couldn’t. He had an army and the means to fund it. All I had was a sliver of hope that somewhere in his body, a heart still beat. That maybe he’d cared for my parents and me once. “Don’t hurt my family any more than you already have,” I said. “That includes Diego.”
A smirk ghosted over his hard, chiseled features. “No, I never forgot little Talia, fiercely loyal to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Where is my snake of a brother anyway?”
Cristiano calling Diego a snake was like my nine-year-old self stumbling across my mother’s body and taunting her murderer for being scared. “You have that one backward.”
“Do you still believe after all this time that Diego would stick out his own neck to save yours?” Cristiano asked.
“He already did,” I said. “He took a bullet for me. You’ll remember—you were the one who shot him.”
Cristiano scanned my face a moment, then laughed. It was a foreign sound that caught me off guard, a rumble both dark and delighted. As he reached up, I flinched, but it didn’t deter him from pinching my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “You have no idea what it means to be willing to die for someone. Diego took a bullet, I’ll give you that. But for you? No, mamacita. When someone does that, you’ll know.”
That was bullshit. Diego had been brave. There was nothing else he could’ve done. And if there was, I didn’t blame him. We’d both been in shock—scared and worried for each other. Once he’d been shot, he’d passed out. What did Cristiano expect, that Diego would magically heal his leg, regain consciousness, and throw himself down the tunnel after us?
Why was I even questioning it? Diego had warned me Cristiano would try to manipulate the truth. “You’re wrong,” I said. “He’ll always have my back.”
“And yet, the evidence of his cowardice stands in front of me. Diego has sent a woman to do a man’s job.” He swept his thumb over my bottom lip and released my face. “Where is he?”
I refrained from touching my tingling mouth to erase his uninvited, overly intimate caress. “I don’t know,” I answered.
“I believe you don’t know his exact location, but he sent you.”
My heart began to hammer against my breastbone. Cristiano didn’t believe I was alone, and I suspected he never had. “You’re the one who came to me,” I pointed out.
“Diego knew I would.” Cristiano turned his head slightly over one shoulder. “Perhaps he’s right at my back. Or above us. Or in the shadows of the dancefloor. He’s not far, is he?”
If I thought I could fool Cristiano one moment longer, I might’ve tried, but he was too shrewd for that. I couldn’t risk him catching me in a lie and walking away before I got any information. Honesty was likely the best way to get the same in return. “He’s here.”
Cristiano drew back a little, his eyebrows rising. “Maybe your loyalty isn’t as strong as I thought.”
“I’m loyal to Diego, but I’m not stupid. Neither are you.”
“You may be if you thought you could deceive me.” He cocked his head. “I should be mad, shouldn’t I?” He cleared some of my hair away, lighting goose bumps over my neck and shoulders. “But I’m more intrigued to know that my brother is watching us now.”
I stilled so I wouldn’t betray how he was affecting me. “If you touch me, you’ll be dead,” I warned him.
“Ah, but I already have. Not once, not twice, not even three times,” he said, grazing my hip with one hand as he brushed his knuckle under my chin once more. “And now, I’m touching you again.” He placed his hands on my jaw, cupping my face as carefully as he might cradle a baby bird. He tilted my head up until I could look nowhere but into his eyes. “I put my hands up your skirt earlier. And where was your Diego?”
Chills made an icy trail down my spine as I tensed, waiting for some kind of consequence to befall Cristiano. And yet, he didn’t even look back. His eyes remained unwary.
He turned my head to one side and whispered in my ear, “Understand me. The next time my hands are that close to heaven, they will enter whether Diego is watching or not.”
Blood rushed to my head as the tender warmth of his breath
warred with such an offensive suggestion. I couldn’t respond, my throat suddenly dry, my tongue numb. Gracias a Dios I hadn’t gone anywhere alone with him—I didn’t question his hands would do as they pleased. And to make Diego watch? I shivered. How indecent. How obscene and filthy.
And yet, heaven throbbed between my legs. That was the devil’s manipulation, making me think I liked the idea.
“You’re here to do Diego’s bidding,” Cristiano said. “To get answers for questions you don’t even know to ask. But how far would you go to get them?”
He let me jerk my head away. “I have morals.”
“You don’t even know the game he plays with you—you never did.”
“For some of us,” I said, “life is more than a game to play, a prize to hold tight, a lesson to be taught. There’s more to it than money and power.”
“Such as?”
“Love. Ethics.” I raised my chin. “Justice. You understood that once.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You remember that?”
“What you said to me about justice? Sí. That there is none.”
“There is in my world. I live by my own code, and you may not see it, but it’s both fair and ethical.” He inclined his head. “For those who are deserving, I ask before I take. I feed those who feed me. I can’t control how others interpret things, but I give honesty where I get it. You’ll find me dead before you find me a liar.”
My chest rose and fell faster as I held his gaze despite the fact that I was stupidly pushing his buttons. “A liar would be an improvement for a murderer like you.”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m only deadly to those who’ve taken risks knowing the consequences. They traded a life of safety for money and power. They deserved it, as do I.” He crossed himself in a gross display of blasphemy. What right did a depraved criminal like him have to ask anything of the Holy Trinity? A hint of a smile touched his lips. “If I died tomorrow, I would not say the assassin had no right to do it. Though I’d commend him for accomplishing a nearly impossible task.”
“You say you’re honest as you lie. You’re not fair or ethical; you’ve executed people who didn’t deserve it.”
“Deep down, you know I didn’t kill your mother, Natalia.” Any suggestion of humor left his tone, replaced by graveness. “And that there’s more to her death than you’re willing to admit.”
His acknowledgement of her murder made me step back. I’d heard the denial from my father, but not yet directly from Cristiano since his return. The conviction in his voice angered me. He had no right to dismiss her death. To question what I knew in the depths of my soul. “I saw you,” I said. “The gun, the blood, the duffel bag—I . . .” I didn’t want to believe there could be anything else to it. A hired hitman made her death even more confusing. More senseless. “You were a sicario for a living,” I said. I slammed the rest of my shot, and my throat burned with its spicy aftertaste. “You took as many lives as my father and grandfather commanded you to. Maybe one of their rivals paid you handsomely for this order, or maybe it was retribution for what my dad did to yours, but either way, I caught you red-handed.”
“You were naïve back then, but you’re old enough to know better now. Nothing is black and white.” He slid my glass toward a bartender, who refilled the vodka and replaced it in front of me.
I resisted my temptation to drink more. The liquor was dangerously good, and I needed my wits about me. “No, thank you,” I said.
Cristiano leaned in. “This is a game, Natalia, and you have to play—or you’ll lose. Learn your lesson should someone care enough to teach you. And never doubt that you are a prize to hold tight.” He slipped an arm around my waist like we were going to tango again, and advanced until I was backed up against the lip of the bar. When our bodies were flush, he spoke firmly. “Believe me when I say, if Diego’s and my roles were reversed, I would hold you so tight, you would forget what it was to breathe. And I would not, for neither money nor power, ever send you into the fire just to see my enemy burn as he has done.”
My breathing sped. He was close, his spicy scent as smooth and dangerous as Russian vodka. And he was talking shit about the man I loved. Diego would never put me at risk. He’d fought me on coming here in the first place. There was no way Cristiano could know I’d walked into the blaze on my own, but let him distract himself into thinking Diego had orchestrated this. “Why do you care how Diego holds me?” I asked.
“Because I held you as a baby,” he said intently. “I was responsible for your life once.” Cristiano’s hand tensed over my lower back. “My brother’s using you to light the fire, but don’t forget—a match also burns.”
I resisted the mental image of Cristiano cradling me as an infant. That was what I’d hoped to tap into, but he also knew exactly how to soften me. I wanted to believe he’d cared for my family at some point during the eight years he’d been with us.
“Now, it’s my turn for questions,” he said, easing back. He fixed the roll of one shirtsleeve so it exposed a little more of his dark, brawny forearm. “That night at the costume party when I found you with my brother in the garden—was he forceful with you?”
Unprepared for the topic change, I didn’t answer right away. What did Cristiano think he’d seen that night by the fountain? Diego’d had one hand nearly between my legs with his other holding my jaw. From behind, it could’ve looked as if he’d been covering my mouth as he’d made demands.
“Tell me how much you love me. I won’t ask again.”
“No,” I said. “Diego’s not like you.”
“And how am I?”
“I’ve heard things. I’ve seen things. I know what you do to women.”
He pressed his lips together, assessing me coolly. “And yet you still tested me by coming here. Some part of you must not believe the rumors.”
“I believe them,” I said without hesitation so he wouldn’t guess the truth—where Cristiano was concerned, I was beginning to question anything I knew.
“You didn’t answer my question.” He took his cell from his shirt pocket as it vibrated but kept his eyes on me. “Has he ever so much as laid a finger on you without your permission?”
“No,” I said. “We were playing a game.” It was the most plausible excuse—and yet it also held truth.
One of Cristiano’s dark, thick brows lifted. Without removing his eyes from me, he answered his phone. “Sí.” His eyes roamed over the alcohol bottles lining the back wall of the bar. After a pause, he said, “Adelante” and ended the call. While typing out a message, he said to me, “Tell Diego to take you straight home. It’s not safe after dark right now.”
After dark, when the creatures of the night played. “I suppose you would know.”
“You’re looking for a monster, and you found one in me.” He tucked his phone back in his pocket. “But I’m not the one you should fear. Just remember—no monster thinks of himself that way. He’s just living by a different code than yours.” He nodded once at me and turned to leave. “Goodnight, Natalia.”
Goodnight? I hadn’t gotten nearly what I’d wanted from him. If anything, I only had more questions. This was my last shot. I had to demand his attention. “What’s your involvement with the Maldonados?”
He froze. His large frame expanded with a breath, his muscles pulling gracefully under his white dress shirt. Even from behind, he was beautiful—and menacing.
Had I gone too far? I slid a couple steps back along the edge of the bar.
Getting him to talk in hopes that something useful might slip was one thing. But legitimate information was dangerous. If he thought I actually knew anything, that could make me a liability. Or worse—a threat.
After a moment, he turned back. “I have no deal with them. You should be asking Diego this.”
“I have, and I know everything he does.” I was in too deep to turn back, and I realized I didn’t want to, even if I was scared. Finally, I was getting what I came for. “Now I want to know wha
t you know.”
He returned to standing in front of me. “What I know? My brother’s in serious trouble, and if he minimized the danger he’s in at all, then he lied to you. He’s putting everyone at risk, including you.”
“He isn’t, but someone is. Someone doesn’t want this deal to happen. Is it you? Are you the one stealing from him?”
His jaw sharpened as it ticked. “Be careful, Natalia. You’re out of your depth.”
It was the first crack in his composure I’d gotten tonight, and it sent a thrill through me. I wanted more. “I’ll come upstairs with you,” I said.
He glanced at the glass wall behind the DJ booth. It wasn’t a wall at all, I realized, but a one-way window that most likely looked from his office onto the dancefloor. I wondered if he’d been watching me before I’d even noticed him.
“Nyet, Natasha.”
I turned back to him. “No, in Russian,” I guessed.
“Correct. I have business now. Maybe another time.”
I tilted my head. “Is it easier to think of me differently as a Natasha?”
“Why would I want to think of you differently?”
“So you don’t have to see me as the little girl you once promised to protect.”
He tilted his head. The pulse at the base of his neck jumped as he let his eyes wander down my dress. “Believe me, I see you just fine as you are. I happen to like the name. I knew a Natasha once.” His eyes leapt back to mine. “She sucked my dick like it would end with a mouthful of gold.”
My throat constricted. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me. “That’s not why I wanted to come up. I won’t do that willingly. Not ever. But maybe Natasha said the same thing.”
He stilled completely. The lights and music seemed to dim along with his demeanor. “You’re accusing me of rape?”
My mom’s dress was ripped. It was perhaps the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to ask about. The answer might be too painful. “You expect me to believe your men do it, but you don’t?”
“You insult me. If I want a woman, I can get her without force,” he said sharply. “That includes you.”
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