“Papi—”
“Do you think this is a game?” he bellowed, throwing me into the foyer so I landed on my behind. Standing over me, he seethed, “It wasn’t enough I lost my wife and the love of my life? I should lose you too? You want me to spend the rest of my days mourning my entire family?”
While anger reddened his face, pain was clear in his eyes. My chest stuttered as I tried to hold in my breaking sobs. “No. I’m s-sorry.”
“I have enemies, Natalia. Do you know what they do to daughters like you? Kidnap, rape, and beat you half to death as—”
“Enough,” Cristiano said.
“As they videotape it all for me. Then they cut your neck. Is that the memory you want to leave me with?”
My throat closed hearing him talk more candidly than he ever had around me. “But I was with Diego—”
“You will never—ever—see him again. You’re forbidden.”
I closed my fist against the tile. “You can’t do that,” I said.
“Do not talk back to me.” He raised his hand, and I ducked to cover my head. “My father would’ve belted me a hundred times by your age for all the ways you’ve defied me.”
“Enough,” Cristiano repeated. It was the calmest, most controlled threat I’d ever heard. I peeked out from under my arms. Cristiano filled the doorway but said no more.
Papá started as if broken from a trance. He began to shake and lowered his arm before limping forward to steady himself on the foyer table. “I can’t lose you too,” he said shakily as tears filled his eyes. “Nothing scares me more than that possibility, Lourdesita.”
He hadn’t called me “Little Lourdes” since before I’d left for school. And he’d never even come close to laying a finger on me. He was in pain. I scrambled to my feet and hugged his waist. “I love you. I never want to hurt you.”
His heart pounded against my cheek. “I’m—I’m sorry, mija. You’re not the one I’m angry with, and you know I would never . . .”
“Yo sé, Papi. I know.” I buried my face in his chest and cried until he kissed the top of my head.
“All right, Talia. I have to deal with this fire. Go upstairs and get cleaned up.” He pulled away and said over my head, “Ride with me.”
“I have transportation,” Cristiano answered.
I’d almost forgotten he was there.
“I’ll see you at the warehouse then,” my father said on his way out the front door. He disappeared into a black car. Trucks rumbled and shuddered with power. The first in a line of cars tore down the winding road, and the rest followed, kicking up clouds of dust.
The house became eerily and unusually quiet. For everyone except a couple guards out front to leave, it had to be serious. For them to leave me alone with a killer, it had to be life or death.
And it was. Reality dawned. The warehouse . . . the goods inside. The damage done was enough to seal Diego’s fate. There was no escaping a loss of this magnitude.
“You’re responsible for this,” I said. Had Cristiano’s talk of games the night before been a warning? If so, he’d made a move that would put us all in the crosshairs of the Maldonados. “My father trusted you. Diego trusted you, and you tried to kill him.”
“If I had, he’d be dead.”
“Like your parents?”
He took a step toward me. “Meaning?”
“Diego told me everything. If you’d have your own parents killed, you wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to anyone else.”
As he advanced, I retreated until I was up against a wall. “And you think I’d destroy my own livelihood to do it?” he asked.
If it meant getting what he wanted, I wouldn’t put it past him. Which suggested he’d go to great lengths to grant his own wishes. To position himself at my father’s side and strike when Papá least expected it. To see Diego gone.
To take back what he thought he was owed.
What did loyalty mean to a man who’d betrayed and been betrayed by those he’d trusted? Even if he hadn’t committed the murder, what loyalty remained after eleven years on the run? A feral cat could be domesticated, but it would never stop looking over its shoulder.
If Diego’s suspicions were right, then Cristiano wouldn’t stop until he got what he’d come for.
The question was—did I fit into this somehow?
The answer, I feared, I was about to learn.
“My father’s expecting you at the warehouse,” I reminded him.
“I’m not going to the warehouse.” Cristiano wore no expression. He spoke with the ease and confidence of a predator who’d cornered its prey and had the time and proclivity to savor picking it apart. “I’m staying right where I am. Now, come here.”
Natalia
Was this how my mother had felt? Cornered by Cristiano with nobody in the house to protect her? No. It was worse for her. Cristiano wasn’t breaking my trust like he had hers. And he couldn’t destroy my sense of safety in my own home. He’d already done that years ago. It wasn’t the first time Cristiano and I had squared off under this roof.
His eyes lingered over my dress. “Did my brother do that?”
I followed his gaze to the blood and dirt smeared on my legs. As soon as I noticed the bruises on my forearm and wrists, and the cuts on my ankles and feet, they began to throb. “I already told you, he isn’t like that.”
Cristiano came toward me, and I backed away, suddenly aware of the glass wedged in my feet. When he was close enough that I could inhale his smoky mix of sweat and burnt wood, he said, “You can limp to your bedroom, or I can carry you there.”
My breath caught in my throat. “My bedroom? Why?”
“Use your imagination.”
I could think of no reason Cristiano would want to take me upstairs except for the obvious one. What chance did I stand against him? He might as well have been made of marble for all his muscle. Resisting him would be like fighting a statue. He knew that. Maybe he wanted my struggle. If it was he who’d tried this with my mother, her fight had cost her her life.
But if he touched me, he’d lose any shot at uniting our families. I had to believe that was reason enough to stop him from hurting me.
“My father would murder you in cold blood,” I warned.
“Understood.” He moved aside to let me pass.
With Cristiano at my back, I crossed the foyer to the dining room and made my way to the stairs. On the second floor, I stopped at my closed door, remembering how I’d skipped down the hall to my mother’s room. He reached past me, turned the handle, and pushed it open. “Inside,” he said.
I took a breath and stepped over the threshold. With the curtains drawn, my room was dark. He shut the door behind himself, stood at my back, and moved my hair over my shoulder before lowering the zipper of my dress.
“Strip,” he said.
Fear and curiosity warred inside me. Was Cristiano so weak that he’d risk his chance at an empire just to have me? If he raped me, killed me, or both, there’d be no question as to his guilt for doing the same to my mother. He’d be back on the run.
My trust in him was buried somewhere deep, and I drew from it now. I was hit hard with a memory I hadn’t thought of in over a decade—my mother and I encountering a young Cristiano while gathering flowers in the garden for one of Mamá’s parties. I had to have been five or six, which would’ve made him almost twenty. He’d never picked flowers, he’d told us, and we’d giggled as Mamá had made him carry our baskets of bouquets around for the afternoon. It was one of the only instances I could remember him without a scowl. Even when he’d promised me he was a monster far worse than any that dared hide under my bed, he’d spoken gravely.
“My mother is watching,” I said into the dark. If any part of him regretted what’d happened to her, maybe he’d soften.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
I supposed that was the best I could ask for. To come out of this no more wounded than I already was. I pulled down my dress and stood in my thong and straple
ss bra.
He placed his palm on my upper back. “Walk,” he said.
I raised my eyes to the bed in front of me. He could have me any way he wanted, and nobody would stop him. Everything I’d saved for Diego would be taken in a flash. Was there anything left of that man who’d been so devoted to our family that he’d carried baskets of flowers for us? There had to be. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but like the way he’d nonchalantly referred to Natasha, my gut told me Cristiano only wanted to see how far he could push me.
I straightened my shoulders and stepped toward the bed. When I neared the footboard, he applied pressure to my back, guiding me away from it and toward the en suite bathroom instead.
Inside, he flipped on a dim overhead light. I watched in the reflection of the mirror over the sink as he circled me, his eyes roaming over my back. He set his jaw, inspecting my body almost clinically. Just another Natasha.
He stopped at the counter to empty his pockets. With his attention diverted, I studied him back. His stark white dress shirt had been marred by smoke, ash, and what looked like blood. My blood, I realized, from when he’d carried me down the access ladder. Without thinking, I dropped my gaze and sucked in a breath at the bulge in his pants.
He glanced up at me, his watch clinking as he set it on the Italian marble countertop. He tightened the roll of one sleeve, securing it at his elbow, then the other. The mere sight of his powerful, sinewy forearms made me light-headed. They were weapons in their own right. Every part of him was, it seemed, down to the beast straining against his zipper. Most of the men I knew couldn’t match his strength. What chance did I stand against him if he tried to overpower me?
He stepped forward, towering over me, soot smudged on his admittedly handsome face—he looked the way I imagined the Grim Reaper might if he shopped in the finest apparel stores and possessed the chiseled features of a god. “Wash the cuts,” he said.
I tensed. “What?”
He moved around me and turned on the faucet to the bathtub. “The cuts on your arms and legs. I told you to watch out for glass, did I not?” He grunted. “I can’t help but think you ran through it just to spite me.”
“I did it for Diego,” I said, although it was only half-true. “And I’d do it again.”
He looked over his shoulder at me, his gaze shadowed. “So you continue to remind me, even though I was there. I watched you run into the fire for him.”
I limped to the tub. “You were wrong earlier. Butterflies aren’t delicate.”
We switched places. He pulled open my top drawer and started pushing products around. “No?”
“During a wildfire, they don’t go up in smoke. They bury themselves in soil.”
He moved to the next drawer, shoving aside my hair dryer. “Another way they’re survivors.”
I perched on the inside edge of the tub so I wouldn’t have my back to him. He kept his to me as he rifled in my drawers, his muscled back rippling under his dress shirt. He dumped my makeup bag into the sink, picking through items while I gently soaped my right arm and hand.
He went through every basket, drawer and cabinet, including the medicine one over the sink, gathering things and placing them by the side of the toilet.
I moved on to cleaning my feet. Eventually, Cristiano sat on the outside lip of the tub and held out his hand for the soap. I gave it to him, and he reached in to clean my other foot. He alternated between lathering the soap over my cuts and massaging my ankles. “What happened to your shoulder?” he asked.
I hadn’t realized I was holding it. Or the throb of pain when I raised my arm. “I fell.”
When he seemed satisfied with my feet, he stood and lowered the lid of the toilet. “Sit,” he said to me before disappearing into my bedroom.
I moved from the bath, dried myself off, and slipped on my purple satin robe. Seated on the toilet, I swayed a little, recalling the sensation of riding for the first time in over a decade. For some time, I’d craved that feeling of driving a horse again the way I had with my mother on one side, but the longer I put it off, the harder it was to get back on.
Cristiano returned with my desk chair. He sat in front of me and handed me a towel of ice. “For your shoulder.”
I inspected it as if it might be hiding mini daggers before deciding to take my chances. I held it to my arm. “Thank you.”
He took tweezers from the counter and grasped my wrist. “This is a deep one, but it’ll be the worst one.”
I’d sooner faint than show him my pain. I made a fist with my opposite hand as he squeezed my skin.
“Why were you at the warehouse?” he asked quietly as he inspected the cut. Somehow, he was more menacing when he was calm and collected than when yelling.
“Diego stopped to check on a problem.”
“And he decided that was the right place to fuck you? You’re a foolish girl.”
“Foolish?” I bit out, my temper flaring. “For your information, we barely touched.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I set my jaw. “You don’t know a single thing about him, me, or our relationship—”
One corner of his mouth crooked. “There it is.”
“What?”
Belatedly, dull pain radiated from a spot on my palm. He held up the tweezers to show me a thin but substantial shard of glass. “If you can take that, the rest should be easy.”
I shut my mouth. I hadn’t even felt it. He’d tricked me to distract me.
His expression defaulted to a scowl as he turned over my hand to inspect my knuckles. “You should never have gone anywhere without your guards,” he scolded. “Not the club, and especially not the warehouse.”
“I don’t need to be looked after,” I said firmly, but my heart skipped. Perhaps what scared me most wasn’t Cristiano’s reputation, but the fact that he was unreadable. Unpredictable. That he had not only the strength to shove me down a dark tunnel but that he might do it for no other reason than to amuse himself. How could Father trust him?
“You’d feel differently if there wasn’t anybody to look after you.” He tweezed a few small pieces from my forearm. “You’ve never had to survive in the wild. You’re just the kind of prey some predators are looking for—one with a false sense of bravery.”
He had no right to accuse me of that. We’d faced off when I’d been weaponless and small enough that I’d only come up to his waist. I’d held my own for a kid. “I have survived,” I said. “Not all danger is physical. I’ve navigated through a different kind of wild, one you know nothing about.”
He worked silently a few moments. “You forget I’ve lost parents too—and a brother as far as I’m concerned. I was thrown out of the only life I knew and forced to fend for myself.”
“You have only yourself to blame for the consequences of your actions.”
He glanced up at me. “You still think I’m guilty?”
“Yes,” I said. No matter what questions I had, he’d latch onto any weakness I showed, so I kept my mounting doubts to myself.
“Nah,” he said. “I’m innocent. You know I am. Yet my brother chose not to believe me, even though it would end my life. So what do you suggest I do about that?”
I tried not to let his twisted truths worm their way into my consciousness. He was only trying to manipulate me against Diego, that was all. “Nothing.”
Like Diego, Cristiano had long, full lashes. But behind them, his dark, calculating eyes betrayed the differences between them. “You know I can’t let something like that slide.”
Goose bumps spread over my skin, prickling my hair under my silky robe. “So you are here for revenge.”
He returned to the task in front of him. “I reached out to him once, about four years after Bianca’s death. Did he tell you? I wanted to come home. To tell Costa the truth and pledge my loyalty to him.”
I shifted on the seat. I’d only been thirteen and already away at school. I hadn’t heard anything about Cristiano reaching out then or since. “What h
appened?”
“He said he’d broker a meeting between your father and me, but it was a setup. He tried to have me killed.” Holding my wrist in one hand, he ripped open a bandage with his teeth and stuck it on one of my cuts. “There’s no trust amongst us, and there never will be.”
It wasn’t as if my father or Diego told me much to begin with, but that seemed like an important detail to keep from me. And if they’d hide that, what else didn’t I know? Could I even believe Cristiano?
“What about me?” I asked quietly. “I said you were guilty too. You must think I also betrayed you.”
I swallowed when he didn’t respond. If Cristiano had anything to do with the fall of the Maldonado deal, he must’ve known they’d come after Diego—and the people he cared about. “I guess that was your plan all along. We didn’t give you a chance to prove your innocence. My father and Diego hunted you for years. Now, the Maldonados can take us all out in one fell swoop and you command both cartels.”
“If you believe that, why aren’t you running for your life?”
“I wouldn’t leave my father or Diego behind.”
“You don’t know what you’re toying with, mamacita,” he said, shaking his head. “Where was Diego when you were on the roof alone? He left you behind.”
“He had to salvage what he could of the product. When he ran downstairs, the fire hadn’t started yet. He couldn’t have known that would happen.” I adjusted the ice pack. “He was coming back for me.”
“It only matters that you believe he would’ve.”
He released my arm, and I pulled it back, cradling it to my body. “That’s not fair. Diego has been there for me my whole life.”
“It must be coincidence that staying by your side also serves his best interests.”
I wanted to ask Cristiano what he meant, but giving him the chance to spin more lies felt like a betrayal to Diego.
I bent my knee as Cristiano picked up my foot and placed it in his lap. He held my ankle in one hand and ran his fingers along my arch. I jerked but tried to hide that I was ticklish. His touch firmed and my reflex to squirm disappeared. A sharp, pleasant thrill traveled up the inside of my thigh. My instinct should’ve been to pull away, but warmth coursed through me instead. Satisfaction bloomed like surrendering to a protective embrace as arousal tightened my insides.
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