Page 48 of Corrupted Heart

The sort of history that scars and shapes you, that ends childhoods far too early and molds you into something brutal and twisted.

She helped make me the monster I am today.

But that’s not the reason we’re meeting her today, in a hotel room of all places, so that no one knows about it.

Back then, when it all happened, Amaya Mircari was working for the FBI. My father wanted a friend in the Bureau. He also wanted to “make a man out of me”, since I refused to be his attack dog.

Amaya was gladly able to help with both those things.

That was seventeen years ago. Now, she’s moved on and gone up in the world, switching from the FBI to the CIA. That’s how our paths have managed to cross again.

Because I fucked up.

Our family has been slowly moving most of our business from the shady and illegal to the legitimate. But there’s still a lot of money in smuggling weapons and drugs into this country.

If you do it right, it’s actually pretty low risk. We only work with people we’ve known for years. We keep the exchanges under a certain monetary threshold to avoid close scrutiny, and we always meet on our terms.

But a few weeks ago, I got sloppy.

Ares had been muttering about a dip in profits from the previous quarter’s financial investments. At the same time, I got contacted by a “friend of a friend of a friend”—a merchant who knew someone I’d worked with once, who was friends with someone I deal with regularly. They wanted a huge shipment of weapons.

It was stupid, but they were waving big money around. I got greedy, and it bit me in the ass, hard. Because after the lights went down and the curtain went up, it turned out my new “buyer” was the CIA, conducting an anti-terror sting operation.

On the plus side, I did the drop myself, alone, so none of our guys got picked up. And my family doesn’t know about any of this shit yet, thank fucking God.

But yours truly is royally screwed.

Not just because I’m potentially looking at spending the next thirty years in Federal prison. Even worse, the lead agent on all this is her.

As if on cue, there’s a knock at the door. Taylor turns, her brow furrowing just a little as we lock eyes.

“Seriously. Let me do the talking. The very fact that we’re having this meeting is significant. They want something, and it’s not your ass in prison, or you’d be there already. Got it?”

I just nod.

Yeah, Amaya fucking wants something all right.

As if she hasn’t already taken so much from me.

I’m silent as Taylor straightens her blazer and walks over to the door to the suite. My jaw grinds painfully when she swings it open and a regal-looking woman in her late forties walks in.

Amaya smiles briefly at me. I don’t smile back.

“My my, Kratos,” she says softly. “All grown up now, aren’t we?”

Her hair is dyed blonder than it used to be. Her face has the shiny, tight look that suggests she and Botox are besties now. But those fucking eyes of hers haven’t changed at all.

Dark. Cold. Cruel.

She’s also still got the brutal-looking scar running up the side of her neck. I don’t give a single shit how she got it, but I remember it used to scare me, when I was a kid and we first met.

…Before I found out there were much scarier things about her.

“If you’d like to address my client, you can talk to him via me?—”

“And you can take that cunty attitude and ten-thousand-dollar Chanel suit and fuck right off,” Amaya says with a wide, venomous smile at Taylor.

Taylor’s brows arch sharply and her nostrils flare.

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