Page 19 of The Last Promise You Made

Her child—our child?—was here.

“I’m sorry,” Maddox said quietly.

My jaw worked. Tears pricked my eyes, which I refused to let fall.

“She was working for the Lovatos?” My voice sounded distant, cold, faraway, but it was either that or bleed emotions all over the floor.

“Gia seems to think so.”

Gia. Another dark-haired liar.

When I didn’t say anything, Maddox continued, “She can’t tell me a lot because their investigation is on a need-to-know basis, but she says Ravyn was some sort of computer genius, running a lot of the cartel’s business from behind the scenes.”

She’d been wildly good with numbers, websites, and software. Dad and I had hired her because of those skills. We’d needed an office-manager-slash-marketing-manager-slash-accountant. Someone who could do a little bit of everything for the little we were offering. Ravyn had shown up seeming like a godsend.

“The letter.” I swallowed hard over a lump that appeared, pushing past it. “She made it sound like they were making her do it.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know the details. I’m not sure the task force does either.”

“What do I do?”

My brother met my gaze, and the eyes meeting mine held a steeliness that was rarely aimed at me.

“Meet your daughter. Take care of her. Keep her safe.”

“I want a DNA test,” I replied.

“I think that’s smart.”

“But you think she’s mine?”

Maddox ran a hand over his face again. “I think she looks like Ravyn. I think she’s the right age, if she’s seven. I think it would’ve been possible—but not likely—for her to get pregnant with some other guy’s kid that quickly after she left here.”

That thought was a bitter pill. I’d purposefully pushed thoughts of Ravyn with some other guy out of my head whenever they had tried to poke at the corners of my mind. I’d wanted to pretend she’d never existed. This caused something akin to guilt to waft through me. Guilt I didn’t owe, and shouldn’t have, but still did.

“Okay.” I exhaled.

Maddox searched my face. For what, I wasn’t sure, but he nodded. “Let me get them back in here.”

He left, and I had mere seconds to prepare myself for the shock of seeing Ravyn’s face all over again. The little girl was still clinging to Gia. Both with heavy brows, thick lashes, and dark hair. They were similar enough that they could be related. Except, Gia was taller than Ravyn had been. Leaner. Small, tight curves to Ravyn’s voluptuousness.

Gia and Addy had their cheeks pushed together, and they were both tense and taut. Gia’s shoulders were drawn back, as if ready for a fight…or maybe she was just uncomfortable with a child clinging to her. Maybe she didn’t know what to do with a kid any more than I did. All I knew was how to spoil a child—I did that regularly enough with Mila—but I didn’t know shit about raising one. My little brother was the family man, not me. I never intended to have kids after what I’d lost.

I stuck out my hand like an idiot and said, “I’m Ryder.”

The girl hesitated before removing one of her hands from Gia’s neck, sliding her tiny palm into mine, shaking it, and saying, “Addy.”

In those two syllables, I heard the same rhythm to her speech that had been in Ravyn’s. It came from growing up speaking two languages, she’d told me. She’d been born and raised in the United States, but her father was from Mexico. Her family had spoken both English and Spanish, switching back and forth with an easy fluidity, sometimes within the same sentence.

With me, Ravyn had mostly spoken English, as my Spanish had topped off with the basic two years required in high school. But when we were making love, when her emotions poured from her, she’d slip into Spanish as if it were the language of her heart. I’d learned a little more of it from her. Not much. And most of it was now forgotten.

I let go of the little girl’s hand and looked from her to Gia and then my brother and back. “What now?”

Gia’s eyes narrowed. “Now, we take her home.”

My chest tightened again. “We?”

Gia knelt, placing Addy on her feet. She spoke to her in a rapid-fire Spanish that spoke of years of use. Addy looked from her to me and then back. She picked up a backpack that looked almost as big as she was and stepped out of the room, sitting down on a chair just outside the office door, and pulled out a gaming device from within the bag’s depths.

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