Page 47 of Hidden While In Sight

“Well, yeah, that much is obvious.” Ramiro paused, thinking. “Your work hasn’t suffered,” he mused. “The stuff you sent over was clear. I guess I’ll indulge you, but I won’t remember all the shit you said to get. Text me, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Diego hung up.

He swiveled in his chair. Damn Ramiro and his meddling. Now Diego was thinking about the past. Zeta’s wife hadn’t been around long before she was killed, but she’d been sweet. Almost motherly. And Zeta had been less of an asshole when she was near him.

As his eyes shifted to Hannah to distract himself from thoughts of the past, he found hers darting away. Her nose was doing that twitching thing it did when she was trying to lock down her thoughts.

“Got something to say?” he asked.

Her fingers toyed with the open cover of the book. “While we’ve been here, you’ve simply watched things. That’s not what I expected.” She swallowed. “It’s just… can you tell me more? About what you do?” Her shoulders tensed and hunched as if she expected him to blow up at her questions.

He chuckled instead. “How much do you want to know?”

She studied the wall of monitors. “Is it dangerous?”

Diego shrugged. “Not as much anymore. I sneak in to set the cameras up myself usually, but other than that, I’m behind the scenes now.” His hand shifted up to the back of Emma’s head. Her hair was so soft to the touch. “I mean, it’s not legal, watching people like this.” He nodded toward the screens. “Most of the time, it goes unnoticed, but I’m not doing it for anything good. I watch people doing bad shit, and then I tell people that do bad shit themselves all about it, and it causes even more bad shit to happen.”

“By bad, you mean violence?”

“That’s a part of it. A lot of the people that hire us are making their money dealing drugs or, like these dipshits, double-dealing drugs. Gambling rings, blackmail, all sorts of shit. Hell, I used to be part of all those things. Mainly as muscle for hits or if a business deal went south.” His fingers tingled as he held the little girl in his arms. “I’ve got blood on my hands, Hannah. I killed people before I killed your husband. Like him, most of the people weren’t victims. Not really. Not with all they did, what they were into.”

Her finger slid along the corner of the Bible’s hard cover. “It’s still murder.”

“It is,” he agreed.

Her eyes flicked to him. “Were you sent to murder Colin?”

He huffed out a breath. “I told you before that I wasn’t. The clients were pissed about it. They wanted something to blackmail him with. Killing him…” He faced her, capturing her gaze. “That’s all on me. I watched you for weeks, Hannah, and the more I watched, the more I wanted to kill him.”

Hannah continued to stare at him, her fingers clutching at the book.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.

Her shoulders stiffened, but she gave a jerky nod.

“Why do you keep reading from the one with ripped pages?”

Her eyes grew wide as her lips parted in surprise.

She’d expected him to ask something else. Something cliché, like why she stayed with the bastard she’d married. Why she’d put up with it. Why she’d never tried to leave. Questions that made it her fault.

Diego already understood why. At least, he thought he did. Being treated like shit made you feel like shit, and that was hard to wipe clean.

He didn’t expect the flash of a dimple as she smiled down at the open book, her hand gliding over its pages. “My parents gave it to me when I moved out on my own.”

Diego remembered reading about their deaths in the information Ramiro had gathered for the Ashford job. If anyone had given him a Bible as a gift, he would have probably beaten them with it. Or laughed. “So it reminds you of them?”

She nodded. “They were wonderful parents. My life wasn’t always… like you saw. They loved me, did their best to raise me, encouraged me.” She swallowed, staring down at whatever was on that page. “The last thing my father said to me was not to marry Colin. He and my mom died in a car accident right after we became engaged.”

Diego decided it would be a dick move to point out that she had married the prick anyway and kept his mouth shut.

“I didn’t handle their deaths well. They were all I had, and I lost myself a little. Colin stepped in to handle things, and I just let him. I didn’t have anyone else. My friends—” Her face twisted. “I’d already lost them that year, and none called when they heard the news. They weren’t friends, not really, I guess. My roommate in college was one of them. She was the one who brought Colin into my life. They were dating.”

Diego raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess. He thought he could date you both?”

“I didn’t want to!” she protested. “It made sense that they were dating. Colin was handsome and older than us, and he and Bridget looked perfect together. I mean, Bridget was so much prettier than me, more on his level, and full of life.”

He remembered the way Hannah had looked in the photo with her parents. Full of life was how he would have described her.

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