Page 20 of Heart of a Villain

FIVE

This was a moment she’d expected to remain as one of the chapters in her journal—the journal that ended with them walking down the aisle together. Now that the moment had arrived, she realized how foolish and impossible the notion had been. Ten years was a long time, and they weren’t the same “kids” they’d been when they first met. His life had probably thrived, while hers was an oil slick in the middle of a dumpster fire.

But, he called her querida.

Why did he call her querida?

There was no way he’d recognized her. She’d spent their entire relationship making love to him in pitch blackness or with more than half of her face covered.

As far as she could tell, Rafael didn’t pick up on the fact that this was the infamous Gano The Enforcer the hire-ups inside Chamas still constantly raved about. The minute they stepped foot inside the house, she’d felt him discreetly flex in response to the testosterone in the air, but he could do nothing to any of these men other than die at their feet.

Adrían retreated to the far side of the room, his face unreadable. All she had to do was pretend not to know who he was for one week. All she had to do was act like her first love, the love of her life, meant nothing to her and never did.

For seven days.

Then, once Rafael was dead, she would tell him everything. She would tell Julien, Joel, Pozza, Nik…every last one of them would get the whole truth the minute this piece of shit stopped breathing.

Afterward, she would leave.

Once she was done drawing the heat away from them, she would come back, although the Sayeda they’d known no longer existed. But, if she could find a piece of that woman somewhere, even a blip, she wanted that nanosecond to belong to them.

Rafael squeezed her arm.

She paced her breathing.

Julien had said to trust him, and she’d been trusting him for far too long to stop now. So, when Rafael, no doubt sent via the Chamas private jet by his asshole brother, followed them to the edge of the property, she didn’t react. When Julien told her to go along with whatever he said, whatever he did—it was exactly what she’d done. That didn’t mean, however, that she wouldn’t get a few jabs in early.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Rafael whispered, the wound on his neck brighter than magma. “When I call your name, you answer. What’s wrong? Did Lorenzo drug?—”

“Why are you whispering?” she asked. “Scared that without your guns and your big brother, you’re just as much of a fucking pussy as I’ve always known you to be?”

His jaw clenched.

Then, he looked around. “You think these suburban people can protect you, you cunt? You fucking whore?”

“Maybe your father should have been the one worrying about protection when he was fucking your cunt-whore of a mother.”

A vein throbbed in his forehead.

His nostrils flared.

Had they been in Brazil, he would have cut out her heart and flame-broiled it over a roasting pit. There, he was in charge. Here, in this house, where they were surrounded by people more loyal to her than to him, he was powerless. Without his lunatic brother, he was trying to fuck her with a flaccid penis.

“Everything all right here, love?” Gage asked.

Leadership and command radiated off the handsome Australian in waves, and she suspected he was former military, likely Special Ops. It was another clue that these men were precisely who she believed them to be, one of three things her mother feared—vulnerability, death, and Team Alpha.

There were a lot of names, but she found she didn’t have a hard time holding on to them. Julien had used them in passing over the years, but seeing their faces effectively stamped each name in concrete.

“Where’s ‘Eesh’?” she redirected. “Sleeping? Because I’ll go wake her up. She knows I will.”

To Rafael, she was Eesh’s sister.

She’d been there less than an hour, yet everyone was already treating her as if she was the elusive Eesh’s sister. So far, she’d learned that Eesh had two boys: Josiah, who was asleep, and she was already halfway in love with Theo. She also learned that Eesh was short for Ayesha, and Ayesha was married to a man she would never forget—Joel Lattimore.

Gage scratched the back of his head with a boyish grin that clashed with his tall, solid, imposing frame. “Wow. You sound just like Eesh, and I know they said you two look alike, but I wasn’t expecting how much.”

A woman stepped from the shadows of a dimly lit hallway, holding a sleeping baby in a onesie pajama against her chest.

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