Page 58 of Twin Deception

I shook my head and rubbed my brow.

“You’ve got people tailing her?”

He growled. “What does it matter? But no, I don’t. I’m just the middle man here, Miguel. Someone’s watching her out there to complain that she’s not dead yet. And that’s where you come in. What’s taking so long?”

I had to stall him, but I wasn’t sure how to word a nonanswer to his demands. Things just weren’t adding up, and I was trained to pay attention to every possible detail.

First, he’s making it sound like she was near the rain before that storm even came.

Now, he’s saying she’s been seen near or at places she clearly wasn’t…

The longer I mulled over what he said and the more I read between the lines, I was perplexed, wondering if Drago—andwhoever was orchestrating things on the other end of this hit—were confusing Isabel with another woman in Louis’s life.

22

ISABEL

How many times am I going to have to tell him?

I shook my head as I started to strip. I was long past due for a shower. After the way I woke up, to blood and guts and violence, I felt dirty and icky. Witnessing yet another murder messed with my head, but it was silly to want to think that showering would clean me or purify me at all.

I wasn’t an accomplice. It wasn’t as if I’d done anything. No, I hadn’t called the cops after witnessing Miguel killing that man. And I wouldn’t be contacting any law enforcement, either. Just like that man in the alley he’d removed from me as a threat, I wasgratefulfor this skeptical hitman who seemed to want to find a clue I couldn’t offer him.

Lifting my face to the water, I sighed and tried to purge this negativity that consumed me from the inside out. Steam rose, and as it soothed my skin, I closed my eyes and pushed my head further into the spray of all the water.

How can I convince him that I’m innocent?

It seemed like he understood, on some level, that I was. I had to be innocent in all this because I hadn’t done anything wrong. Like he said, I was a mural painter. I had no secret double life as a femme fatale, and I wasn’t Louis’s woman in any shape or form, not even his daughter.

Miguel heard that Cartel man suggest that I was somehow tied to all this, but I saw no way that I could be.

I wasn’t a woman in Louis’s life, and I had no way to guess what woman might have that role. He’d never been faithful to my mother, even when she was most lucid and not destroyed by drugs. Countless lovers, mistresses, girlfriends, and hookups rotated in and out of his life. None stood out. Most of them were nameless to me. He’d never bothered to hide them from me—or my mother—and I never tried to form any attachment or dislike to any of them. They were just… there.

Is one of them… helping him? A partner?

That seemed most logical in terms of any Cartel member being worried about a woman in his life. If Louis had a woman with power. My mother certainly had none, withering away in a rehab facility as she faced an early death.

But that didn’t sound accurate, my father having a woman as a partner who could be feared. Louis was a loner, like me. He preferred to be the boss, the only boss in his life, and he never actually worked with anyone, always alone, against the world. I doubted he’d ever married. In fact, I knew he hadn’t because he’d never actually gone through with divorcing Esmeralda. They were legally bound, but that was it. Estranged at best and loveless as ever.

Louis’s woman…

As I shampooed my hair, I tried to picture him as half of a partnership.

I’d never given much hope to being in a partnership myself, but now that Miguel had been hired to kill me, and failed to do so, it only seemed fitting to place him in that role. So far, we had acted like partners, helping each other in this confusing mess of danger and death, sticking together despite the odds. And sharing this undeniable need to be near each other again.

But for how long?

He’d vowed to protect me always, but did he mean that in the sense that he always wanted to be with me? Like… marriage? A wife? The mother of his kids? Did hitmenwantchildren?

I was jumping ahead of myself, my mind going a mile a minute with the possibilities of a family, the one thing I feared I’d never have or find.

My heart raced with excitement at counting on having Miguel’s attention and company forever, but I reined in my runaway imagination and tried to focus as I showered. I’d stalked out of the room because I needed a break from his challenging me, but now that I had the space and peace tothink, I wanted to stick with the topic at hand.

Louis.

Connections to the Cartel.

Why someone would need me dead to lure him out of hiding.

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