Page 63 of Velvet Deception

“There’s no?—”

She gripped my chin, pinching it with her icy fingers and she furrowed her brow. Staring down at me in the chair, she shook her head. “Stop. That’s nonsense.”

“But he’s gone.”

“For now,” she argued. “I saw your man running out of here. I saw your hero rushing after him.”

An incredulous laugh left my lips. Diego had left me with a foolhardy promise to get Ramon back. But this was theCartel. This was an army. A trained and corrupt and lethal organization of many who took pleasure in punishing and killing whichever civilian they wanted to.

He had skills. I could respect that. He had shown his ability to fight, and to fight well. He’d proven how he wanted to defend us, like he had in killing those druggies who had broken in.

But one man against the entire Cartel?

He wouldn’t live.

He wouldn’t win.

Hecouldn’twin against the Cartel.

No one man could.

Sticking to these facts, I accepted that I was well and truly alone. I was isolated and left behind. Without my son. Without the man I was beginning to see as my partner and other half.

They were both gone, lost to the Cartel.

Accepting those facts wasn’t easy. I swallowed them down like shards of glass, slicing my throat and stabbing my heart.

Coming to terms that this bleak loneliness would be my fate for the rest of my days, I once again wished that I didn’t have to, that I would rather be dead than suffer the worst pain imaginable.

“Ice it,” Señora Vasquez ordered, adjusting the bag of ice to rest on my arm.

There’s no point.

I lacked the willpower to find strength or energy. I couldn’t summon the concern about my own health or pain. The gnawing heartache ate at me from the inside out and I couldn’t stop it.

“You stay up, Sofia. Not down. You wait, not quit.”

I wasn’t quitting on them. I was merely accepting the reality that my son would never return or grow up to experience the brighter half of life. I was only submitting to the fact that Diego would never be my man.

Señora Vasquez straightened, frowning at me as someone called for her next door, a relative.

She sighed, staring at me with worry and annoyance, most likely peeved that I was still so sluggish and dismissive of her help. I didn’t want to anger her. I didn’t want to abuse her generosity and compassion. I just couldn’t react any further.

“I will be back to check on you,” she said, moving to leave without checking for my answer. “I will come back to help you find faith.”

It’s all lost.

“And to count on the trust you’d put in that man.”

Trust.Now that was an interesting word that had mostly fucked me over.

I’d vowed to never trust a man again, but I had. The night I caved to the need to care for a wounded stranger, I lowered my guard. At first, it hadn’t felt like it. Diego had been so vulnerable and weak, confused and recovering when I’d brought him here. He hadn’t seemed like a threat at first, knocked out so hard that he had amnesia.

But the longer I let him stay, the more I developed feelings that stretched far past a cordial and professional relationship I should have with a patient, and the more I craved his touch and the orgasms he knew how to deliver…

That was where I erred.

If I hadn’t been so busy falling into the fantasy of having a good man willing to protect me, maybe I could’ve avoided all of this.

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