Page 137 of The Devil Can Be Kind

I remembered how she flinched with each reference to his name. How she went pale…She knew him.Or at the very least she knewofhim.

Blinding rage knocked the breath from me, and the glass in my hand was dangerously close to shattering.

The thought of Adalyn occupying the same room as a man known to beat women and do a lotworseto them, made me feel nauseas. But more than anything else—it made me murderous.

Ricardo Lopez was a dead man walking on borrowed time. And so help me God, I was going to make the bastard suffer for going after what was mine.

ADALYN

The penthouse was extravagant and beautiful. Walls of towering glass stretched across two stories, revealing the expanse of Las Vegas, similarly to the conference room earlier. The neon lights and crowded streets of the city framing the room like living art.

On any other day it would have been beautiful, but now… I didn’t even glance at it.

Too wrapped up in the haunting memories and crippling feelings that threatened to swallow me whole. I crumpled on the bed and rolled into a ball, unable to keep my sobs at bay. The familiar tendrils of pain swelled in my veins, obliterating everything but debilitating self-pity.

He isn’t going to stop.

After all these years. Despite all this distance. He wasn’t finished with me. He still wasn’t doneruiningme.

As if that wasn’t enough, my own father, a man who knew what Ricardo was capable of, and who had done nothing when he found out what had happened to me, was willing to bind me to him for the sake of ‘business’.

From what I’d heard, time had only served to make Ricardo a more efficient monster. He was a sadist who enjoyed inflictingpain, particularly on women… particularly on women who couldn’t fight back.

Thrasher.

My stomach rolled violently, and I scarcely made it to the toilet before throwing up. I pressed my head to the cool tiles and focused on trying to level out my breathing, my throat burning with every breath.

A distant voice echoed at the edge of my consciousness, but it did little to rouse me from my torture.

I ignored the gentle shake on my arm. The pain was too?—

“ADA!” Marco’s voice thundered around the room, snapping me out of my agonizing delirium.

I was instantaneously flipped onto my back and met with familiar, albeit frantic, black eyes. Marco’s handsome mouth was set in a grim line as he took in my appearance, concern marring his handsome features.

“I’m fine,” I muttered weakly, sitting up.

The nausea was nearly gone now, though the aching in my chest remained.

He lifted me from the floor and took me back into the dimly lit bedroom, gently dropping me onto the expanse of bed and removing my shoes. After a moment of tucking the covers around me, he took a seat at its edge, looking at me with concern and…fear.

“What is going on with you, Ada?” His voice was tight, heavy with an emotion he was trying to suppress. “Talk to me.”

I shook my head and swallowed, tears brimming my eyes.

A different kind of trepidation pounded in my chest. The kind that told me that if he knew the truth, therealtruth, then he wouldn’t want me anymore. That he would think me broken.

Ruined.

“Ada, please.Please, Baby.” His hands cupped my face.

Hearing the helplessness in his voice and seeing the vulnerability in his eyes caused something deep within me to finally snap.

I racked in a heavy, unsteady breath.

It was time to tell him my secret.

CHAPTER

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