Page 87 of Corrupting Camille
“Dead,” I answer. Like I’m talking about weather.
Diego doesn’t flinch. “Fucker had it coming.”
We drink in silence, the ceiling fan humming above us like a lullaby for the damned. Outside, a woman laughs in Spanish. Music echoes down the block. Life pulses outside these walls, dull, distant, irrelevant.
We talk business, what’s left of the Everglades pipeline, the fed heat tightening in Brickell, shipments that need rerouting.
Diego doesn’t ease into it. He never does. “Heard about New York.”
My jaw ticks. “You been watching the feeds?”
He smirks darkly. “Who do you think set those fucking feeds up, hermano?”
Leaning forward, Diego locks eyes with me, voice edged with something rougher than sympathy. “She’s in your blood now. Infecting you.”
“She’s under my skin,” I correct him coldly, teeth gritted tight. “I never asked for that.”
He shrugs, casual, unbothered. “Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
Draining my glass, I set it down with a sharp crack that echoes off the worn wooden table.
“She was supposed to be leverage,” I bite out bitterly. “An opening. Just a fuck. A pawn on my board.”
“And now?” Diego’s voice goes soft, dangerous.
Now?
Now, I can’t breathe without hearing her voice.
Now, I’m haunted by her confession in that fucking rec room, cracked open, whispered, a sacred wound bleeding in front of a child.
“He hurt me…he touched me…pushed me…”
I can’t unhear that. Can’t unsee Camille giving away a piece of herself like it didn’t rip her wide open to say it.
And Joaquin’s report? Fucking spotless.
Too spotless.
Someone paid heavily to erase that night, no name, no charges, nothing but shadows and ghosts.
I’ve killed men for less.
“She’s the only thing I want clean,” I whisper, the words slipping out raw and rough. “Everything else can rot.”
Diego goes quiet. Doesn’t mock me, doesn’t laugh. He just nods slowly, gaze heavy with something he knows far too fucking well.
“You understand what’s happening, don’t you? What this feeling really is?”
“I know what I’m doing,” I snap quietly.
“You’re playing with fire, Kane,” he says, voice low. “Holding your hands out, thinking you won’t burn. But obsession doesn’t end clean, it ends bloody. Yours or hers.”
I feel my jaw tick, stubbornness iron-clad. “Then I’ll fucking bleed.”
Diego leans back slowly, chair creaking under his heavy frame. Silence spreads between us, thick and suffocating, the silence of men who’ve seen too many graves filled, too many lives lost.
“She’s not like us,” Diego finally says, tapping his chest, the sound hollow. “She wasn’t forged in the dark. She grew up smiling for cameras, not running from bullets. She doesn’t understand men like us. What we do to survive.”
