Page 16 of Until Retribution Burns (Beauty in Lies 3)

"Franco Bellandi died when you were nine. He was one of my father's closest friends, and he happened to run Chicago," I answered.

"That can't be a coincidence," Isa said, stepping away from my embrace to peer down into another one of the boxes that she or Regina had torn the lids off. "What about these other girls?" She reached into one of the boxes, pulling out a photo in each hand. A different girl stared up at her from each of them, a red x crossed over their faces. "What does the red marker mean?" she asked.

Regina looked at me with sadness in her eyes one more time before she fled the room, leaving the heartache behind in the tomb where I'd tried to trap it.

I hadn't been the one to pack up my father's records and belongings to place in the office, leaving that to one of the housekeepers as I’d been too busy dealing with the transfer of leadership at the time. I’d intended to go through everything once the transition was solidified, but never gotten around to it. "It means they were sold,mi reina," I murmured, stepping up behind her to peer down into the boxes sprawled at her feet and swallowing back the shame I felt knowing all the innocent people my father had hurt.

Isa swallowed loudly as her eyes closed and she turned to press her face into my chest, her fingers gripping my shirt tightly. "There are so many."

"There are," I agreed. "And most of them looked like you," I said, burying a hand in her hair and clutching her tighter to my chest. In each of the photos in the box, there was a child with multicolored eyes. Most were girls, but some boys were mixed in with the sheer number of lives my father had been involved in selling.

I could only hope that the victims were long since dead, because I didn’t like to think of the life they'd lived if they hadn't been granted that death.

"This doesn't explain anything," Isa murmured. "If these photos were taken after he drowned me, it doesn't give even the barest hint as to why he did that. Regina said he had more to gain from selling me, and I'm inclined to agree after seeing just how many children he did that to." I knelt at her feet, picking a photo from one of the boxes. The red x was stark across the boy's face. Turning it in my hands, I studied the name and date on the back.

It too had been dated after Isa's drowning. "Are there any dates before the river?" I asked. Isa dug her hands into the photos, taking them out one at a time and sorting through them. Only the ones marked with red had dates though some without them had names, leaving little doubt as to the purpose.

My father kept track of who he sold the children to and when, and he crossed them off like a checkmark on a list when the sale was complete.

With the photos laid face down in front of us, Isa studied the dates. "They're all after the accident," she said, and there was a pause for reflection. As if she knew, with everything staring her in the face, that she needed to stop referring to her attempted murder as an accident. Why she ever had, I didn't know.

Maybe it helped her to not have to think about the fact that someone hated her enough to want to kill her, and she'd never known why.

"You were the first," I said, staring at her with sudden clarity. Whatever had moved my father to throw her into that river,somethinghad shifted for him on that day. Enough that he'd suddenly developed an interest in trafficking children. "But why?" None of the photos revealed a name, but her eyes lit with knowledge regardless.

"You said that your father believed your mother was innocentbecauseshe died. I lived, Rafael," Isa said, her expression gleaming as she tried to follow the hints of clues in front of her. "What if all of this was because I didn't die? In the Salem Witch Trials, Trial by Water wasn't unheard of. I don't know what drove him to throw me in that river, but if he thought it should kill me and it didn't?"

"You're saying maybe your survival proved to my father that girls with eyes like yours were witches?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "I didn't know him, but you did. Would he do all of this,"– she gestured around the room – “if he thought we were the literal spawn of Satan because our eyes were different colors? It sounds ridiculous," she scoffed, shaking her head as she swept the photos of herself back into the box. "And we're no closer to knowing what made him throw me in the water in the first place, especially on the anniversary of your mother's death. It feels too convenient to be a coincidence, but there's nothing here that touches on what caused this."

"If the answers to those questions exist anywhere, it's in Chicago," I said, pulling my cell from my pocket and texting the pilot that I wanted to leave sooner than planned. There was too much at stake, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was missing a very important aspect and my lack of knowledge would have dire consequences for us.

If she ever learned the truth, she may never forgive me.

My only saving grace was that Isa was more concerned with why my father had chosen to try to kill her in the first place. I knew him well enough to know the cruel bastard didn't need a reason.

Because if Miguel Ibarra had truly wanted Isa dead, she wouldn't be standing in front of me.

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