Page 48 of Corrupted Deception

She closed her mouth as gravel crunched beneath the tires of a black SUV with tinted windows all around that turned into the warehouse’s lot.

“Expecting company?” I asked as I reached for my gun, watching Charlotte’s body language as much as I was watching the approaching vehicle.

“As a matter of fact, I am,” she said, and her body language told the same story. There was nothing wary in her stance.

This was the reason for the call and her sudden departure?—a late-night meet-up in a dark parking lot. She had no weapon on her, nothing but a single syringe of some form of modified ecstasy she’d gotten from fuck only knew where.

Her gaze swiveled back and forth between the SUV and I while her teeth dug into her bottom lip. “Don’t you dare pull that gun out, Cielo. I promise you, you’ll regret it.”

She didn’t know me very well, did she? Regret wasn’t a common word in my vocabulary, least of all when it came to the violence I inflicted.

The SUV rolled to a stop near the front of the warehouse, about ten feet from Charlotte’s Audi.

She rolled her eyes at me as my fingers wrapped around my gun, still in its holster.

“Would you give me some credit?” she huffed. “I wouldn’t have told you to come over here if I thought it would put you in any danger, trust me. But if you want to ignore me and leave here in a body bag…” She shrugged her shoulders.

Trust her? The list of people I trusted was a short one, and the girl who’d showed up after vanishing ten years ago wasn’t on that list.

So why the fuck was I lowering my hand?

The driver’s side door of the SUV opened and a man stepped out. A burly, dark-haired man, covered in tattoos. A lot of fucking tats.

He moved to the SUV’s rear passenger door, but Charlotte squealed or screeched—it was hard to describe the happy sound that came out of her. And then she was on the move, flying across the space between them.

My hands curled into fists as she threw her arms around the big man and he grabbed her up, swinging her around like a little girl. By the time he set her feet back down on the ground, the urge to rip his hands from his body was potent.

The man’s attention turned to me once Charlotte had stepped back. She was still smiling, but the man’s eyes were narrowed, glaring at me suspiciously.

“It’s all right,” Charlotte said, putting a hand on his arm. “He’s… with me?” she said, cocking a sardonic eyebrow at me. “This is Cielo Luciano.”

The man’s brow furrowed more, drawing attention to the dark markings on his eyelid. “Luciano, huh?”

She nodded.

The man looked at me for a moment longer, then made a ‘harumph’sound in his throat and turned away, giving me his back.

Not a smart move, asshole.

But Charlotte glared at me, a warning in her silver-gray eyes. And it seemed what Charlotte wanted, Charlotte got, because I leaned back against her car, arms crossed over my chest, looking to all the world like I was waiting patiently as the man opened the rear passenger door and stepped back…

…and a tall, dark-haired man in his early thirties stepped out.

A man with a scar cut across his eyebrow and the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. A man anyone in the criminal underworld would recognize.

Nacio Morales.

What. The. Fuck?

Chapter Fourteen

Cielo Luciano

Morales wrapped his arms around Charlotte, and she hugged him back and pressed her cheek to his chest.

“¿Cómo estás,cariño?” he asked her quietly.

“Estoy bien,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders as she straightened her spine and pulled away.

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