Page 114 of Corrupted Deception

Brilliant, Char. Put thoughts of slicing and dicing in her head.

“You need to understand some things,” she said, then she looked at me for a moment and nodded.

“Do you know why I went into this… line of work?” she asked.

“No,” I replied, because whatever answer I would have given five minutes ago seemed kind of irrelevant now.

She sighed and leaned one hip against a chair on the opposite side of the table from Aiden.

“Revenge,amiga.It is a very strong… how do you say… motivator?”

Yeah. I was feeling a pretty strong urge for some vengeance at the moment too.

“I’ve never done anything to you, Val, and you know it.”

“No. No, you didn’t.” Her lips twitched in an apologetic smile. There was no apology in her eyes though, nothing but hardness and determination. “You are a… causality,sí?”

“Pretty sure you mean ‘casualty of war’, but I get the picture.”

She shook her head. “No,amiga. You don’t.”

I had a feeling I was about to—lucky me.

She pushed off the chair and stood up. She was still pointing her gun at me, but her arm had to be getting tired. If I could keep her talking for a little while, she might get too tired to get off a straight shot.

“Then explain it to me,por favor,” I said, leaning back against the wall, looking for all the world like I deeply wanted to understand.

“Twenty years ago, I was forced to watch as men came into my home in the middle of the night. They murdered my father,” she explained in Spanish. “They murdered my mother and my fifteen-year-old sister right in front of me. They left me alive—I do not know why. I wanted revenge. I deserved revenge. I wanted the man responsible to pay.”

Fair enough. I nodded.

“So, I played the game, grew my fortune and my contacts so I could get close.”

Again, that seemed reasonable to me.

“Then, can you guess what happened?”

I got the sense that this was the part where the story started to go downhill.

“Thehijueputadied,” she spat.

Yup. Straight down. And I had a feeling I knew what it slammed into. “Nacio’s father.”

She nodded. “When he died, I had every intention of making the son pay for the father’s sins…” She shook her head as she readjusted her grip on the gun. “Instead, I fell in love with him. What a… a fool I was. He married Isabella. He had a child with her.”

I could almost feel the venom in her voice landing on my cheeks.

“I loved him, and he betrayed me. So… I betrayed him. I had to do it,” she finished, her voice almost beseeching.

I mentally ran through old business deals Nacio had been involved in, anything that had gone bad, searching for any sign of betrayal.

And then it hit me. It was like a blow to the chest that left me reeling, grappling for balance.

“El víbora…” The man who’d murdered Nacio’s family.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to; I could see it in her eyes.

“You told him how to get to Isabella… to Emilio?” I asked, my voice raw like my throat had been scorched.

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