Page 42 of Corrupted Deception

But before I’d finished preparing myself, Cielo grabbed the scalpel out of my hand and dragged it in one swift slice across Mendoza’s throat, severing right through his carotid artery so that the bloodpouredout instead ofpumped.

Three.

Two.

One.

It hadn’t been by my hand, but Carlos Mendoza was dead.

Chapter Twelve

Charlotte Santoro

I stared at Mendoza’s body, pale from blood loss, surrounded by thick, dark blood. But he looked like a tunnel to me. A long, dark tunnel, empty and endless, the same tunnel it felt like I’d been running down for too many days now.

I let out a heavy breath. God, I was tired.

Was that wrong? Here I was, standing in front of a guy I’d just helped murder, and all I could think about was how much I wanted to lie down and take a nap. Yeah, that definitely had to be wrong.

There was a knock on the hotel room door, three sharp raps. Cielo had made a phone call the moment he’d set down the scalpel, calling for a clean up. I guess the cleaning crew had arrived.

I didn’t move as he crossed the room, let in the big, bald man who’d been following me earlier, then got to work, the two of them wrapping Mendoza’s body in the transparent cover beneath him and taping it closed.

Personally, I would have left the body. The police would never trace the murder back to me because there was no ‘me’. Just a ghost. A shadow.

It had its perks, I supposed.

Cielo, though, I imagined he still existed. It was kind of hard to vanish when you were a part of a big-time, organized crime family. The Luciano name wasn’t splashed across the tabloids on a regular basis, but they werethere,wended into the fabric of society, like jet black threads that couldn’t help but stand out amid a gray canvas.

“Grazie, Vito,” Cielo said once they’d stuffed Mendoza’s body into an oversized suitcase.

As Vito wheeled the luggage toward the door, ‘I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again,’ flitted through my mind. There really had to be some screws loose up there.

The door opened. Then closed. And then it was just me and my co-murderer. One thing was certain: Cielo made a lousy Goose.

“Charlotte?” Cielo said quietly. He probably thought I was having a mental meltdown here over the dead guy.

“Yeah?” I replied, still staring at the bed.

When he didn’t respond, I dragged my gaze off the bed and looked up at him.

Bad idea.

His lips were pressed together, and there was something going on in his eyes, making it feel like he was revving up for battle.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he said in a voice that was far too calm for the glint in those icy blues.

But seriously?

He shook his head. “’It seems you have an account at Global Wealth Management Bank you haven’t been telling anyone about’?” he reiterated my own words back to me in a less than kind fashion. “Fucking blackmail?”

“Yeah, ‘fucking blackmail’. And it would have worked if you’d kept your god damned mouth shut. You are seriously the worst wingman ever.”

He scoffed. “That man was scum who deserved everything he got and more. I recognized it the second he walked in the door. I thought you had better senses than that,” he snapped—which wasn’t something I recalled Cielo Luciano doing often. Or ever.

But I welcomed it because something about it cast off every bit of tiredness I was feeling and turned everything else inside me into one blissful ball of anger that swallowed up all the grounding techniques I’d ever learned.

“Because you know me so freaking well?” I snapped back, throwing my arms out wide. “You don’t know a single thing about me, so don’t you dare judge me.”

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