Page 70 of Corrupted Deception

I’d always been self-aware, never a man to bury my head in the sand, but I’d truly believed I could love this woman from a distance.

I let out a slow, heavy breath. What a fucking fool I’d been.

She shifted after a long while and held her hands out in front of her.

“The blood on my hands, Cielo…” She looked at her hands, fanning out her fingers. They were spotless, but I knew what she was seeing.

I adjusted my position so that I could take each of her hands in mine. She half-heartedly tried to yank them back, but I held firm, staring at our entwined fingers.

“There is no blood on your hands,” I told her. “When you kill to protect someone, it doesn’t count. It leaves no marks.”

That’s why she’d done it—to protect me. I knew that. Of course, I knew that. There was no way Charlotte would have killed those men for the hell of it.

She scoffed. “I must have missed that page in the rulebook.”

I shook my head against the top of hers. “It’s in there. You wouldn’t fault a mother for killing to protect her child, would you? Or a husband for killing for his wife, a brother who kills to protect his brother?”

She stretched out her fingers entwined with mine, then curled them. Then again. I could practically feel the wheels turning inside her head.

“That’s what it is to you, isn’t it?” she said, curling her fingers a little tighter around mine. “That’s why it’s… simple?”

“Si, that’s why it doesn’t bother me—it never has. It sounds cold, psychopathic even, but there are few things that have ever been so clear for me.”

She was silent, stretching out then curling her fingers again, lost in thought. But like always, I had no idea what she was thinking, no ability to gauge or anticipate. And that was the problem.

That was why this could never work.

She scoffed and shook her head. “We are both seriously fucked up. You know that, right?” I could feel her smile against my chest.

“Si.” Fucked up and in a lot of fucking trouble. I kissed the top of her head.

When she slid her hands out of mine and shifted her weight so that she was supporting herself, I stood up, ignoring the urge to gather her back into my arms.

“Why don’t you take a few minutes to get cleaned up?” I asked, phrasing it as a question since she would have fought me otherwise. I crossed the small room, nevertheless, and turned on the faucet to the walk-in shower.

She eyed me for a moment, then nodded, and while the thought of joining her held the kind of potent appeal that was making me hard, I turned away and left the room, closing the door behind me.

On my way out of the warehouse, I shoved one of the pillows from the sofa in the door to keep it wedged open, then looked around outside.

There were no more bodies on the ground, and the SUVs were nowhere in sight—presumably hidden around the back of the warehouse for the time being.

Deo, Vito, and Aurelio had congregated by our cars, but not one of them was wearing their happy face.

“What is it?” I asked as I stopped next to Deo.

“Gustavo Mendoza is one of the dead men,” he said, nodding toward the back of the warehouse. “There’s no chance his men didn’t know where he was going.”

Shit.

“And that means, when he doesn’t return, retaliation will be coming,” I added, filling in the blank.

“It looks like your runaway can take care of herself,” he said, a hint of awe in his voice. “But if she gets credit for wiping them out, that fucks over the message we need to send toLos Cazadores Sangrientos.”

I drummed my fingers against my thigh, rearranging the puzzle pieces in my head.

“Then we do what we have to do tonight,” I said with a shrug. Luis Mendoza had given the order that brought these men to Charlotte’s home. One way or another, he was dying tonight. “We bring the bodies with us and make it look like they were involved in the hit. All of Mendoza’s men gone in one night—that was the plan anyway. This way, we send a message and none of the fallout comes back on Charlotte.”

Deo nodded, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. “We’ll need intel. Fast,” he said, a furrow between his brows. “If we intend to make a statement, I won’t be sloppy about it.”

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