Page 77 of Corrupted Deception

Maybe, but something wasn’t sitting right. This was more than a casual brush-off.

“You’d rather I be disorganized and impulsive?—that’s your thing?” I asked, my tone cold. It didn’t feel like she was rejecting a random stranger here; she was rejecting me. “Would that somehow make me better in your ‘fuck-you’ eyes?”

“Hell no,” she replied, throwing her arms out wide. “Are you insane?”

Maybe. Or possibly daft. Because I was sure having a hard time keeping up with this conversation. I’d always known she was a tempest, but she was spinning me around so fast, I swear I was getting whiplash.

“Look,” she said like she was the perfectly reasonable one here, “Ray and I don’t need any one else in our lives who is going to give us a hard time about the mess on the floor, or how the sugar bowl ends up in the fridge, or how coffee runs, more often than not, turn into skydiving sessions or… impromptu Venezuela trips… or—”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I interjected, raising my voice for the first time. I was pretty sure this conversation was not actually about a skydiving dog. Or maybe it was? Not one word was making a damn bit of sense.

She took a deep breath and let it out, then curled her hands into fists, digging her fingernails into her palms so hard her knuckles turned white. Her gaze darted around the room, settling on one thing and then the next like she was trying to look in every direction but mine.

“This,” she said after a moment, motioning back and forth between us, “is never going to be anything other than fucked up.”

I shrugged. “Like you said, we’re both seriously fucked up, and the results are cataclysmic,” I said, nodding toward the bed. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.” Though, a translation guide for fights like this wouldn’t have been unwelcome.

She shook her head and took another step back like she was trying to sneak more distance between us.

“You don’t know that. You don’t know me. And I…” She licked her lips, and her gaze slid away again. “…I don’t want to know you,” she said with her nose tipped higher in the air.

That’s what this was?—she thought she was better than me?

Something shriveled in my chest while anger pumped hot and thick in my veins. There were literally hundreds—if not thousands—of women who would have been damned glad to be in her position right now. So, fuck this.

“You be careful up there on your high horse,tempesta.If you ever have to come down, that’s going to be one hell of a fall,” I said, then I turned away, crossed the room to the stairs.

The cold, riled-up asshole in me almost kept going, but I paused there without turning around.

“If you leave your warehouse before sunrise, Mendoza’s men will swarm you like locusts,” I warned her. “I’d suggest you stay inside.”

“When the sun comes up, they’re all going to magically disappear?—turn back into mice and pumpkins?”

I scoffed. “By the time the sun comes up, they’ll all be dead. And if you want to judge me for it, you go right ahead.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Charlotte Santoro

I pushed down harder on the gas pedal, weaving in and out of highway traffic.

“If you leave your warehouse before sunrise, Mendoza’s men will swarm you like locusts,”he’d warned me.

Ha!

They couldn’t sneak up on me, and they couldn’t out-drive me. What were they going to do? Launch a bomb in my general direction and hope it hit its target?

I scoffed out loud.Unlikely.

Besides, I’m just doing what Nacio told me to do, I thought to myself rather smugly.

But the truth was, I couldn’t stay in that warehouse, not another minute, another second. Their silent screams replayed in my head over and over again, but I could hear them echoing off the warehouse walls, a little more each time. Louder and louder.

“When you kill to protect someone, it doesn’t count. It leaves no marks,” Cielo had said.

He wasn’t necessarily wrong. No permanent marks, maybe, but like ink that faded over time, it was still fresh, vivid, not yet dulled.

“And I am not sitting on a high horse, you asshole,” I snapped out loud… to the steering wheel, or maybe the midday traffic.

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