Chapter 37
LEX
The Pit – about to lose my damn mind.
I can’t fucking breathe. She’s sitting between us, tears on her cheeks, voice shaking, and still she says, I’m not done.
How the hell is there more? I’ve taken hits from men twice my size and never felt pain like this.
Never felt rage like this. Cade looks wrecked, like someone just ripped out his heart.
“After the explosion, we boarded the plane. Our plane, I guess.”
“What do you mean your plane, sweetheart?” Cade asks.
She exhales like it hurts. “Remember how I said Zeke was stopping the buys?”
We both nod.
“Well, he’d been working on that for a while. Taking money from corrupt politicians, billionaires, anyone who paid to hurt kids. He was robbing them blind.”
Fucking genius man.
She swallows. “And he, uh, also hacked into some criminal families. Stole their Black Books.”
I suck in a breath.
Her voice calms, now personal. “That’s how Nate came into the picture.” She looks at Cade.
“Nate’s ex-something. Acronym type. FBI maybe. CIA. I don’t really know, but he’s brilliant. His sister was kidnapped and…”
She stops. Takes a breath. “…she didn’t make it.”
A long silence.
Her voice steadies, like steel hammered in fire.
“Zeke, Tex, and Nate built Project Dylan. We get kids out of foster hellholes, away from abusive parents, and out of trafficking rings. We pull them out and drop the sellers and buyers in a hole so deep they can’t crawl out of.
We use the Black Books as leverage, blackmail, pressure, and muscle. ”
That fire in her is back, low and steady. A different kind of rage.
Purpose.
“I was trained but didn’t get to go on my first mission until my sixteenth birthday,” she adds quietly, like it still haunts her.
Cade cuts in, voice quiet but strained. “So, you’ve been going on these missions since you were sixteen?”
She nods. “Yeah. Zeke, Nate, and Tex pretty much raised me. Trained me to be a weapon for Project Dylan.”
“And you’re still doing these missions? Saving children?” Cade asks.
“Yes, Cade. I’m still saving kids.”
But then her voice flattens. Her eyes go cold.
“Our mission changed my Freshman year. Zeke was on a mission in Chicago. We got a tip. Thought it was solid.” Her shoulders rise and fall once, like she’s trying to stay steady.
“It was a trap. There was an explosion and… and..” her lip quivers, “my brother was murdered.”
Cade looks gutted. I just want names. She keeps going.
“Knox—”
“The DJ?” I ask.
She nods. “Yeah. He pulled me out of a bad state and got me to face it. In a very cruel and usual way for sure, but it worked better than the shrink.”
She glances at me. “Nate was near the blast. He still gets a little shaken up from time to time. Knox is a great hacker, almost Zeke level. He’s a major asset to the team.”
Cade’s voice cuts through the quiet, low and shaky. “If Knox knows all of this, then—”
She nods once. “The girls do too.”
He leans back like the wind got knocked out of him. “Dad’s birthday? When you missed the yacht outing?”
Her silence is the answer. But it’s the way she won’t meet his eyes that really says it.
And I see it. The years of built-up closeness neither of them ever named.
The kind of bond you don’t get from just dating.
This shit runs deeper. Shared summers, family trips, midnight pick-ups, late-night texts when she wouldn’t talk to anyone else.
Cade’s jaw flexes. “You told them. But not me.”
“I told them before we were ever a thing,” she says, voice quiet. “Ellie at St. Lyra’s graduation, and Hales and Knox the summer before Freshman year.”
Cade blinks, like the timeline just shifted under his feet. His brows pull together. “That long ago?”
She nods. “They were my roommates, Cade. My team. My family.”
I watch Cade swallow hard, like he’s trying to make space in his chest for that truth. For everything he didn’t know. Everything she carried before they ever touched. Before he ever kissed her like she was his.
“Where were you on Dad’s birthday, Bella?” Cade asks again.
“I was in New Orleans.” She looks down. “The Black Book families want their data back, and they will do just about anything to get it. I made a trade for some pieces of one, and their leader got me what I asked for. My revenge on Carlos.”
That name is gasoline. I shift forward, something feral curling in my chest. “What kind of revenge, baby?”
Her eyes meet mine. And for the first time tonight, she smiles. But it’s not sweet. It’s dark. Dangerous.
“I should back up. First, Zeke and I got Carlos put in prison. Mariela was pregnant and there was no way in hell we were letting that baby girl grow up with him as a father. So we bankrupted him. Zeke stripped away the cops, politicians, all of it. He leaked Carlos’s failed sales to the feds, enough they couldn’t bury.
Carlos went down. Afterward, we sent Mariela cash, IDs, a way out.
A safe new life for her and her daughter. ”
She shifts in her seat. “So now… back to the New Orleans part. Sabine got Carlos transferred from Miami to New Orleans,” she continues, calmer now. No longer trembling.
“Her men attacked the transport van. Made it look like Carlos ran. And then they sat him in the bayou to wait for me,” she says letting out a huff.
Her voice is different now. It’s like me when I get into one of my rage spirals and don’t come out until someone’s broken or bleeding. She looks like she could kill a god and then go sleep like a damn baby.
Cade, on the other hand, looks like he’s about to faint. His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
“Carlos didn’t make it out of that swamp.”
Cade’s voice is barely above a whisper. “You… you killed a man?”
Ok calm the fuck down, Cade. Fucker had it coming.
Bella’s head tilts. “Not exactly.”
Cade blinks fast. “The message. From Luca. Is this that Carlos?”
She nods once. “Yeah.”
“Okay. What aren’t you telling me?” I ask, “I haven’t seen these messages. What happened in that bayou, baby?”
“Well…” she says, like she’s about to tell us the ending of some twisted bedtime story. “Sabine—who, by the way, totally looks like a voodoo priestess—is a genius. And she lives for revenge. She has this snake that she swears can tell if a soul is rotten.”
She shrugs, “Turns out Carlos’s was.”
Cade looks like he’s going to be sick.
“She told me not to waste my revenge on a head-shot. Said that’d be too merciful. To be smart, savor it.” She shrugs again, all casual carnage. “So, since he had talked about all the nasty things he wanted to do to me with his dick, I shot him in it.”
I wince.
“Sabine shot him in the kneecaps and then we left him there.”
“Fuck, baby,” I mutter. “That’s… brutal.”
Cade looks green. Like, billionaire-heir-vomits-on-his-loafers, kind of green.
She stands and something in her breaks. Her fire is gone. That sharp, fearless energy she carries like armor just flickers out.
“And this,” she says softly, gaze locked on Cade, “this is exactly why I didn’t want to say anything.”
We both rise instantly. I catch her hand. “Bella, wait.”
She stops but she’s not looking at me. Just him. Cade. And he fucking freezes. Doesn’t say a word. And that’s all it takes.
Her chin trembles. “The way you’re looking at me right now, Cade, like the girl you’ve been kissing, sleeping with, and laughing with these past few weeks just ripped her mask off and underneath is something dark and twisted. Like I’m a stranger or worse, some kind of monster.”
Cade’s jaw tightens. His fists clench like he wants to scream, but he doesn’t.
“This is what I was afraid of,” she whispers, like it’s the last secret she has left. “This is why I never told you. Not in Nashville, not ever. I just knew the second I fell in love with you, Cade, I was just biding my time.”
Cade flinches. Like the words physically hit him.
“Because every time I let myself love someone… really love them, I lose them.” Her voice is barely a whisper now. “Zeke. Dylan. My parents. Every damn time I choose love. It gets ripped away from me.”
Cade’s voice cracks the silence. “Bella, I don’t think you’re a monster.”
But he won’t look at her.
Her arms fold tight, but her voice stays calm. Too calm. “Yes. Yes you do, Cade.”
He still wont meet her eyes.
“You know how I know?” she says, stepping back. “Because you haven’t looked me in the eyes once since I told you I left Carlos in that chair.”
Cade drags a hand through his hair, pacing like he’s trying to outrun the truth. “I’m sorry, Bella. But what the hell did you expect? That I’d just nod and say, ‘cool, you killed a guy,’ and go back to kissing your shoulder while you hum yourself to sleep?”
She barely flinches, but I see it.
He keeps pacing. “Jesus, how am I supposed to process that you’ve… that you murdered someone?”
I take a step forward. I’m one more dumbass sentence away from throwing him into a wall, but Bella lifts her hand without looking and stops me cold.
Her voice cuts the air. “I didn’t kill him, Cade.”
Silence.
“I maimed him. For what he did. For what he would’ve done. And then I walked away. Left him alive and bleeding.”
It’s sharp. Brutal. Honest.
And Cade still can’t shut the fuck up. “What happened to Carlos after you left, Bella?” he asks.
She blinks. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” He’s not yelling but the heat is there. “You said you left him but I know you. Maybe better than you think. What really happened after you and Sabine walked out?”
“Cade,” I snap, low and dangerous. “Enough.”
Bella stops me again. She looks at him, flat and tired.
“You want the truth?” she says. “Fine.”
Her voice is fire and ash. “We walked to the door. He asked what would happen to his kid. I told him the truth, that his wife and daughter would live a long, happy life without him. Then Sabine’s men walked in behind us and they burned the fucking house to the ground.”