Chapter 18 Alejandro
EIGHTEEN
Alejandro
Marisol and the kids would be back in an hour. School pickup, then a stop at the store because we were low on milk, then home.
Back here. Where…
… it wasn’t safe.
I headed straight for the kitchen, putting the table between Levi and me, not wanting him anywhere near me.
There were faint shadows under his eyes, a line between his brows that hadn’t been there before.
I told myself I didn’t have room to care and leaned back against the counter, feeling the cool edge bite into my spine.
“Alejandro?” he pushed, and I winced. I felt something twist in my gut, sharp and cold, like a hand closing around my spine.
I was giving in to fear or something worse.
Memories. Exposure. The past pushed up through me, forcing me to face everything I’d buried.
Ortega’s name coming from his mouth… it was as if pieces of a life I’d burned down were clawing their way back.
My stomach lurched, a sick mix of anger and shame rolling through me.
How the hell did Levi know Raven’s name?
And why did it make me feel fourteen again, blood on my hands, fire behind my eyes, someone I didn’t recognize and never entirely stopped being?
“Are you working with Ortega?” he pushed again.
“I said, he’s dead,” I corrected, blinking at him.
“No, he’s fucking not!” Levi narrowed his gaze. “Fuck, Alejandro, are you working for him? Providing him with bodies? Is that why he’s in the country?”
What? He’s here?
“No.” The word scraped out of me, barely formed.
A hot, sour rush surged up my throat—panic, disbelief, nausea all tangled into one sick punch.
My vision narrowed to the phone in my hand, the screen blurring, my fingers shaking.
Raven. Alive. The thought hit like a knife under the ribs.
If he’d survived—if I hadn’t finished it—then every shadow I’d felt for the past few weeks had a name, a face, a reason.
The past didn’t just rush in—it rammed into my skull, ripping through the walls I’d built. Blood. Fire. Screaming. The weight of a knife in my hand. The smell of acid. Fifteen-year-old me standing in the ruins of something I’d made, something I couldn’t undo.
I swallowed hard. Anger flared—not at Levi, but at the weakness clawing up my spine as the truth I’d buried cracked open.
How did Levi know that name? How the fuck did he know?
The floor seemed to shift under me, and I forced my breathing to steady, slamming the lid down on everything breaking loose inside me.
I had to. I felt the shift, the way some people felt the weather changing: a pressure drop, a coldness settling in my bones, and the sick panic from moments ago disappeared.
I straightened a little, rolled my shoulders back, and let the mask settle.
The real one—not the version who smiled at my sister’s kids, not the one who pretended everything was normal.
The one I’d been carved into. The one Raven helped make—the one who didn’t break.
“No,” I repeated, flatter this time.
The kitchen was quiet. The hum of the fridge. A car passing outside. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked, high and repetitive. I focused on each sound in turn, anything but the way my skin felt too tight.
“No, what? No, you’re not working with him? No, you’re not delivering humans for him to carve up. No, you’re not—”
“He’s dead!” I shouted. “Leave it alone.”
He didn’t move. “No, he’s not. And this Raven was the cartel’s money man. Some of that cartel money ended up with you. So I’m not letting this go until you explain your connection to him, and why Gael and Lucia Varga disappeared from all known records.”
My jaw clenched. I hadn’t even realized until I felt the ache.
“Please, Alejandro,” Levi prompted quietly, anguish in his expression. “Tell me you’re not trafficking people for their organs, tell me I can still trust whatever is between us.”
There it was—the push.
Not shouting and not threatening. Only constant pressure.
“There’s nothing between us.” There can’t be.
He stepped closer, gripped my arm, and tilted my chin with a finger. “That’s a lie,” he murmured, and for a moment, I was lost in velvet brown eyes. What would it be like to have something real? Would it be total trust? Acceptance? No secrets?
No! It was just sex. I recoiled from his touch and shook him off.
He was shocked for a moment, but I’d seen the distrust in him, heard the accusations. There was nothing real between us because I’d been carrying secrets.
He continued after that pause. “A massacre wiped out an entire cell, the first iteration of the águilas Cartel.” Levi stopped as if he was waiting for me to fill in the gaps.
“No witnesses. No suspects. But you knew Ortega’s name.
You called him Raven. So, I’ll ask you again.
” His voice dropped. “What is your connection to him?”
The air left the room.
Not in a dramatic way. No whooshing, no roaring in my ears.
Just… gone. As if someone had opened a valve in my chest and everything leaked out, leaving me hollow.
I went still, and my gaze fixed on the tiles by his boot.
When we’d moved in, Marisol had hated those tiles, said they looked like hospital flooring.
I’d left them. Easy to clean. Blood wiped right off.
Think of something—any lie. I’ve been lying for so long. Lie. Deflect. Twist. I’m good at this.
Nothing came.
“It was me,” I heard myself say. “All of them.” The words pushed their way out, slow and unstoppable.
“Nineteen men. Seven poisoned—five shot in their sleep. Four with their throats cut. Two just acid and fire.” I listed them as if I were counting instruments on a tray.
My tone was flat, distant. The numbers slotted into place in the air between us.
Levi’s face lost color.
“Then one more. Raven was last,” I added, because if I stopped now, I would choke on it. I swallowed hard. “I killed him,” I said, still confused that Levi thought he was still alive. “I killed all of them.”
Silence. I lifted my head.
Levi was staring, shocked, as if someone had yanked the world from under him, and words spilled out of me at a furious rate.
“Raven was a murderer. A rapist. Evil. He hurt people because it amused him. Tortured them because no one stopped him. Raped and killed my mom with his friends and lieutenants because it made him feel powerful. He broke my mom, and started on my sister, and I waited, and I planned every moment, and I killed him. He wasn’t the first. He was the last, and I made him watch so he was sure to feel every second of it—used a poison that kept him awake, tied him so he could watch, cut him open, threw acid on him, and watched him burn. ” I paused.
Levi’s jaw worked. No sound came out at first. Then: “How old were you?”
“Fourteen.” My mouth answered before my brain could shut it up, then I tipped my chin and owned this shit. “Almost fifteen.”
His fingers flexed at his side. “Do you understand what—”
“Yes.” My temper flared, sharp. “I understand exactly what it is.” I met his gaze. “I was there, and they were all dead. No one survived. I thought we were safe.”
Levi stared at me as if he was trying to reconcile the version of me he’d built in his head with the one standing in front of him now.
Shock, horror, calculation, pity—his expression flickered through all of it, too fast for me to pin down.
For a second, I thought he might pull out his gun and arrest me.
Or shoot. Or run. Or freaking hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay. The uncertainty twisted in my gut.
“And the transferred money?” he asked, finally.
“I had everything I needed from Raven, forced him to hand over passwords, took his finger.” I held up my hand and stared at it, remembering taking the finger first, the way he’d screamed and cursed me.
Coward. “When we got away from the authorities, I used what I could to start over here and dispersed the rest to other victims.”
“Alejandro—”
“I killed them all,” I repeated. Summarized. Wanted to make sure he knew that.
I heard a sound behind me; I knew it was Marisol. “He killed them all for me,” Marisol whispered, and I turned to face her, glancing behind to see if Bradley and Molly were there. “I sent them upstairs,” she added. They didn’t know the full horror; they never would.
“No, I did it for me,” I said. “This isn’t on you.”
She gave me a stubborn chin tilt—stoic, dry-eyed, not shedding a single tear, although grief was carved into every line of her face.
She held it the way she always had—locked down, silent, the kind of silence that had once kept her alive.
No shaking hands, no hitch in her breath.
Just that terrible, practiced stillness.
It was the silence that scared me sometimes—the kind born from surviving too much, too young, the kind that said she’d learned long ago crying never stopped anything, never saved anyone, and never made the monsters go away.
She came close to me, slid under my arm, and stared at Levi. “I won’t let you take him.” She curled into me.
“You need to go upstairs with the twins,” I said. Begged. I didn’t want her to know that Raven had made it out.
How had he survived what I did to him?
“And Raven being in the country?” Levi asked.
I felt Marisol stiffen in shock. “What?” she asked, horrified. “What do you mean?” She eased away from me and glanced up, her expression broken. “You said they were all dead.”
“I killed them all, I…” I didn’t know what to say. “Somehow, Raven crawled out from death. I will find him, Lucia, I promise you, and I will finish this.”
“What if he thinks the twins… what if they’re…”
“No, don’t think that,” I said, a little desperate.
We didn’t know which of the cartel members was actually the father of the twins, but it didn’t matter; Bradley and Molly would never have to deal with this, and neither would my sister.
“Where is he?” I asked Levi who was watching the exchange between my sister and me.
“We’re working on finding him.”
“Cops?” I laughed, a sound that tasted like metal. “Forgive me for knowing they won’t find anything at all.”
“I have other avenues to explore. A different team. We’ll find him.”
And then it hit me. Not a thought—an impact.
A jolt so violent it felt like the floor pitched under my feet.
The photograph Molly had sent. The man who’d been staring.
The scars. The posture. The wrongness I couldn’t name at the time.
The attack on Marisol. My hand slipped on the phone.
I caught it on the second try, fingers shaking as I scrolled, my other hand fisting tight in Marisol’s T-shirt because I needed the anchor to stay upright.
The face on the screen, which I held out of her reach, swam into focus.
No. No, no—
My heart slammed hard enough to hurt, a thick, sick thud that clawed up my chest and stole my breath.
It could be him.
It was him.
He was breathing the same air as we were, and walking the same streets.
Raven had survived.
Every drop of blood I’d spilled. Every cut. Every scream. Every flame. All of it—undone.
He’d found me.
Worse—he’d found my sister and her babies.