Chapter 19 Levi
NINETEEN
Levi
I watched Alejandro shift from shock to something empty and cold, and it happened so fast I couldn’t keep up.
One moment, he was unsteady on his feet, breath stuttering, color drained from his face as if the past had reached straight through his skin and wrapped a hand around his throat.
The next, the panic vanished as if it had never existed at all.
His eyes went flat, his posture settled, and an eerie kind of calm rolled through him.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet. Controlled. Terrifying.
I’d seen people harden themselves before—cops facing down their first shooting, victims giving statements with trembling hands—but nothing like this.
Nothing that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
It was like watching a whole person disappear and something colder step into place, neat and practiced, as natural as breathing.
And standing there in his kitchen, with the faint hum of the fridge and the smell of stale coffee mixing with whatever tension he was giving off, I understood—maybe for the first time—that most of what I’d seen of him before had been a version built carefully over years.
The performance of a man who flirted when he was irritated, who rolled his eyes at danger, who stitched up strangers without asking for thanks or caring if they lived.
Not a lie exactly, but definitely not the whole truth either.
Because the person in front of me now… this was the core. The part carved out of violence—the part he’d been forced to grow into.
He exhaled—slow, even—and the air around him seemed to settle.
His shoulders rolled back with an ease that made my stomach tighten, as if slipping into this version of himself was more natural than staying in the previous one.
Everything in him streamlined: his breath, his posture, the way he watched me with eyes that saw more than I wanted them to.
A killer’s focus.
And if I were being honest, I recognized something of it. That cold, necessary distance you stepped into when the world demanded you be harder than you felt. I’d come close to it once or twice in my career, but he lived there permanently.
He eased Marisol away from him, and for a split second I caught one of the twins—Bradley, I thought—watching him with wide, unsettled eyes, already sensing something was wrong, and Marisol stared up at him, confused and afraid.
“Get the twins. Secondary passports only, no electronics, no clothes. Get them and get in the car.”
“We’re leaving?”
“Get them in the car.”
“Alejandro,” I said quietly, as Marisol must have seen something in my face and hurried out of the kitchen. “Alejandro!” I shouted when he refused to look at me.
His gaze flicked my way, and the obsession I’d glimpsed there before was gone and completely gone.
In its place was a watchful, precise calculation that made my pulse trip.
He wasn’t deciding how to answer me. He was deciding whether answering me was a threat to his survival.
And the sick churning in my stomach wasn’t just fear.
It was something worse—because I had no idea which version of him I wanted back.
The unraveled one, the closed-off one, or the dangerous one standing in front of me now, who felt more honest than either.
“Ask your questions, Detective,” he said, each word hammered into something sharp. Detective, not Levi. A line drawn. A warning.
“Ortega—”
“If Raven survived what I did to him,” he said, voice lowering, “then every second I’ve spent trying to build something here was a fucking joke.
” There was anger in him now—quiet, contained, but beneath it was fear that took me a second to recognize.
The kind aimed not at himself, but at losing something he couldn’t afford to lose. Marisol and the twins. His family.
“He hurt her, Levi,” he said softly, then drew in a breath as if he was pulling it up from a long, dark place he’d bolted shut.
“He hurt… people,” he said. “Tortured them. Took their kidneys, their livers, their fucking hearts! Then he killed them. And when he went after her, when he killed Momma, and then forced my sister…” He inhaled. “He had to die. They all did.”
He stepped back, bracing himself on the counter, and for the briefest moment—just a crack—I saw past the mask.
I saw the boy he’d been—scared, outnumbered, pushed past every limit, making choices that no child should have had to make.
His eyes flickered, were filled with pain, fury, and maybe something like shame—then vanished beneath the mask again.
He huffed out something like a laugh, but it was hollow. “Terrified isn’t useful right now. But that’s all I’m feeling.” He stared at me, still as a statue. Then he said, “It doesn’t matter what I feel.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“You want the truth?” he murmured, eyes on mine but not seeing me.
He yanked at his shirt, revealing the inked bird I’d glimpsed before.
“This isn’t a tattoo.” His voice went thin.
“It’s ownership. He carved and tattooed a bird into me when I was nine.
A raven. Said it meant I belonged to him. ” He huffed out a breath.
“We find him,” I said. “Together.”
No reaction. No blink. No breath. Then, finally, quietly: “Don’t make me trust you if you can’t follow through.”
“I’m here.”
“Fuck! He’ll go for her if he can. If he’s here, I don’t know what’s holding him back. How did he know… how did he find us… what the fuck…” He carded his hands through his hair and gripped tight as if he was spiraling again.
“Where are you taking your family?” I asked, and when he didn’t answer, I gripped his arm again and shook him.
He blinked at me—lost in his own world. I caught his wrist—steady, controlled pressure—because he was shaking and didn’t realize it.
“Alejandro,” I said quietly, “look at me. Where are you taking them?”
“I’ll… I have a place,” he said.
I curled my hand around the back of his neck—warm skin, tight muscle, a pulse kicking hard under my thumb. And there was the smallest chink in that mask, as something in my chest pulled tight enough to hurt.
“Stay with me,” I said, voice low. “Don’t disappear on me right now.”
“I need to… think…”
Before I could push him for more, he was already moving—snatching his keys off the counter, heading for the door as if the ground beneath our feet was on fire.
I followed because there was nothing else I could do.
After all, whatever thin line existed between us had snapped into something sharper, and I wasn’t about to let him walk into this alone.
Before we made it out of the door, Bradley and Molly hovered in the hallway—wide-eyed, confused, whispering to each other.
Marisol tried to reassure them, but her voice shook, her hands trembling as she urged them to grab their shoes.
Bradley kept asking what was happening, why Uncle Alli wasn’t talking, and why he looked like that.
Molly clung to her mother’s arm, staring at Alejandro as if she didn’t recognize him.
Alejandro didn’t answer a single question.
He opened the door and told them to move.
The confusion and fear in the house clung to all of us as we stepped outside.
I took shotgun in his car before he could tell me to back off, but when Marisol and the twins climbed into the back, no one introduced me.
Alejandro didn’t speak as he started the car.
His hand tightened on the wheel until the leather creaked, then there was a deadly stillness in him. Controlled. Focused. Terrified.
We pulled away from the curb fast enough that my shoulder hit the door.
I had no damn business being in that car, but I stayed anyway.
I stayed because the thought of him facing this alone made something ugly twist in my chest. Call it instinct or stupidity—didn’t matter.
I’d already chosen my side, long before I said it out loud.
With Novak following in his van, halfway down the block, Alejandro made the first call through his EarPods—rapid-fire, precise.
I caught enough to piece it together: shut it down, close it out, no more work.
Whatever business he had running in the shadows—medical, cartel-adjacent, something between the lines—he was cutting it loose.
I wanted to know what he was shutting down.
When he ended the call, I asked, “You’re closing the Doc-for-hire?”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “I’m not the only doc out there doing this, you know.”
“I get that.”
“And I have other things to do for now.”
“Are you an actual doctor?” I asked.
He glanced at me. “I don’t have a degree if that’s what you mean.”
“Field medicine then,” I summarized.
“Necessity driven,” he said, and then made a second call, slower but just as firm. He inhaled once, as if he had to brace himself.
“I’m calling in the favor,” he said when the person picked up. His voice didn’t crack, but something underneath it did as he argued loudly with whoever he was talking to, a long list of curses, then snapped a “fuck you,” and gave an address.
“Why there?” I asked.
“Because it’s another one of Novak’s places,” he said without looking at me. “He’s got cameras everywhere. If anyone tried to touch my family, he’d know.”
My pulse kicked hard at the mention of Novak, and I knew I had to ask one of the questions that I had, whatever the consequences of him telling me. “Alex Dryden-Well was found dead with his throat cut. Was it Novak’s work?”
“The surgeon?” He frowned, shook his head. “Novak couldn’t find him. Hell, I couldn’t find him. He’s dead?”
“Oh yeah, throat slit, face all carved up, his father dead as well.”
“Face carved up?”
“Ribbons.”
“Raven. That was his signature. Not Novak.”
“And you trust Novak?”