Chapter 8 #3
Disco screams.
I bite Diablo’s shoulder to keep from laughing and moaning at the same time. He curses, grips my hips, and gives me exactly what I asked for. Want. Not fear. Not a cage. Not control dressed up as protection.
Us.
Our fight is still in the room. Carmen’s threat is still in the room. Lady’s roses, Shady’s silence, Rafael’s grave, every ugly thing waiting outside that door, all of it is still there.
But Diablo is inside me, shaking with the effort to be a man instead of a wall, and I love him so much it terrifies me.
His rhythm breaks rougher. His mouth finds mine again.
“Marry me,” he says.
I freeze.
He moves again, deep, and my breath tears loose.
“What?”
His eyes lock on mine. “Marry me.”
“Are you seriously proposing while you’re inside me?”
“Yes.”
“Diablo.”
“Say no if it is no.” His voice breaks on the next stroke. “But I’m done letting Carmen be the last woman Miami saw me promise myself to. I’m done paying Rafael’s debts with your pain. I’m done pretending I can breathe in any future where you’re not my wife.”
My eyes burn.
He stops moving.
That is what undoes me.
Not the proposal. Not the heat. The stop. The choice. The way he holds himself still inside me, shaking, waiting, letting my answer matter more than what his body wants.
“Not because of Carmen,” I whisper.
“No.”
“Not because you’re scared.”
“I’m scared as fuck,” he says. “But no. Because I love you. Because I choose you when the room is watching and when nobody is. Because I should have asked before there was blood at the door, but I’m asking now with all of mine on the table.”
A tear slips down my cheek.
I hate it.
He kisses it.
I hate that more.
“Yes,” I whisper.
His whole body goes still.
Then his face breaks open in a way I have never seen. Not soft. Diablo is never soft. But open. Wounded. Mine.
“Yes?” he asks.
I cup his face. “Yes. But if you ever try to make me a prisoner in the name of being your wife, I will divorce you, take the bird, and teach him to say your dick is small.”
Behind him, Disco screams, “?Pendejo!”
Diablo closes his eyes like he is praying for patience from a God who has already abandoned him to women and birds.
Then he laughs.
Then he kisses me.
Then he starts moving again, and the laugh turns into something darker.
He takes me over the edge with my name in his mouth and his hands locked on my hips.
I come apart hard enough that the office disappears, that Carmen disappears, that every white rose in Miami burns down to ash behind my eyes.
He follows with a rough groan against my throat, holding me like I’m not fragile, but precious. There is a difference.
After, we stay tangled on the desk, breathing like sinners after confession.
Disco mutters from his perch, “Pretty.”
I turn my face into Diablo’s chest and laugh until I almost cry.
Diablo kisses the top of my head. “I’m getting that bird a muzzle.”
“You’re not.”
“He witnessed too much.
“He witnessed a proposal. He is family.”
“He called me pendejo during a life milestone.”
“He was accurate.”
A knock hits the door.
Diablo’s entire body goes dangerous in half a second. “What?”
Alpha’s voice comes through the wood. “Clothes on unless you want this briefing to become everybody’s problem.”
I close my eyes. “I hate this club.”
“No, you don’t,” Diablo says.
“No, I don’t.”
He helps me down, careful now, his hands lingering until I swat him away because if he keeps touching me, Alpha can brief us from the hallway for the rest of his life.
When we open the door, Alpha stands there with a tablet, eyes fixed aggressively above our shoulders.
“Congratulations, I assume,” he says.
Diablo’s brows lift. “You assume?”
“I’ve been waiting outside the door. I heard furniture die and Darling say yes. Context clues.”
My face heats. “Alpha.”
“Right. Crime.” He looks down at the tablet. “I dug deeper into Amour Reyes.”
That sobers the room fast.
We step out into the hall. Diablo’s hand stays at my back. In the main room, the Saints are still moving. Carmen’s visit has left a charge in the air like lightning looking for a place to land.
Alpha swipes the screen. “Reyes Floral was clean on paper until Rafael Solano’s last year alive. Then it started taking private contracts from three shell companies connected to Solano routes. Not drug routes. Burial logistics.”
I frown. “Funeral flowers?”
“Funeral flowers, refrigerated transport, cemetery maintenance donations, grave deliveries. All clean unless you stack the dates beside club murders and missing shipments.”
Diablo goes still beside me. “Rafael used the flower company to move something.”
“Or hide something,” Alpha says.
My stomach tightens.
Alpha’s phone pings.
He looks down.
The color drains from his face.
Diablo notices. “What?”
Alpha turns the phone toward us.
Unknown sender. No number. No profile. Just a message in plain text.
STOP LOOKING AT THE FLOWERS.
START LOOKING AT RAFAEL’S GRAVE.
Under it is a photo.
A grave marker in moonlight.
RAFAEL SOLANO.
Across the stone lies one white rose, snapped clean in half.