Chapter 30
Freya is asleep after a long, stressful day. She spent most of the afternoon at a desk next to Ingram, then came home to put in a second shift at GhostEye, debriefing them on the new developments from the Marshall interview.
I gaze down at her. She’s finally surrendered to sleep. Her hand is curled near her stomach, her lips parted, her breath slow and even. I stand there for a moment, watching the tension drain from her face in a way it hasn’t all day.
I pull the blanket up over her shoulder in our bed and step quietly down into the living room because, for me, the adrenaline hasn’t burned off yet, and I don’t want that near her.
A knock comes at the door. Nobody passes through the gates out front, manned by armed guards twenty-four seven since Enzo is meticulous about security. It has to be a Mendez or a woman who has chosen one.
Still, out of habit, I look through the peephole.
Rio.
I open the door, and he steps inside. His expression is dark, his presence heavier than usual. Rio is always serious, but tonight it’s different. Tonight, he looks loaded. As if he’s been carrying something all day and finally decided where to set it down.
“What’s wrong?” I ask because evening visits aren’t typical from Rio unless they involve tequila.
He doesn’t answer right away.
“You want a drink?” I head toward the kitchen.
He looks like a man who might want one.
“No. I’m good.”
We move toward the breakfast bar. He perches on a stool and shrugs off his blazer. The sleeves of his Prada button-down are rolled up, revealing full arms of tattoos. He must have come straight from work.
“I wanted to be at the ranch office this morning, but I got pulled into San Francisco.”
I nod.
“Ava and Enzo told me about the timestamp and what came of the Marshall interview.”
He glances up at me, and I see something I have never seen before in Rio’s dark, hooded eyes. He’s…eager.
Rio Mendez never comes across as if he needs you.
I want to tell him to come out with it, tell me why the hell he’s stopped in at nine-thirty after a long day at Headquarters, why he’s refused tequila. But whatever is going on, his features are strained. It’s not an easy conversation for him.
So I share some of what we learned at the Marshalls’, even though I know he’s heard it from Enzo and Ava when he returned from work.
“Ingram left out a lot of detail in the police report. For one, Zoe might have had a love interest. Her parents heard her arguing a couple of times. She’d become secretive around that relationship and also had an apparent lottery win that enabled her to finally start her business.
They said it was a shock Zoe would have been drunk driving, too. ”
He perks up. “Why’s that?”
“Said she used to volunteer for AA. Alcoholic in the family.”
“But there was alcohol present on the tox report?”
I narrow my eyes and nod. “Yeah.”
He taps his fingertips on the marble. “Maybe it was postmortem fermentation?” he asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “If body recovery is delayed, as it was in this case, sugars break down. You can get false positives.”
“Never heard of it.” But more importantly, why is Rio telling me this now? “You think she wasn’t drunk driving?”
His nostrils flare. “I think Freya was right to keep digging.”
“Interesting development.” I cross my arms and lean on the counter behind me. “Why did you feel the need to come here and tell me this tonight?”
“The case I told Freya to pull?” He looks at me dead in the eyes. “She was my girlfriend.”
The breath in my lungs stills.
“Mariana and I weren’t supposed to exist.” His gaze goes dark. “Different worlds. Kept it quiet. If anyone found out, it would’ve cost both of us.”
“Why’s that?”
He pins me with a look that carries no apology. “She was the sister of a man in a rival motorcycle club.”
Rivals are the same kind of person, just standing on opposite sides.
Rio was patched?
His smile is humorless. “You didn’t think the money for all this came from rodeos and horses alone. Or Enzo’s early tech jobs. Or my time in the city.”
Now that I think of it, the place must be worth at least twenty million. And their company was just valued at more than a billion.
“I had an agreement with my club to get out,” he says. “To wrap things up cleanly and finish what I was responsible for.” He pauses, choosing his words with care. “Once that was done, I was supposed to be free to fully join Enzo with what was the dawn of GhostEye.”
I’ve never heard Rio apologize but his tone rides the edge of one.
“I wasn’t going to risk getting caught with anything that could stain it. Or drag my past into everyone’s future.”
Heavy silence settles between us. He’s standing in the memory, deciding how much of it deserves daylight.
“When I told Mariana how close I was to being out, she asked if we could leave together,” he continues. “She’d found a property in the countryside, one with a rental attached. Said she could get the down payment, that she’d have enough for both of us.”
A soft, humorless breath leaves him. “She was desperate to be done with that world.”
His jaw tightens as he looks past me, the memory settling in his shoulders.
“I told her I couldn’t,” he says. “I had too much tied to my family to disappear. We fought. Neither of us gave ground.”
He lowers his gaze now, features heavy. “I let her leave. I thought she’d go home.” He pauses. “Instead, she drank. And ended up at the bottom of that quarry.”
Rio has been carrying this for years—no wonder he keeps people out.
There’s too much to see.
I watch him for a beat. “And when Freya kept the case open, you wondered if Ingram missed something in Mariana’s case, too?”
He gives a sharp nod. “If he cut corners now, he could have cut them before. Mariana’s file was thin even then. I always knew that.” A brief pause. “But now…there seem to be more coincidences than just the quarry.”
I lift my eyebrows in question.
“One. Mari didn’t really drink. She hated how it made her face red. And two”—his eyes narrow—“one of the things Mariana and I fought about that night was where she got the money for the down payment. She didn’t want to tell me.”
His gaze hardens.
Zoe’s lottery win…
“It was one thing to think about one murder in our town, Ant…”
I finish his sentence: “But now you think there were two.”
“I’m here to tell you that subpoenas and red tape need to come later,” Rio says. “We move now. If we find something at GhostEye, we can rebuild the chain when the paperwork catches up.”
His hand tightens once on the edge of the counter. “I want answers, hermano. Whatever they turn out to be. If Mariana’s death is on me, I’ll carry that again. But if there’s a pattern here—if these cases line up—we need to find—”
“You say find,” I cut in, “but you mean hack.”
He doesn’t flinch. “I mean access.” He straightens. “If a serial killer is operating in this town, and your woman is tied to the investigation, that’s already too close. You’ve thought that through. I know you have.”
I have.
“I’m authorizing the work tonight,” he says. No force. No drama. “But Freya needs to be on board. If she says no tomorrow, we back off.”
He meets my eyes then, just long enough to be clear.
“But I want you to talk to her. Make sure she understands why I’m asking.”
It hits like a shot fired in a silent room.
Rio puts on his jacket. I follow him to the threshold, watching the tension in his shoulders, the way he hesitates before stepping into the night.
He turns back—a decade of blame flickers across his face.
“This stays in the family,” he says so low I barely hear him.
I clasp his shoulder, and he knows that I’ve got him. “I’m glad you got out.”
At that, he turns one last time, and there’s a haunted darkness in his eyes. “Out wasn’t the same as free. Once they got you, they always have their hooks in you.”
The words drop heavy between us, and he leaves.
I stand there for a moment, forehead against the door, exhaling through my nose.
This isn’t clean.
Today, Freya said she wanted to stay within the legal realm for as long as possible, and now…Rio came to inform me he’s stepping over that line. And he asked for Freya’s support.
And the truth?
It’s what I want, too.
For Rio.
For Freya.
For our baby.
I’ve never known if I’m good at a lot of things, but I sure as hell know how to protect what’s mine.
I’d walk straight into hell for that woman in my bed.
If the devil wanted a fight, I’d bring back his crown just to set it on her curls.