35. Robin
ROBIN
Eagle.
My brother.
My blood.
My annoying, damaged, frustrating, wounded, beautiful brother.
I stare at Cruz, waiting for him to take it back. Tell me he’s joking. As if he could ever joke about something like that.
He doesn’t.
Cruz Moreno, who dragged me from Texas to Colombia, who has blood all over his face and grief carved into his mouth, doesn’t take it back.
“What did you just say?” I say through gritted teeth.
My voice is calm.
Too calm.
So calm it sounds like someone else’s.
Cruz’s jaw tightens. “Robin—”
“No.” I step closer. “Say it again.”
He doesn’t.
I hear movement above me. Esmeralda and the others leaving the house.
But that all fades beneath the roar building in my ears.
Eagle’s overdose was staged.
Not an overdose.
Not a relapse gone horribly wrong.
Not my brother spiraling so badly that his old demons dragged him back under.
Staged.
And Cruz was the one who did it.
I look at his hands.
Blood stains his knuckles, his palms, the creases of his fingers. Zabala’s blood. Senora Valentina’s blood. Maybe his own.
And now, in my mind, Eagle’s blood too.
Not literal blood.
Worse.
The invisible kind.
“How?” I finally ask.
“Robin, we need to leave.”
“How?”
He flicks his gaze toward the stairs.
“How did you do it?”
Cruz looks down at my hands on his shirt. “It was simple mathematics,” he says.
He says it so coldly that I almost slap him.
Simple mathematics. As if he’s talking about balancing a checkbook.
“You determined what?” I ask. “How much it would take to kill him?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.” His voice hardens, but not with anger. “How much to not kill him. I told you. Vega was very clear about that.”
I kick at the floor. “Congratulations.”
“I mean that.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I determined how much it would take to make it look like what Vega wanted it to look like.”
“A drug overdose.”
“Yes.”
I hold on to his shirt because if I let go, I might fall. “Keep going.”
“I watched him for days,” he says. “Tracked his movements. His routines. He was erratic. Agitated.”
“Where?” I ask.
“Outside Hawk’s place.”
The breath leaves me.
No.
No, no, no.
“He was trying to get to Hawk,” Cruz says quietly. “Knocking on the door. Hard. Shouting. He looked unstable.”
“He was terrified.”
“I know that now.”
“You don’t know anything.”
His jaw flexes.
“He was knocking like a madman,” Cruz says. “No one answered. I approached from behind and incapacitated him.”
“Incapacitated,” I repeat. “Get real. Tell me what you actually did.”
“I knocked him unconscious.”
My stomach twists. “And then?”
Cruz’s eyes darken. “Then I did it. I drugged him.”
I blink. “You drugged my brother while he was unconscious.”
“Yes.”
“And left him there?”
“I laid him out where he would be found by family.”
A sickening laugh tears out of me. “How thoughtful.”
“Robin—”
“No, really,” I spit out. “That was so considerate of you. You staged my brother’s overdose but made sure someone who loved him would get to find the body.”
“He wasn’t supposed to be a body.”
I whip my gaze to him. “But he could have been.”
Cruz says nothing.
He can dress it up however he wants. Orders. Assignment. Mathematics. Not meant to kill.
But he knew.
He knew there was a chance Eagle would die. And that thought makes my blood boil.
“And the cocaine?” I ask.
His face stills.
“What?”
“There was cocaine in Hawk’s truck. He realized after the fact.”
“That wasn’t me. The coke was already there.”
“What?”
He clears his throat. “When I was casing the property, I noticed Hawk’s truck in the driveway. There was a large amount of cocaine in the back. Why the hell he had so much, I have no idea.”
My mind flashes back.
Hawk’s truck.
The horror of finding Eagle.
The confusion.
The way everything seemed connected and disconnected at once.
And fire surges within my core.
I shove Cruz.
Not hard enough to knock him back.
But hard enough to make him feel it.
“It made the scene easier to explain,” he says. “There was already a trail. Eagle had a history. I opened one of the bags to make it look like he’d used it.”
My stomach roils.
Cruz did it all.
“You made it look like Eagle took cocaine from Hawk’s truck,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You made us believe he relapsed.”
“Yes.”
I remember Eagle’s face.
Not from before.
From after.
Or what I saw of it.
Blue lips.
Sweat.
Vomit.
Twitching limbs.
His body fighting for life while I screamed his name.
My vision blurs.
No.
I refuse to cry.
Not yet.
Not in front of him.
“I checked the next day,” Cruz says. “To make sure he’d been found. I wasn’t going to let him die.”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah? Good. That’s just great, Cruz. And he was gone, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You know why?” I struggle to breathe. “I was the one who found him. I was the one who found my little brother near death.”
“Robin—"
“I went there because Hawk wasn’t answering his phone. He was with Daniela and wasn’t paying attention. I was worried, so I went to check on him.”
The memory comes back so clearly I can smell it. I wrap both arms around myself.
I steady my voice to keep it from breaking. “He was on the ground. His lips were blue. His fingertips too. His skin was clammy. Covered in sweat. There was vomit everywhere.”
Cruz’s face twists.
Good.
“He was twitching,” I say. “His limbs were jerking like his body didn’t know how to stay alive. I thought he was going to die.”
The tears come now.
I hate them.
I hate that they blur Cruz’s face.
I hate that my body betrays me at the exact moment I want to be nothing but rage.
“I screamed for help,” I say. “I called 911. I kept saying his name because I thought if I stopped, he would slip away. I thought maybe if he heard me, he’d come back.”
He takes a few steps toward me. “Robin, please.”
I throw a hand in his face. “You were the one who did that to him!”
His eyes close.
Only for a second.
When they open, they’re wet. He’s not crying. But it’s close enough that I hate him for it.
“Yes,” he says.
“The doctors gave him a fifty-fifty chance.”
Cruz stills. “What?”
“A fifty-fifty chance of making it,” I say. “That’s what we were told.”
He swallows. “I didn’t know that.”
“You didn’t know that when you left him unconscious after drugging him?”
“I calculated—”
“If you mention math to me one more time, I swear to God, Cruz.” I bury my face in my hands.
“But he’s okay,” Cruz says, and the desperation in his voice makes me furious all over again. “He woke up, didn’t he?”
I stare at him.
“Didn’t he?”
I wipe a tear off my cheek. “He’s still in the hospital, as far as I know. I haven’t been able to check because in case you missed it, I was abducted and taken to Colombia.”
His face twists with pain.
But pain isn’t enough.
Not this time.
“I’m grateful to you,” I say. “Grateful that you got me out, even though you’re the reason I was in that dirty place. I owe you my fucking life. But you almost took my brother’s.”
How the hell am I supposed to balance that? How can I find rationale for my feelings for this man when his actions nearly killed my brother? Put my family—when we were already dealing with all my father’s bullshit—through so much turmoil?
“I’ll always be grateful,” I continue, speaking slowly. “But I don’t see a future for us.”
Cruz goes still.
“I can’t,” I say. “I can’t in good conscience use my family’s money to help a man whose actions could have easily killed my own flesh and blood.”
He says nothing.
I almost wish he would argue.
“I understand,” he says.
Damn him.
I don’t want him to understand.
I want him to make this easier. I want him to say something cruel so I can slam the door on whatever stupid thing was growing between us and never look back.
But Cruz just stands there, bloody and devastated, and lets me choose.
I step closer before I can stop myself.
“Robin.”
“Don’t.” I rise onto my toes and kiss him. Just a soft touching of our lips, but for a second, the basement around us disappears.
Everything disappears.
The blood.
The panic.
The dead woman upstairs.
The brother in the hospital.
The men coming to kill us.
All of it falls away.
Cruz doesn’t grab me. Doesn’t deepen the kiss.
That ruins me more than if he had pulled me against him.
I press my lips to his harder, parting them, because I need to know. I need to know what I’m walking away from. I need one true thing in a morning full of horror.
He tastes like coffee, blood, and grief.
I pull back before I can change my mind.
His eyes are closed.
“I’ll take Senora Valentina’s car to the embassy,” I say. “I saw the keys hanging in the kitchen.”
“No.”
“Fine. I’ll take the stolen car. You take Senora’s. I don’t give a shit.”
“Robin, I’m not letting you drive alone.”
“You don’t get to decide what I do.” I exhale sharply.
“I don’t care which car I take. I’ll go to the embassy.
I’ll tell them what happened here. I won’t say anything about you killing Zabala unless I have to.
” I draw in breath, hold it for a moment.
“And I won’t tell my family what you did to Eagle. ”
“Rob—”
I hold up a hand.
“I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it because if my brothers find out, they’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.” My voice steadies. “And I don’t want more blood. Not because of me. Because you rescued me, I’ll spare you that.”
He exhales slowly and pulls bills out of his pocket. “At least take these. It’s not much. Worth maybe a hundred US dollars.”
I nod and take them. “So this is what happens,” I say.
“You go. You live honestly from this point on. You stay away from Vega. Away from Adriana. Away from my family. If you do that”—I close my eyes and run my hands through my hair—“you won’t face repercussions from the Bellamys. Not from me. Not through me, anyway.”
“You can’t promise what your brothers will do.”
“They won’t know.”
“And if they find out?”
“Then I guess you’d better make damn sure they don’t. I’ll do my part.”
I turn then, wearing socks and sweats that aren’t mine, and walk up the stairs.