Chapter 2
Matteo
Isaw the explosion from two miles away, seated at an outdoor café within Rojas territory. I can’t believe that stupid fucker actually did it.
Before I could begin to process that my father was dead, my phone rang. I sighed and dug it out of my pocket, expecting to see Felix’s name on the ID. Instead, it was a name that I thought I’d never see on my phone: Liliana Castillo.
I answered the call. “Lili?”
“I need to talk to you.” Her voice was husky, angry, in my ear, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. How long had it been since I’d heard her voice? A decade?
“Where?” I asked.
“South Beach. You know where.”
I did. We used to meet up near Elíseo when we were younger because it was so crowded with tourists that it was nearly impossible to get caught. “I’ll be there.”
Ten minutes later, I was standing in the hot sand with a gun pointed at my face. I looked from it to Lili Castillo, and my stomach rolled like it did every time I saw her. I am a fucking moron.
It took another heartbeat for my brain to catch up with itself, and I reached out and grabbed the barrel of the gun. With ease, I spun the handgun out of her hands and popped out the clip.
“It’s the middle of the day,” I said and ejected the round from the chamber before putting the weapon into the waistband of my jeans.
The woman in front of me was even more beautiful than I remembered, even if she looked like she’d been dragged behind a car for a mile or so.
She must have been close to the club when my idiota of a father detonated the bomb.
There were scratches on her arms and tears in the flimsy dress that she wore.
There was a bruise on the apple of one cheek, like she’d hit her head on the ground.
Her dark hair was longer than I remembered, but the honey-gold of her eyes was the same.
She wasn’t smiling, but I could easily recall the sharp curve of her mouth and how much I liked the taste of it.
Fuck, not now. “What were you thinking? Calling me here?”
She blinked over and over, staring at her hand like she couldn’t quite believe that I’d taken her weapon from her.
Then her eyes drifted up to mine, and anger twisted across her face; it made the swelling and bruising on her face even more apparent.
“Your father just blew himself up in broad daylight, pendejo,” she spat.
“The only reason I didn’t put a bullet in your forehead the second I saw you—”
Anger boiled in my gut. It had been years since she’d let me be anywhere near her, and I contemplated dragging her some place more private to fuck that bitchiness out of her. “Watch your mouth, Liliana,” I practically barked at her.
“Vete a la mierda!” she snapped back and shoved me.
Even in the sand, I didn’t wobble. She let out a grunt of frustration and pushed me again, and this time, I grabbed her wrists and tugged her close.
Lili let out a scream and struggled, but she was no match for my strength.
The thought sent a prickle down my spine and made my dick hard.
“Where is he?” she demanded, still trying to pull herself out of my grip.
Had she lost her damn mind? I might believe she was in shock if I didn’t know the type of family she grew up in.
If there was any woman in the world more suited to the kind of life we led, I hadn’t met her yet.
Liliana Castillo was beautiful and dangerous and knew better than to wave around a firearm in public.
“What are you talking about? Where is who?”
“Our son.” The words came out like a snarl, and this time, when she yanked her arm, I let her go.
We had never talked about what had happened when we were in high school.
Not that we had fallen in love. Not that we lost a child.
Nothing. To hear her say the words was like a punch to the solar plexus.
“Lili.” I didn’t know what to say. “He’s dead. You know that.”
“Eres un mentiroso,” she insisted. “Your father told me that he was alive.”
That…didn’t make any sense. “He was lying. He wanted to keep you in the club, that’s all.”
Lili shook her head. “If he wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have come in and gotten down on his knees. He wouldn’t have shown me the bomb.”
My head felt like someone had stuffed it with cotton. Nothing about any of this made sense. Why would my father tell her something like that? To torment her? “There’s no way that he survived. I would have been told. I would have told you.”
“Would you?” she demanded.
The accusation hurt more than I cared to admit. Lili had been the one to end things after we were told that the baby had died from the cord being wrapped around his neck. She couldn’t look at me after it happened; she didn’t think what we had was worth blowing up either of our families.
As if any of that had mattered to me.
This was not the place to have this conversation. There were paramedics and cops everywhere, and if I got caught on Castillo territory, there would be nothing that Felix could do to save me. Not that he would, I reminded myself.
I looked around, trying to assess if anyone was hanging too close to us.
“I lost him too,” I said in a low voice, and she slapped me so quickly that I didn’t have time to stop her.
The sound was louder than the slap was painful, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing her arm and wrenching it behind her back so that if she moved, she would dislocate her own shoulder.
“The first one, I’ll forgive,” I said in her ear.
“But try that again, and you won’t use that arm for the next month. ”
Lili scoffed. “Do it,” she taunted me. “Hell, just finish what your father started. Then you won’t have to worry about keeping things from me at all.”
I turned her around, ready to shake her, when the tears gathering in her eyes made me pause.
“If my father wasn’t lying to you,” I said, and it was a big fucking if at that, “he was lying to me too. They told me our son had died the same time that they told you.” She flinched as if I had slapped her.
“And after?” Her voice came out softer, as uncertain as I’d ever heard it. I let her go and watched as she rotated her shoulder slowly.
“Afterward, you dumped me, and I went to work for my father like he’d always planned I would.
” I wanted to reach out and hold her—even after nearly a decade, that remained true—but I wasn’t going to risk her stabbing me.
There was no way that the gun was the only weapon on her; her brothers would have trained her better than that.
“I would never keep something like that from you. He was our son!”
Lili stared at me like she still didn’t believe me, but I could see her wavering now.
Before she could say anything, however, her pocket gave a shrill cry.
Swearing, she reached for it. “Angel,” she said by way of greeting.
I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but Lili winced and held the phone a little away from her ear. “Estoy bien! No te preocupes.”
Angel’s voice was louder now: “Where the fuck are you, Liliana? You left Manny to deal with the paramedics!”
“I’m dealing with something right now,” she said, keeping her voice calm, measured. Her eyes flicked up to mine. “I’ll be home later.”
“No, you come home—”
Lili hung up, cutting him off. She stared at the phone in her hand for a second, and then tossed it as hard as she could so that it skipped across the sand.
“I’m going to regret this, if Angel doesn’t kill me first,” she said, more to herself than to me, and then looked at me again.
“Would Felix know if your father was lying?”
My immediate answer was no…but my father had been under Felix’s thumb for years before the man struck out to take everything Luis Rojas had ever built. “He might,” I said. “But if he had anything to do with covering things up, he’s not going to volunteer that information easily.”
“So, we use force.”
The rational part of my brain screamed at me to tell her no.
I knew better than anyone how dangerous Felix truly was.
More than that, my father was an exceptional liar.
It was very likely that he’d told Lili that our son was alive merely to torture her like this, knowing that she wouldn’t have the chance to interrogate him.
Despite all that, a tiny glimmer of hope had sparked in my chest. It had been a long time since I’d let myself feel anything close to that. “I’ll figure it out,” I told her.
Lili shook her head. “We will figure it out. You’re not going to sideline me.”
“I can’t just take you to Felix’s office, Lili.”
“If you don’t take me, I’ll go myself.”
She was going to get herself killed. Fucking hell.
I reached out and took her chin in my fingers, forcing her to look at me.
“I do this, and you follow my lead, comprende? If you even think of doing something stupid, I’ll take you back to Angel myself and tell him everything. Consequences be damned.”