Chapter 7
Lili
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t wrap my head around what had just happened, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at Matteo either. I could still feel his hands on my body; my lips were swollen from his kisses.
But he’d asked a question...now wasn’t the time to focus on the way my inner muscles kept clenching down on nothing. “There wasn’t a smoking gun, if that’s what you’re asking.” Nothing as concrete as Felix saying out loud that there were two children with both Castillo and Rojas genes.
“Think,” Matteo urged. “What were you looking at?” He muttered something about how he should have looked at the damn screen myself, and I remembered that he had an eidetic memory, and I absolutely didn’t, but I racked my brain to remember what I had seen.
“I was looking at financial spreadsheets. There were some repeated transactions to the same person in Tampa.”
“What was the name?”
Think, damn it. “It was a woman. Jalissa Nunez. Your father had been sending her a little over five grand every month for a decade or so.” While it sounded suspicious, it wasn’t necessarily connected to our son. “Did your father know anyone in Tampa?”
Matteo nodded. “A distant cousin on his side. They moved to the US the same time he did.”
“So it’s probably nothing.” Luis could have been holding up some kind of deal by sending his cousin money. Or she could have been running some kind of business for him in the Tampa area.
He sighed. “But it’s all we have for now,” he said. His eyes dragged over me. “We need to get you a change of clothes before we go. You look like a car accident victim.”
I looked down at myself. He was right. Pendejo. “I don’t suppose we can stop at the compound?”
Matteo didn’t even bother to answer me. We both knew it was impossible. Instead, he drove to a clothing store far enough from Felix’s office building that we hopefully wouldn’t be spotted. “What’s your size?” he asked.
I raised my eyebrow in question. “Why would I tell you that?”
“You can’t go inside. They’ll call the cops.”
I looked down at myself again and sighed. He had a point. I told him my size. “Just some kind of tee shirt and pants, all right?”
“I think I can handle it,” Matteo said. “Trust me.”
He was gone before I could even scoff at the idea of finding him trustworthy. The burner cell that he’d filmed me with was left in the cupholder between our seats. It buzzed to life while he was still inside the store. Fuck.
I reached down and picked up the phone. It was Angel’s number on the screen. I answered the call. “Angel.”
“Lili?” He started shouting at me in rapid, angry Spanish.
“Cálmate!” I shouted into the phone. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”
“Not hurt?” Angel demanded. “You looked like you’d been dragged under a goddamn car, Liliana!”
I hated it when Angel got like this. He was so upset that he wasn’t actually listening. Talking to my eldest brother was, at times, like talking to a brick wall, and he was just as communicative. “You try running from a bomb,” I snapped.
Angel swore out loud, but his tirade seemed to run out of steam. “Where are you?” he demanded. “We’re coming.”
“Don’t.”
There was a pause, and then Omar’s voice came on the line. “What do you mean ‘don’t’? What are you doing, Lili?”
Ask your wives was on the tip of my tongue.
Lyse was the only one who ever knew about mine and Matteo’s relationship.
I didn’t know how much she knew about the pregnancy, but she knew that we were in love, that we had planned to run away.
Emma was probably the only one I’d ever said the words “I was pregnant” to outside of Matteo; it had been the first time I’d mentioned it in years.
Given the circumstances, it wouldn’t be hard for her to figure out who was the father.
But I didn’t want to start World War Cartel at home again.
“I’m dealing with something right now.”
Omar made a sound like an angry cat. “What are you dealing with that we can’t help with?”
The driver’s side door opened. “I’m not sure if I got the right thing—”
“Is that Matteo?” Omar demanded. “Put that bastardo on the phone.”
I sighed. “No, thank you. You can speak to me, or I can hang up.”
“Hang up? What the fuck are you talking about?” Omar shouted.
“Explain yourself,” Angel demanded. They must have me on speaker phone.
How could I possibly explain over the phone like this? “Matteo and I—” That had both of my brothers shouting and swearing again. “We have a son!” I yelled over the din.
They went quiet. The deadly kind of quiet. “You what?” Angel bit out.
“You heard me the first time,” I said, refusing to repeat myself. “Look, it all happened a long time ago, and there’s too much to explain, but it’s okay. I’m handling it, and I’ll be home soon.”
Both Angel and Omar started yelling again, but this time I hung up, cutting them off. I handed the phone back to Matteo and took the bag that he was still holding onto. The clothes inside were exactly what I asked for: a tee shirt and some jeans. “Stop at a gas station so I can change?”
Matteo nodded. “Sure.”