Chapter Twenty-Six
Turning the Knife
The metal table had grown cold under her forearms, but Allie no longer registered temperature the way she once had.
The concrete room had taught her body to stop flinching at discomfort.
What remained was a stillness that felt older than the collar at her throat—a quiet, coiled patience that had been forged in the hours between the evidence folders and the cross.
She wore one of his shirts. Black cotton, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the hem falling to mid-thigh.
The fabric carried the same dark, astringent soap that lived on his skin, and breathing it in felt like breathing him.
The collar sat above the shirt's neckline, matte black leather against the pale column of her throat, the silver ring catching the low lamplight each time she swallowed.
The antique cuff glinted on her left wrist—older silver, softer patina, the engraved geometry pressing its faint, continuous texture into her skin.
Her hair was still damp from the shower he had allowed her.
The heat had been a shock after days of cold concrete and colder purpose.
She had stood under the spray with her palms flat against the tile and let the water beat against the sore muscles of her shoulders, her thighs, the deep, used places he had claimed and then claimed again.
The ache between her legs remained present enough to remind her of every choice she had made in the previous hours—the cross, the three men, the continuous option to stop she had refused to use.
It no longer competed with the colder clarity moving through her mind.
Toro sat across from her with his forearms on the table, sleeves pushed to the elbow, the intricate black-and-grey tattoos on his forearms shifting when he turned the legal pad toward her. The pen was uncapped. The first page remained blank. He was waiting.
Not with impatience. Toro did not do impatience.
The quality in his stillness was something closer to assessment—the focused attention of a man who had spent years reading people for threats and had recently discovered a person who required a different kind of reading.
She had been a door once. A lever. A soft point in the architecture of the Caldwell family's defenses.
Somewhere between the third folder and the moment she had looked up at him from her knees with his come still glistening on her mouth, the original arithmetic had stopped working.
He was no longer only the man who issued orders. He was waiting to see what the woman who now belonged to him would demand in return.
"Kenzie first. "
The name left Allie's mouth without heat and without hesitation.
She had burned through the heat during the hours he left her alone with the evidence of what her best friend had done.
The photograph of the payment. The documentation of the contract.
The cold, clinical proof that the woman who had texted her every morning for three years had handed money to a stranger and asked for a body in return.
Allie had screamed into the concrete until her throat bled.
She had clawed at the floor until her nails split.
She had emptied herself of every drop of grief she had ever wasted on Kenzie Morales.
What remained was the clean, unadorned desire to watch the people who had sold her discover that the transaction was not complete.
Toro nodded once. A single, economical dip of his chin that carried the weight of a signature. "She paid for your death. She is the simplest thread to pull and the one most likely to unravel the others when she breaks. "
"She won't expect me to be alive. " Allie leaned forward and pulled the legal pad toward herself.
Her damp hair fell across one cheek and she pushed it back without looking away from the blank page.
"She thinks the money she handed over bought a disappearance that would never be questioned.
Miami was supposed to be the end. Bachelorette party.
Drinks. Dancing. Then a body in an alley and a funeral she could cry at while everyone comforted the grieving best friend. "
The words came out clinical, detached, as if she were describing a business arrangement between strangers.
Some part of her registered the distance and understood that it was not numbness.
It was clarity. The same clarity Toro had brought to every folder he placed in front of her.
The same clarity she had felt settle into her bones when the collar's buckle clicked shut at the back of her neck.
"She will try to negotiate," Allie continued.
"When she sees me standing in front of her, the shock will crack her open.
But she recovers fast. That is what she does.
She talks. She spins. She finds the angle that makes her the victim and exploits it until the other person apologizes for being hurt.
She has been doing it since we were nineteen.
The affair. The pregnancy. The payment. She will frame all of it as something that was done to her rather than something she chose.
" Allie tapped the legal pad with one finger.
"That is the mistake we cannot make. Giving her room to talk.
She will try to find the exit in the first thirty seconds. We cannot let her believe one exists. "
Toro's expression did not shift, but something in the set of his jaw tightened by a fraction.
He had been cataloguing her words with the same precision he used for everything, and the version of Allie speaking them was not the version he had abducted from the alley.
This one did not plead. This one did not flinch.
This one was already sharpening the knife and choosing where to insert it.
"She will not leave the room with the ability to negotiate.”
The statement was flat and absolute. Allie met his dark eyes across the metal table and did not flinch from the meaning underneath it.
She had already accepted the shape of the man she had chosen.
The collar at her throat was not a metaphor.
Neither was the violence he was capable of when someone threatened what he had claimed.
A small, cold smile pulled at the scab at the corner of her mouth.
"How do we bring her to us?"
Toro pulled the pad back. The pen moved across the page in clean, angular script—a handwriting as controlled as the rest of him, each letter formed with the same economy of motion he brought to handling a weapon. Names. Locations. Timing. He spoke while the ink dried.
"She still performs the role of grieving best friend in public.
The group chat continues. The candlelight vigils.
The carefully worded posts about how she cannot sleep, how she cannot eat, how she stays awake at night praying for answers.
" The disdain in his voice was so faint it was almost invisible—a single note of contempt held so tightly it barely vibrated.
"She has been messaging the other women from the bachelorette trip with updates designed to center her own distress rather than any useful search.
No one questions it. Grief is a mask no one examines closely. "
"Because they want to believe it," Allie said. "Everyone wants to believe the crying best friend. Questioning her would mean questioning the entire performance, and that is uncomfortable. People avoid uncomfortable. "
"Exactly. " Toro's pen scratched across the pad.
"We use the performance as the entry point.
A message from a blocked number, claiming to have information about your disappearance.
Enough detail to prove knowledge—the name of the bar, the street you were last seen on, the color of the dress you were wearing.
Enough urgency to make her come alone. She will not involve Vivian or Caleb until she knows whether the information can be controlled.
Kenzie's first instinct is always self-preservation. She will want to manage the situation herself before anyone else learns what she did.”
Allie watched the plan take shape on the page. Her fingers had found the silver ring at her throat again—a small, unconscious habit that had already begun to form. The cool metal warmed under her touch. The leather shifted with her pulse.
"She will ask for a public meeting place," she said. "Somewhere she can walk away if the situation feels wrong. Somewhere with witnesses. She will not agree to anything that feels like a trap. "
"She will be given the illusion of safety.
" Toro did not look up from the pad, but the corner of his mouth moved by a degree.
"A short-term rental near the city center.
Street-facing windows. A coffee shop on the corner.
Foot traffic. Natural light. " Each detail was a brick in a structure designed to look inviting from the outside.
"She will see the window and believe she has an exit.
What she will not see is the garage access through the back, or the soundproofing, or the secondary door that locks from the outside.
The illusion will hold long enough to get her inside.
After that, the reality is ours to define. "
"And once she is inside?" The pen stopped moving. Toro set it down with a soft click that echoed in the concrete stillness and lifted his gaze to meet hers. His dark eyes held the same absolute focus they had carried when he was still deciding whether she would leave this room breathing.
"You will be the first thing she sees. " Allie's pulse kicked once against the leather at her throat.
"I will be the second. The order is deliberate. She needs to understand, in the first instant, that the woman she paid to erase is still breathing and still capable of walking toward her. That shock is more valuable than any threat I could make. It will dismantle her composure before either of us speaks a word.”