Page 125 of The Complete Truth Duet
I sucked in a deep breath and put my elbows to my knees. It was now or never. And as I’d learned over the last few weeks, never wasn’t an option when it came to my feelings about Cora.
“We can’t talk about me without talking about Thomas. He killed my wife.”
Her head snapped to the side. “What?”
I cracked my neck. Those twenty-nine minutes had changed my life. I’d obsessed over them for the last few years, and it wasn’t until I’d met Cora that I’d been able to spend a single night without being trapped in that bloody hotel room.
I didn’t want her to know the man I’d become after I’d lost Lisa.
I’d felt like the old me when I had been with Cora—more than I had in years, if not ever. To me, those moments with her were like a last-minute pardon from death row. She was the first person to give me a reason to want to live again.
But if I was being honest with myself, the shallow and heartless man driven by hate and pain, the liar who had manipulated his way into her bed, was all she’d ever known of me.
And it ruined me that I had to tell her that.
But I owed it to her.
And so much more.
So, while staring into her deep-blue eyes, I finally gave her the truth.
“My name is Shane Pennington. Drew isn’t my brother. He’s actually my brother-in-law—Lisa’s twin—and we didn’t get the job at your building by chance.”
Her mouth fell open in pure astonishment. “Are you, like, an undercover cop?”
I leaned back in the chair, but only to keep myself from reaching out to her. “Far from it. Drew and I came here to find and kill the man responsible for Lisa’s death.”
She shook her head. “I…I don’t understand. You said the police shot the men who murdered her.”
“They did. But those men didn’t just break into her room and kill her in a robbery gone wrong the way the police tried to shove down my throat. They killed her for sport. I blew through private investigators, but we never could link the men who killed her to Manuel, Dante, or Marcos. So Drew and I put our heads together and decided to go straight to the source. Drew stole two cars to get locked away with Manuel.”
“Manuel? Why would he do that?”
“Because Lisa was nosing around in Guerrero business when she was killed.”
She slapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, God.”
Scrubbing my palms back and forth over my denim-covered thighs, I ached to hold her. But if I wanted to get through this, I had to tell her all of it.
“We lucked out when he and Manuel became fast friends and then cellmates, but even if Manuel had hated him, being on the inside gave us more intel than we could ever get on the outside.”
She shook her head, paused, and then shook it again. She looked like she was in a maze, mentally running into dead ends before backtracking and moving in a different direction. “Wait… So Manuel told you Thomas killed your wife?”
I groaned, dreading this part the most. “No. You told me that.”
Suddenly coming unstuck from the bed, she jumped to her feet. “I never said that!”
“Relax. Come here.” I extended an arm out to her, starving to pull her into my lap, but she sidestepped my attempt.
“Don’t touch me. Just talk.”
I grumbled, shifting in my seat. “We came here looking for Catalina. Manuel had told Drew that his granddaughter had sat in on a meeting where a man had asked him to order a hit on a nosy reporter. We just couldn’t figure out who that man was. Manuel only had one granddaughter, and he’d always believed you knew where her mother was. The night right before the fire, when you were telling me about Manuel and Thomas falling apart, all the pieces clicked into place.”
She rounded forward like I’d punched her in the stomach. “Oh, God. It was River, wasn’t it? She was the one who was there.”
I didn’t have to answer.
She started pacing. “Oh, God. This is bad. So so so bad. He’s going to find out River was the one who told you.”
“I won’t let anything happen to her. I promise. I’m going to kill him, Cora.”
“Oh, great,” she smarted. “That makes it all better. That worked out so well when you killed Marcos and Dante.” She waved a hand in my direction. “Shit, maybe that did work out after all.”
My lips twitched. Fuck, she was cute.
I forced my mouth flat when she stopped and looked at me, her eyes narrowed in bewilderment, not attitude.
“Wait. If you’re alive, whose body did Drew identify in the fire?”
“One of Marcos’s entourage. I called them. Taunted them about taking over the business. Told them that you and all the women were mine. They sent two men first, thinking I’d be dead before they had to put on their shoes. It didn’t work out that way. I lured them up the back stairs. Deleted the thirty seconds of footage of them following me into your apartment and then peeled the stars off your ceiling as I waited for Dante and Marcos to arrive.”
