Page 104 of The Complete Truth Duet
Life without the chaos of running the building.
Life without the fear of Marcos and Dante.
Life without the warmth of Penn’s arms.
I was still confused on what had actually happened that night. I’d asked Drew a million different questions, but he didn’t seem to have any answers. Or at least none that he was telling me.
He’d sworn that he didn’t know where the money had come from.
And promised me that he had no idea why Penn had been at the apartment.
He’d looked me right in the eyes and vehemently told me he was just as confused as I was.
But he wasn’t, because he hadn’t spent the last week asking me the exact same questions.
People by nature seek the answers to what we don’t understand. Especially when it comes to our loved ones. When Nic had been murdered, I’d been there and still sought an explanation from the Guerreros for the events that had led up to his death.
While Drew definitely seemed affected by having lost Penn, he wasn’t consumed with grief.
The police had been by the hotel multiple times to talk to Drew. He’d always step out into the hall or meet them down in the lobby. At first, I’d thought it was because he was shielding me from more pain.
But, more recently, I was getting suspicious that maybe he was actually shielding me from the truth.
I’d had my fair share of conversations with the cops too, but they didn’t seem to have any more answers than I did.
After Manuel had gone to jail on a laundry list of convictions, the police had been eyeing Marcos and Dante for years. They were suspects one and two when the city’s famed district attorney, Thomas Lyons, had reported his wife and his child as missing—this bullshit including a tear-filled press conference that made primetime news. Back then, I’d figured that had been the equivalent of declaring World War III. And while I would have loved nothing more than for Thomas to finish what he’d started and take down the rest of the Guerrero family, surprisingly, he’d never followed through. He had the power, but I suspected he enjoyed the national attention, and the mystery of it all definitely hadn’t hurt his career. The label of “grieving victim” had only made his parade of justice that much more impressive while he’d single-handedly plowed through the city’s criminal population.
The cops had never let Catalina’s disappearance go, and watching Thomas, who they considered one of their own, lose his family had only painted a bigger target on the Guerreros’ backs. But they’d never gotten anything to stick on either one of them. Now though, with a video of Marcos and Dante chasing a man into an apartment, that man being my boyfriend and me being their dead brother’s wife, it wasn’t like they were spending a lot of time trying to prove the Guerreros’ innocence.
Especially not after a search of their houses revealed a fresh body buried in Marcos’s backyard and over a million dollars’ worth of drugs in Dante’s house. As far as the police were concerned, everything was tied up in a pretty red bow for them. Case closed.
As for me, I was more concerned with the how this had happened.
Dante and Marcos’s official cause of death had come back as smoke inhalation, but they’d suffered significant trauma to their faces and their bodies before that. The cops had concluded that it was from fighting with Penn inside the apartment before the fire had broken out.
Meanwhile, Penn’s official cause of death had been ruled a homicide thanks to a bullet in his chest.
I’d thrown up for over an hour after Detective Morris had informed us of this.
Even in a state of total emotional upheaval, I kept a close eye on Drew.
He was Penn’s brother, after all. His only response had been to let out a loud curse, thank the detective, and then sit on the floor in the bathroom with me, alternating between rubbing my back and staring at his shoes. It was strange. But everyone handled emotions differently.
Then it got weirder. Drew was still waiting on the city to release Penn’s body, and over the last few days, I’d started planning a small memorial ceremony. I’d never seen Drew so mad as when I’d told him about it. He’d stormed out of the room and sat in the hall with his forearms propped on his knees and his head hanging between his arms for over two hours. I may have (read: definitely) watched him through the peephole for at least half of that time. He didn’t speak as he crawled into bed that night. And the next day, he didn’t mention it at all.
Yeah. It was safe to say something was definitely not right. And while I hadn’t yet been able to figure it out, I wasn’t about to give up.
