Page 160 of The Complete Truth Duet
And not for the better.
She’d gone home dejected and feeling more used than ever, and she’d caved to Thomas’s demands to testify against her father. And then spent four years living in solitude with Isabel, for fear of ever taking another chance on a man.
Much to my surprise, she let me hold her that night in Shane’s bed. And when we woke to him and Cora arguing in the kitchen, she slipped back out of my life for what I feared was the very last time.
That is until Manuel called my phone later that morning while we were cooking eggs and bacon for the girls, before the news of his escape had even hit the local news.
Despite the fact that he had agreed to help Thomas track down Catalina in exchange for his freedom, the only thing Manuel truly wanted was Thomas dead. And he wanted me to do it.
That I could do.
That I could so fucking do.
Manuel had no delusions about the fact that he was going back to jail. He was dying, and he said that he could go peacefully as long as Thomas Lyons made it to hell before he did.
And then he shocked the shit out of me by telling me exactly where Catalina had been in hiding and asked me to go get her so he could see her one last time before he died. It seemed losing three of your four children and preparing to meet our maker softened the man.
And considering she was standing right next to me, tears rolling down her face at the knowledge that he’d known where she had been all along and never turned her over to Thomas or Marcos or Dante, she picked up the phone. They talked for over an hour. And while I’d say that chat was therapeutic for Catalina, nothing was forgotten during that conversation. She hated him. But she finally got some closure.
When the three of us hatched the plan to come down to Florida—neutral territory so Thomas couldn’t get squirrelly and pull any bullshit on us—I decided to supply the weapons—filled with blanks.
Rightly so, Thomas decided he didn’t trust me at the last minute. When he and Manuel showed up to reclaim and kill Thomas’s wife, he confiscated my gun. But that was okay—my plan had always been to drain that motherfucker.
And right then, as I lifted Catalina into my arms across the room from her abusive husband’s dead body, with Manuel on his way back to prison where he belonged and Penn and Cora huddled together, offering each other love and reassurance, I finally felt the overwhelming weight of losing Lisa fall from my shoulders.
It was done.
It was finally fucking done.
Penn
Another fucking hotel.
Though this one was a two-bedroom beachfront suite and I’d never been so excited in my entire fucking life.
She was there.
They were there.
And, soon, I’d be there with them.
Forever.
Earlier in the night, Manuel had sat on my couch, sipping a bottle of my water, and glared daggers at my woman as Catalina and Drew had given us the who, what, when, where, and how of what had gone down. After everything Manuel had put Cora through, it took all of the self-restraint I possessed not to leave him on the floor beside Thomas. Or, at the very least, tell him that I was Penn Walker and then give him the play-by-play including every excruciating detail about how I’d killed his sons. The only thing that had stopped me was the fact that Manuel was taking the fall for the dead man in my living room and not Drew.
Per Drew’s stupid-ass plan, Cora had taken the truck and left before Catalina called the cops.
There was no reason for her to be involved in any of this. With her record and the fact that we were harboring a teenage runaway, it was best for everyone involved if she picked up all the kids from the theater and took them somewhere safe. Cora had dropped Isabel off a few streets up, and just as the cops had arrived she’d come running up the beach and into her mother’s arms.
The cops had been at my house for hours, asking questions, taking pictures, and searching the place. I had to admit Drew had covered his bases.
The lies we’d all agreed on went like this: Lisa was left out completely. Catalina and Drew had started dating after he’d been sent by his old prison buddy to find his daughter. She was hiding from her husband and brothers and she didn’t trust law enforcement. So her new boyfriend, Drew, had brought her down to my house—the only place he’d thought he could make her safe.
Thomas and Manuel had tracked them down.
Manuel had thought they were saving Catalina, and Thomas had double-crossed him and tried to kill her. Manuel got there first, with a knife to Thomas’s throat.
