Page 41 of The Complete Truth Duet
And, for that reason alone, I looked him straight in the eye and told him a lie. “I trust you.”
He breathed an audible sigh of relief, a ghost of a smile pulling at his lips.
Until I added, “But I need you to trust me too.”
That smile vanished. “Cora.”
I lifted a hand to silence him. “I was there the day you and Drew got here. It was obvious that there wasn’t a whole lot of family love between you two and Marcos and Dante. But what you don’t understand is I can handle them. I’ve been doing it for over half of my life.”
His jaw went hard, and his eyes narrowed.
“Yeah. Do the math on that. I was sixteen when I married Nic, Penn. Sixteen when I became a Guerrero, and sixteen when I buried a Guerrero. This isn’t my first rodeo. Marcos and Dante are terrible, disgusting assholes. But they won’t kill me. They will, however, kill you. You gotta trust me on that.”
His face got dark. “Fuck that. Manuel—”
“Is in jail because his own daughter flipped on him. And you know what? He, Dante, and Marcos have been hunting her ever since. So don’t for a second think that the Guerreros aren’t capable of killing the people who cross them. Enemies, friends, and family alike. Do you understand me?”
His jaw ticked as he scowled down at me. I prayed I was actually getting through to him. Clearly, though, I wasn’t.
“Where’s the girl?” he asked.
My head snapped back in surprise. “What girl?”
He licked his lips and then cut his gaze over my shoulder, but he never loosened his increasingly tight hold on me. “The girl… Manuel’s daughter.”
“Catalina?”
“Yeah. Her.” His gaze came back to mine. “Drew and I, we know some people. We could get someone on her. Keep her safe. Just give me an address.”
A knot of unease suddenly twisted in my stomach as alarm bells started a distant ringing in my ears.
Before Cat had testified against Manuel, she and I had been close. She was the only Guerrero who didn’t treat me like a waste of oxygen or trash who had purposely robbed them of a brother. She believed in me. She couldn’t do much to help me, considering that the whole family acted like she was nothing more than an imposition too, but she tried. Nic and I had been there the day her daughter, Isabel, was born. I’d held Cat as she cried in her hospital bed, trying to figure out how the hell she was going to keep a sweet baby girl away from her brothers and her father. And I guessed, ten years later, when she’d disappeared into the night, she’d finally figured it out.
They’d never stopped looking for her. And not because they were missing their little sister. If and when Catalina was found, it would be the last day of her life.
I was good at lying, but it’d taken a full month of constant abuse at the hands of Marcos and Dante to convince them I had no idea where she’d gone. And that didn’t include the time I’d been cornered by Isabel’s biological father in the grocery store parking lot. He’d been furious that Catalina had taken off on him too. I guessed I was the closest thing he could get to beating her again. Thomas Lyons was worse than any of the Guerreros though. He didn’t have to hide from the law. As the District Attorney and the man responsible for locking Manuel away, he was the law.
It was true. I didn’t know where Cat had gone. Yes, she contacted me fairly frequently. Yes, we met up at a hotel once a year on the anniversary of Nic’s death. Yes, I’d funded her escape with Guerrero money right under their noses. And yes, I would go to my grave if they ever found out. But if I was going to break free of that life too, I needed someone on the outside to help me.
At that moment, though, with a strong and mysterious man staring down at me, asking questions about a woman who shouldn’t have been a blip on his radar, I had the strangest fear that maybe she was the only blip on his radar. “I…I have no idea where Catalina is. From what I can tell she took her daughter and ran off right after the trial. Thomas reported her missing years ago. It got some national coverage, but no one has ever heard from her again.”
“If she’s in danger, you can tell me, Cora. I’ll take care of them, just like I’m gonna take care of you.”
“Just like I’m gonna take care of you.”
I’d begged the universe more times than I could count to send me someone to say those words to me. And there he stood, gorgeous, compassionate, kind—everything I could have wished for—saying them to my face in the biggest lie I’d ever heard.
