Page 71 of Born for Starlight

"No. No, this is wrong. You should not be here." Her voice dropped low and fast. "You come in the front door. You say her name at the desk. You ask questions in the open where anyone can hear. Do you understand what you could do? You could break everything apart. Everything. Meu Deus." She had my elbow now, and for a small woman she moved me like a hand truck. "Go. Please, senhora. Go now. Do not come back and do not say her name to anyone else."

"Please, if you'd just tell me⁠—"

"Go!"

The doors swung open, and the next thing I knew, I was on a hot sidewalk, bombarded by street noise. I looked back through the glass exactly once.

She already had her phone out. She was dialing before the doors had even finished swinging shut.

Great. Whoever she was calling was about to hear all about me.

The taxi crawled back through the afternoon traffic. I sat in the back seat and put it together, piece by ugly piece.

There was an American working with officials on something at that hospital. Something so delicate that a woman in washed-out scrubs went white at the thought of me blundering through it. There was exactly one American attached to Luzia, and I'd been sharing his bed.

He wasn't just lying to me. He was running his own separate operation. He'd been running something this whole time, and the lies at lunch weren't a man covering a mistake. They were a man protecting a mission.

From me.

The fucker!

I shook my head and closed my eyes. I was swearing too much, even if it was in my own head. I needed to get my shit together before I confronted the lying fucking bastard. I sucked in a deep breath.

Think!

Layla's voice came back, flat over her coffee cup at the fish market. It's an auction. This is our big chance.

The rare vintages. Young. Small growers. The kind that never reach an open shelf.

Someone with no name walked a seven-year-old out of a hospital, and nobody wrote it down.

Luzia was seven.

The shaking started in my hands. There was nobody in this taxi to perform for, so I let them shake.

Not her. Please, God, not her.

She was the little girl at the edge of the video, the one who watched everything. She hated beans and that’s all I knew about her. That, and she was seven years old, and she belonged to nobody.

And damn it, that meant she belonged to me!

Somebody with money had walked her out a door three days before I ever set foot in this country.

I'd promised Beatriz a phone call with news. Matthew had promised me, in the car outside those blue gates, that he'd find her, and it had sounded like a vow. Both of us had made promises about that child. The difference was, I meant to keep mine without telling a single goddamn lie in between.

I heard myself swear again.

Calm, Drakos. Calm. Breathe.

I checked the time. If the traffic behaved, I'd be back in the suite with fifteen minutes to spare.

Fifteen minutes to fix my makeup, cool my skin, and slow my heart down. Fifteen minutes to fold this rage up and tuck it somewhere he couldn't see it.

Get yourself under control, Angelica. You've played women twice as calm as you need to be right now.

The no-good lying bastard was coming back to the best performance of my life.

Chapter Twenty-Two