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I block the view of the body as I gently urge her to look up at me.
“Hey, it’s going to be okay. He would have killed us. You did what you had to do. He can’t hurt us anymore.”
Zoe takes a shaken breath and presses her face into my chest.
I hold her tight, pulling her in as close as I can.
She clutches my shirt and holds onto me.
As I run my hands up and down her back, I can’t shake the knowledge that Demarco has been trying to kill me this entire time.
I thought that he died years ago. Even with the information Alessio gave me, I didn’t want to believe that he was still alive.
It had been a mistake.
“Can we get out of here?” Zoe asks, her tone soft and hollow. “I can’t be here right now. I just need to get away from this. I need to be away from here. Please take me somewhere else.” Panic colors her voice as I stand up and pull her to her feet.
“I’ll take you away from here. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be alright. I just need to call Ruben to come deal with this and then we can go.”
Zoe nods, her eyes still wide as she wipes away the tears.
I kiss her forehead, doing what little I can to console her while I pull out my phone and send a quick message to Ruben.
The moment the message is sent, I take Zoe to the car, eager to get her out of here.
As we walk, I stuff down everything I’m feeling. I can deal with that later.
Right now, Zoe needs me.
The night sky is starting to fade as we set in the bed of my truck at the edge of the lake.
I have pillows and blankets spread out through the bed, creating a nest to keep us warm while Zoe stares out at the water.
“You did what you had to do,” I murmur, leaning forward to grab her and pull her back to me.
My legs bracket her body as she leans back against my chest. “He would have killed us if you hadn’t taken the shot, Zoe. I know that this is difficult, but you had to do it.”
She nods, looking back at me with red-rimmed eyes. No more tears stream down her face, but she looks like the dams could break at any moment.
Not that I blame her in the slightest.
It’s not easy to have to kill your first person. Not when you never knew that you were capable of doing that.
“Who was he?” Zoe asks, looking back out at the water as I loop my arms around her torso.
“Demarco Jones.” I swallow hard, trying to find the words to tell her about my past. “He was my father’s right hand. He was like a second father to me.”
Zoe laces her fingers through mine. “Why did he want to kill you?”
This is the part of my life that I hoped I would never have to talk about again.
“Years ago, I had to take control of the cartel. My father wasn’t a good man. More and more of our people were dying every single day.”
I look off to the line that breaks the two separate pieces of the horizon. Breaking the lake away from the sky. The same way that moment broke me into two different sides that make a whole.
“He was killing innocent people. He was going to kill me for speaking out against him. He saw me as a threat and said that I would be better off dead.”
I was twenty back then and was put in an impossible position.
