* * *
By the timeI reach West Lake Hills, the sun is beginning to set.
The gate is exactly what I expected—iron bars, keypad entry, security camera overhead.Looks impressive to anyone who doesn’t know better.
Getting in is simple.I wait, idling a few car lengths back until a silver Lexus rolls up and punches in the code.When the gate starts to swing shut, I ease in behind them like I belong.
Reyes’s place is deep inside the neighborhood, a southwestern style with clay shingles and perfectly trimmed bluegrass.Lights are on inside.Someone’s home.
I park two streets over, just close enough to keep an eye without drawing attention.
I walk over and check the perimeter.
Three real cameras, two fakes.The fakes are the cheap, hollow kind you can spot in seconds.The real ones cover the front door, back door, garage, and a bay window—master bedroom, if the Zillow listing I pulled is still accurate.
I scroll Zillow on my phone.Reyes bought the house a few years ago.It has five bedrooms, each with their own bathroom.A kitchen that looks like it belongs in a cooking show.A finished basement with all the luxuries—gym, wine cellar, home theater.
It’s the theater that grabs me.
One of the listing photos shows a door in the corner.I flip to the floor plan.There’s another entrance, leading from a stairwell off the pool deck.
I glance toward the pool.Sure enough, a camera points that way.But the casing’s wrong.It’s a dummy.
That’s my in.
I’ll come back after nightfall.
28
DANIELA
The hallwayto my suite feels longer than usual.My mind is a tangle of voices—Vinnie’s instructions about the chocolates, Raven’s assurance that Belinda is safe, Hawk’s determination to go after Reyes.Alone.
I close the door to my suite behind me and lean against it for a second, listening to the muffled quiet.In here, I can pretend for a moment that I’m just another woman with a normal life, a normal bedroom, a normal trash can that doesn’t hold potential murder weapons.
The box is right where I left it—on top of the trash, the lid askew.
I crouch and stare at it before I pull a gallon-sized plastic bag from my pantry, hold it open, and slide the chocolates inside.The faint scent of candy wafts up, and my stomach tightens.One piece is all it would have taken.One careless bite on the wrong day.
I place the zipped bag on the counter.
And I remember…
All the other gifts from the men over the last three years.
Lingerie, folded into tissue paper and boxed.Dresses that clung in all the places men liked to look, not the places I liked to show.Jewelry—cold metal and cold stones that warmed only when my skin did.
Stranger things, too.
Music boxes that played notes so delicate they were almost sad.Paintings of landscapes I’d never see.Silk bedsheets from Diego Vega embroidered with my initials and his—his way of saying I belonged to him.
I hated all of them.No matter how rare or expensive, every gift was tainted by what I had to do to get it.
Except one.
The only gift I ever truly valued.
And it wasn’t from a man I serviced.Not because my father forced me too, anyway.
