“I ended it with Carmen,” he says quietly.
The room doesn’t hear him.
I do.
My breath catches at the reminder. Carmen Solano has been in the walls of this place since before I had the nerve to walk back into it. Her ring. Her blood. Her father’s chair. Her smile when she used to look at me like I was a stain on marble she owned.
“I ended it in front of the table,” Diablo says. “Not hidden. Not softened. No loophole for politics. I told the officers, the Solano men still sniffing around her father’s ghost, and every brother who needed to hear it. There is no engagement. No debt paid with my bed. No queen beside me because Rafael left a throne empty.”
My throat tightens.
I wanted that once. Not the throne. God, no. I wanted the truth said where people could hear it. I wanted Carmen to stop being the woman with the official place while I survived Diablo’s war.
“And what did she do?” I ask.
His eyes darken.
“She smiled.”
Women like Carmen don’t break in public.
They sharpen.
“She looked at me,” Diablo says, voice dropping lower, “Like I had not just broken an arrangement. Like I had stolen a life she’d been promised since Rafael taught her to spell power.”
Coño.
The problem.
Diablo didn’t only choose me. He unchose Carmen in front of men who had spent years treating her like Rafael Solano’s living signature. He took the ring off the table, and Carmen, polished, beautiful, sin vergüenza Carmen, doesn’t know how to punish a man without finding the women he loves and making them pay first.
“She isn’t just mad you chose me,” I whisper.
“No.”
“She wants every woman who stays to bleed.”
He doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t need to.
I look back at Lady’s bloody mouth on the screen.
“Then stop holding me like I’m something she can take from you,” I say. “Because that is what she wants. She wants you scared enough to cage me. Because she knows I won’t stay your prisoner.”
Diablo’s jaw tightens.
Then, slowly, he steps back.
The space between us is small.
It feels like a door opening.
Across the room, Shady stands near the bar with blood drying down his side and one hand curled around the back of a chair like he is seconds from snapping it in half. Magic already tried to make him sit. Vice already told him twice to let someone stitch him. Six is posted by the front like death with a pulse. Cosmo is muttering prayers under his breath, not soft prayers either. The kind that sound like he is asking God to look away for a few hours.
Shady doesn’t move.
That is the terrifying part.
