Page 26

She folded her arms and studied me. “Then explain it to me.”

I couldn’t. Not without telling her things I wasn’t prepared to tell her, and certainly not without dragging fifteen years of blood and secrets into the apartment where I’d spent the night holding her.

“You need to trust me.” The moment I said it, I knew how weak it sounded.

Her expression hardened. “I barely know you.”

The words struck deeper than they should have, but I pushed the reaction aside. This wasn’t about my feelings. It was about keeping her alive.

Still, I couldn’t stop myself from talking. “You said it the other night. You told me you trusted me.”

Her brows pinched, her cheeks going red. “Yeah, well, that was different. People say anything during sex.” She lifted her chin, eyeing me defiantly. “I didn’t mean it.”

My eyes hardened. “Well, listen to me. This isn’t something you can treat like one of your ordinary investigations. Take it down.”

“No.” She said it calmly, but there was nothing uncertain about her refusal. Sofia had never been intimidated by me, and apparently she had no intention of starting now. “You don’t get to walk into my apartment and order me to erase something I’ve spent years trying to understand.”

“You don’t understand the people you’re dealing with.”

“Then tell me who they are. This is getting ridiculous. If you know something I don’t, let me know right now.” Her eyes remained fixed on mine, searching for something I couldn’t afford to give her.

“Who gave you the information?” I asked instead. “I need to know who else has access to it.”

She stared at me for several seconds. “Why does that matter to you?”

“Because anyone helping you could be putting themselves in danger, and I’m worried about you.”

The words came out before I could stop them. Her expression softened for half a second before suspicion returned. She stepped closer, lowering her voice. “You care too much about this.”

I kept my face controlled, but inside I could feel everything tightening. I could see the hurt beginning to replace the anger in her eyes, and somehow that was harder to face.

“You’re hiding something from me.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong. I wanted to tell her that whatever she thought she’d discovered, it had nothing to do with me.

But I couldn’t make the lie come out. Not while I was standing in front of the woman who’d unknowingly walked straight into the one part of my past I’d spent fifteen years trying to bury.

I could feel the last of my control slipping as Sofia stared at me. Whatever she’d seen in my face had changed the argument. She was no longer simply angry with me for trying to stop her investigation. She was studying me, searching for an answer to a question neither of us had asked aloud.

“You talk about that night as though you were there,” she said.

I said nothing, because there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t make everything worse.

Her eyes narrowed, as if she was slowly linking the pieces together. “You know things you shouldn’t know, Ronnie. You know how dangerous this information is. You know exactly what I’m investigating.”

She took a breath, and I watched her struggle with whatever she was deciding to tell me.

“My parents died that night,” she said. “What nobody knows is that I was there, too.”

I stared at her, unable to force myself to look away. The memory I’d spent fifteen years refusing to examine was no longer something distant and uncertain. It was standing in front of me in the form of the woman I’d allowed myself to become attached to.

She must have seen the realization on my face, because her expression changed. The anger disappeared, replaced by confusion and something closer to fear.

“You knew,” she whispered. “You knew. You were there, too.”

I couldn’t answer her. There was no accusation in her voice now. She sounded as though she was begging me to tell her she was wrong.

When I looked at her, I understood that I could no longer continue hiding behind the name she knew.