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I knew without looking what the note on the top of the box said.
I knew how incriminating it was.
“What house are these from?” Calla whispered, but from the way she refused to look at me as she clutched the tiny cameras in her hand and shuffled through the box filled with them, I knew she suspected.
“Yours,” I said. I wouldn’t lie to her, not ever. But the fact was that I also didn’t regret what I’d done. I’d always known the day would come when I told her the truth.
I just hadn’t thought it would be so soon.
I stalked toward her, fully conscious of the way sweat dripped down my chest and the fact that even in her disbelieving fury her eyes tracked the trail it left down to the waistband of my pants. Calla could never claim that the magnetic attraction between us was one-sided. I’d seen it the first time she met me, and if she hadn’t been married to a man who was very useful to Matteo, I’d have made her m
ine.
Married or not.
But I owed Matteo everything. His father had given me my revenge, after all.
“You-you filmed us in our home?” she asked, and her voice quivered with the realization that she hadn’t understood just how far my obsession went.
I nodded as I leaned over her in the chair. Her back straightened, leaning back as far as she could into the leather to avoid me as my hands grasped the arms and caged her in. “I watched you through those cameras,” I confirmed. “I watched you when I snuck into your bedroom every night. I did anything I could to be with you before we were together.”
Her eyes went wide only a moment before her hands went to my chest and shoved. “You’re insane,” she hissed.
“I’m fairly certain we’ve covered this, Tesoro. Who did you think it was that you felt watching you? A figment of your imagination?” I reached down to the top drawer of my desk, tugging out the massive, overflowing envelope. Opening the clasp, I let the pictures slide across the desk. Her eyes flew to them, and she reached out and grabbed one in each hand to study them.
The first photo was the one I’d taken while she slept the night before she officially became mine. The last one of her in her old home. The creeping of my ink on my wrist looked as brutal as I’d remembered next to her luminescent skin, and it felt like the perfect photo of how much she lit up my life.
The second photo was from years prior, when Chad had still been alive. Calla was still pregnant with Ines, holding her belly as she walked through the park with Axel clutching her hand. From the look of joy on her face, Ines had kicked. Calla loved being pregnant, loved feeling her children protected inside her. Like she carried the entire world within her.
I imagined it was similar to how I felt when she was in my arms.
“This was always going to end one way, Calla,” I whispered, tucking her hair behind her ear as she stared at the photos in horror. She’d get over it, understand that I’d only done what was necessary to protect her from the evil in our world—the very evil her husband had dragged her into the center of when he’d gone dirty.
He’d chosen to dance with the devil and somehow thought he could do that without it putting his wife and kids in danger. His willingness to put them in danger was unforgivable, because he hadn’t been capable of keeping them safe from men like me.
“I thought I was paranoid,” she whispered, and my heart pounded in my chest. Even though I’d known it, the admission that she’d felt me all those years felt like the perfect affirmation of everything that pulsed between us. She’d felt me, and she’d told nobody about it.
Because she knew that I wouldn’t hurt her.
On some level, she knew that the man who watched her only wanted to love her.
"Did you kill him?" she whispered, refusing to meet my eyes as she asked the question.
"No," I said firmly. "He was shot when he was going to tell one of Matteo’s dealers not to be so fucking dumb and do a deal out in the open. The dealer saw his badge and panicked.” I let her absorb the information of just how dirty her husband had been as a cop. She had to have processed the fact that he worked for the Bellandis, but I watched the gears turn as everything she thought she knew about her marriage vanished. “I would never have caused you pain like that. I think I've made it obvious that I wouldn't have needed to kill him to take you away if I wanted," I said, and she nodded in response. It soothed something inside me that even when she’d had her world turned on its head, she still knew that I wouldn’t lie to her.
Her instincts were to trust me, even if she should have run as far as she could. I’d drag her back kicking and screaming if I had to, though. “Why? I don't understand.” Her voice was so melancholy I wanted to hold her and comfort her, but I also knew she needed a sliver of space while she tried to process what she’d learned.
I gave her the only answer I could. The simple truth at its core. "You're my Sunshine," I said, perching on the edge of the desk in front of her. It made her seem even smaller somehow, like I loomed over her. I couldn’t deny that something about it appealed to me. I wanted to surround her and overwhelm her until she didn’t know where I ended and she began.
She knew there would be no getting away from me, not with the way the house was guarded and secured with a gate and a ten-foot fence. She stood no chance of climbing that alone, let alone with Axel and Ines in tow. But I'd stalked her. I’d made her question her own sanity and feel like there was something wrong with her. When all along it had just been me following her. Lurking in the shadows and watching.
Where she might have wanted to fight, she also knew there was nothing she could do to fight me.
Her life was mine now.
I saw the moment she realized all the things I knew, her favorite foods, the kids’ favorite things. The fact that I knew just how to touch her to make her come apart.
Because I’d watched her do it to herself.
