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“What are you doing?” I know what she’s doing, but I need her to say it.
“I was—” She’s breathing hard, her body trembling. “I can explain. We need to talk, you need to—”
I’m on her too fast for her to get the rest of her words out. In a blink, I have her arms restrained behind her back as I push her upper body onto the desk, holding her there, but at a loss what to do with her.
“I know this looks bad. I know you’re angry,” she sobs. “You have every right to be, but you need to hear me out.”
Icy rage works its way through me, a pit in my stomach threatening to explode. My heart jackhammers in my chest as I pull a knife from my ankle strap and hold it flush to her throat. Wrenching her up by her hair, I whisper in her ear, “We’ll talk downstairs. Where I question traitors. Now move.”
Pushing her along, she walks in front of me, my fingers still curled against her scalp. She silently weeps, her delicate shoulders shaking as she steals a glance at me. I enjoy her pain, her panic—she needs to know how we deal with traitors in the bratva.
But it’s not rage filling my chest, though, it’s deep sadness. The kind that could suck me under and hold me down like some possessed sea creature, never to rise again.
We are in the dungeon before I realize it. It’s not really a dungeon, but it has all the charm of one. It’s more like a holding cell. A small bare room, the only light coming from a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. Other than the chair I’ve deposited Bianca on, there’s a rickety table, a stripped mattress in the corner, a sink, a toilet, and four blank walls.
In other words, this place looks medieval, and purposefully so. We don’t actually torture anyone down here, that happens at the factory, but we keep people here to scare the wits out of them before we’re ready to bring them in for questioning.
“Why?” My anguished voice echoes off the barren walls. “I gave you everything. Why would you side with that monster, with Días?”
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t fucking lie to me,” I roar, causing a fresh round of tears to fall down her beautiful face, onto to her thin white nightgown. I can practically see her naked curves, but it only serves to remind me how she manipulated me with sex, with my incredible need for her.
My breath comes fast and hard, I must look as unhinged as I feel because terror flashes in Bianca’s eyes. I’ve never seen her look so wrecked. Devastation written all over her face, but it’s nothing compared to the storm brewing inside me.Nothing.
I hold her jaw tightly and stuff my thumb into her mouth, wondering if she’s going to bite or play nice. I can’t stand to see her all misty-eyed and broken. She has no right. I’m the one who is hurting. She inflicted the pain.
But she takes it. She closes her eyes and sucks on my thumb so tenderly. It’s fucking confusing. Her warm mouth, the softness of her tongue, and I don’t know what she is doing to me, other than rubbing salt in the wound.
I wrench my hand back and bring out the knife instead, but I don't have the heart to press it to her throat. It hangs limply by my side, as I stand in front of her, waiting for answers I don’t want to hear.
“It wasn’t Jorge and my uncle I was working for, it was the FBI.” Her words hit me in the gut. Before I know it, I fist her hair in my hand, and I press the knife into her flesh, hard enough to sting. Bianca’s not crying anymore; she’s not hysterical. She seems to understand and accept that I must kill her. Even if it destroys me.
Which it will.
“It was never about you. I never wanted to hurt you or your family. I’ve been working with the feds to sink my uncle. He killed my family, and he will pay for that. I’ve made it my life's mission.”
I pause, her words throwing me. But then I remember she’s a master liar. “I don’t fucking believe you. I don’t believe a word you say.”
“It’s the truth, Daniil. I swear. I’m not lying. I can prove it.”
“Except you’re a liar,” I bellow, ragged emotion clear in my voice. “We caught you on camera conspiring with Días in the fucking back stairwell at the casino, a place neither of you should have been. Just like now. What were you doing in my office, Bianca? Planting a fucking bug.”
“I wasn’t planting it, I was retrieving it. Listen to me, Daniil. You can kill me after you hear me out.” The tears that spill down her face now are tears of frustration. But I can’t look into her beautiful brown eyes anymore, so I throw the knife aside and pace around the room like a tiger stalking restlessly in its cage.
“A year after my family’s death, just after my seventeenth birthday, I found a flash drive in the pocket of one of my mother’s old cardigans. It was the only piece of clothing I kept because it reminded me of her. She used to wrap it around her shoulders when she worked late into the night.” A silent sob escapes her mouth before she continues. “In the weeks after my family died, my uncle dealt with everything—purged their existence. If I was more with it, I would have stopped him. But by the time I came out of that deep dark hole, he’d erased them. Clothes, journals, personal items, all of it gone. He acted like he did me a favor.”
“What was on the flash drive?” I question, my voice unflinching.
She releases a hard breath through her nose. “It was… everything.” She shakes her head as if language is beyond her right now. Maybe it is. “I told you my parents were journalists, but they didn’t cover the local beat. Maybe that’s how things started, but they’d both moved into investigative journalism. As far as I know, they focused on the assholes in Washington, preferring to take down crooked politicians and public figures. But it seems my mother took on a secret project collaborating with an anti-corruption organization in Colombia. Nothing had been reported yet, they’d only been gathering data… but you can imagine how it ends.”
“Let me guess. They were investigating your uncle.”
“Yes,” she rasps. “They were building a case against him with the organization’s lawyers. I don’t know how my uncle found out, it was supposed to be top secret, but…” Bianca’s delicate shoulders shrug as emotion swirls in her eyes. “I was young when I learned all that. I was living with the monster that killed my family. I didn’t have hard proof, but there were enough clues in my mother’s work to suggest my uncle was onto them. What was I supposed to do? I knew no one, I was surrounded by Zegas. The FBI was literally my only option for help. And they agreed… but with strings. They wanted me to help expose him, take him down for everything. And I wanted that, too. I want to see him rot in jail.”
“Did I ruin all of your well-laid plans with that poker game?” I snarl, understanding where this is all going.
“That was the only reason I was with Jorge.” She stands and grabs my wrists. For some reason I let her. “He’s despicable, and I hate him. But unlike my uncle, after a few drinks, he’d let little details slip. Cartel business I wasn’t supposed to know. But then you came along…” She squeezes her eyes shut and opens them again. “When I was forced to marry you, the FBI insisted that the Kozlovs become part of the deal.”
