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Girding myself, I raised my hand and turned the knob.
The door swung open to reveal an equally tense scene on the other side. Lou sat at the end of the sofa, one foot lifted to rest on the opposite knee, her back perfectly straight against the cushions. The other three men held themselves in a row behind her as if standing guard.
Niko and Jasper simply looked grim. Quentin outright glared at me. I could tell they were strung tight, probably ready to snatch at their weapons if I made a wrong move.
I couldn’t blame any of them for their reaction.
Lou glanced at me with a cool expression. When she spoke, it was to the other guys. “I want to talk to Rafael alone.”
Quentin let out a noise of protest, but before he could get any further into an argument, Lou held up her hand to stop him. “I’ll be fine. Whatever he’s got to say is about stuff from way before I knew any of you. I don’t want any interruptions.”
Jasper dipped his head, shooting me with a warning look. “We’ll hang out in one of the bedrooms. Shout, and we’ll be right here.”
They headed off through one of the nearby doorways. As the door clicked shut behind them, Lou bent over and picked up the skate I hadn’t noticed resting against the base of the sofa. She adjusted another object in her hand and brought the skate’s blade to it.
Shrrrk!
I’d heard that sound dozens of times before. The sharp hiss of metal being sharpened against a hand stone. It raised the hairs on the back of my neck the same way nails on chalkboard might have, but I wasn’t in a position to complain.
Lou didn’t say anything to me, didn’t even meet my gaze again as she angled her skate in rhythmic swipes across the stone. Honing the blade into just as much of a weapon as any knife she could have carried. I had no doubt that thing could slice through my skin if she wanted to cut me.
As she no doubt wanted me to be aware of while we had this conversation. A subtle yet unmistakable statement of her strength. I had to admire the gesture, even as it made my stomach churn.
Shehadsaid she wanted to talk. I took careful steps over to the sofa and eased down at the opposite end from her. She dragged the skate blade over the stone with another shrill scraping sound.
I let my eyebrows arch just slightly. “Should I be worried about whether this is a conversation or actually an execution?”
Lou’s gaze flicked to me for just a second. “What are you talking about?” she said in a voice as smooth and cool as her expression. “I need to keep my skates in good shape. You know that.”
“I do.” I also knew that in this moment, she was every inch her mother’s daughter. Not the awful parts that made the woman a vicious monster—the collected, professional aura of power that had made her a leader.
Lou could be a great leader too. Seeing her like this, I could imagine her keeping the Deadly Rose empire in line so easily.
If she’d actually had any interest in doing that.
What we were about to talk about now mattered to her. Keeping her self-control in the face of the potential threat I now might be mattered to her.
She didn’t give a shit about world domination or racking up business earnings, and that was why she’d never be able to maintain the kind of authority her mother’s heir would need long term. But she shouldn’t have to.
She should be able to have whatever she goddamn wanted.
Not that long ago, that’d been skating, and the men she’d found on that journey… and me. More than anything, I wanted to pull her to me, wrap her up in all the protection I’d always offered, and show her she still had me.
That wasn’t going to work. Not after what she’d seen. I had to use my words first.
Apparently it was up to me to start the discussion. That seemed fair too.
I swallowed my apprehension. “Lou, I’m sorry. More sorry than I can even say. I didn’t tell you about any of that because none of it was true anymore. All the things you saw—they were from more than a decade ago. I haven’t thought any of the things I said back then for a long time.”
Shrrrk.
Lou kept her eyes on her skate. “But you did before. When you said it. You really did come to work for my mother planning to take her down, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I thought I had a good reason to. The other guys you saw me with in the videos—they were part of my brother’s old gang.”
“The guys who confronted you in Austin? The ones who beat you up?”
“Yeah.” I grimaced at the memory. “A few years after Edmundo brought me into the gang, Mireya lashed out at us what seemed like out of the blue. She killed my brother and a couple of other guys. I could barely wrap my head around living without him—I wanted to destroy the person responsible for taking him from me. The rest of the gang saw it as a flex of her power, just to show that she could and remind everyone to stay in line. Totally undeserved. I couldn’t just accept it and shrug it off.”
