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“You want to go back to Lázaro Cárdenas alone?”
“Well, I’d bring a marching band along, but it might draw unwanted attention.”
Fuck, she was serious. “You can’t go back in there alone, darling. It’s too dangerous.”
Her spine stiffened, and the girl who’d been screaming my name and coming on my cock five minutes ago looked about ready to rake her fingernails down my face. I don’t think Greta Agossi was a fan of anyone telling her what she could or could not do.
“I’ve dangled myself out on a stick like bait;thatwas far more dangerous than this, and I survived.”
“You were bait? When?” And what the hell were people like Gabe Costa and Amadeo Luciano doing letting her do crazy shit like that? They were older than her; they should have known better.
She shrugged. “I got myself caught byEl Víbora’smen,” she said. Her voice was flippant, but something in it was wrong, just as wrong as the dark shadow that ghosted through her eyes.
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“It was part of the plan. The only way to find his compound was to get my ass brought there so Gabe could track me. Every guest to his compound was blindfolded and searched for trackers; the only exception was the girls he took. There was no reason for him to think they’d have trackers on them, and there was no point in blindfolding them, not when he had no intention of ever letting them escape.”
“That was one hell of a risk,” I said, thinking about the hundred fucking ways that could have gone wrong.
“No,” she said, shaking her head adamantly, “it was one hell of a plan, and any plan comes with risks.” Her voice was too flippant, and the shadows in her eyes too dark.
I wanted to ask her what kind of “plan” flying off to Lázaro Cárdenas alone was, but I felt pulled in another direction. No, forget “pulled”; it was like something was shoving me headlong, and I wasn’t an easy man to shove.
“What happened when you got caught by that asshole’s men?” I asked.
Her eyes flickered up to meet mine, then away. She licked her lips. “The plan was to stay locked up in the basement until the cavalry arrived.”
“But things didn’t go as planned, did they?”
She shrugged like we were chatting about an unexpected rain shower or a construction detour. “Deo was doing business withEl Víboraat the time. The damn viper had promised to keep me reserved for Deo. Not surprisingly, the bad cartelcapolied.”
“They—”
“Yeah, they did,” she snapped.
I expected her to wrap her arms around herself, or to somehow try to make herself smaller. But this was Greta; she didn’t do anything the way anyone expected.
“And it fucking sucked,” she seethed, standing up taller, hands at her sides. “But the only other choice I had was to blow our cover, and it wasn’t just me in that goddamned basement, Brute. A friend of the Luca family was there. Dante Luca’s girlfriend was there. And all the other girls… they had family, friends, boyfriends too.
“If I’d blown our cover, it would have meant those girls—who they weren’t just raping, they were beating and sometimes killing—would have been stuck there. So, I made the call—it was my call to make—and I don’t regret it. Don’t you dare try to make me feel like I should regret it.”
I said nothing; I had no intention of trying to make her regret what she’d done. But inside, my heart was pumping pure rage through my veins. What I wouldn’t have given to set every one of those assholes on fire and watch them burn, nice and slow. I would have made sure it took hours, maybe days, before the worthless fuckers finally died.
“You couldn’t blow your cover and walk away because you’d never stop seeing their faces?” I asked, but it wasn’t a question. I remembered what she said, why the things that most of the world didn’t give a second thought to haunted her.
I took a step toward her, but she took a step back.
“Don’t. That whole hug me and pity me thing and somehow that’s supposed to make me feel better?” She shook her head. “Just don’t. I did the therapy. I talked it out—didn’t keep shit bottled up. I don’t need pity and I don’t need comfort. What I need is to figure out how to take down Domínguez’s whole kidnapping, murdering empire so the next man, woman, or child on his list doesn’t wake up dead. If you want to help me, Brute, then help me do that. Otherwise, stay out of my way.”
She stormed past me, heading for the office door.
“Why?” I asked, not sure whether she’d stop or keep on going.
She paused with her hand on the door handle, then turned around, one perfectly arched eyebrow cocked.
“Why are you so committed to this?” It couldn’t just be the faces. Was that really enough to make a girl risk her life over and over again?
“If not me, then who?” she said, throwing out her arms. “That’s the problem. Nobody wants to get their hands dirty. There has to be a reason for people to want to get involved. Otherwise, they’d much rather bury their heads in the sand and pretend the vile things that happen in this world don’t exist. I don’t want to pretend, and I don’t want to be the kind of person who sits around and does nothing about it.”
