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Ugh, the woman was annoying. “Me and ‘the people I work with’ don’t run guns and drugs. We take down people who think human beings can be trafficked or sold or ransomed.”
Leeri scoffed. “Vigilante justice?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s not justice, Greta; it’s murder. If you wanted justice, you should have become a cop, or a lawyer, or an advocate for some anti-human trafficking organization. Running around and taking down the people you personally feel deserve it? That’s just murder,” she said, sounding like she was sitting just a bit too high on her high horse.
“You seem comfortable ‘dating’ a man who kills people and dumps their bodies in barrels of acid. I’m not sure you have the moral high ground here,amica.”
She shook her head. “You know nothing about Javier.”
I knew plenty. First and foremost, that he wasn’t just some asshole cartelcapousing his girlfriend to take down his competition. He was coming for me, for us. And I had a feeling that “Fred”—the asshole from my apartment—was just the beginning.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Greta
“Here,” Leeri said, handing me a stack of a dozen or so photos from the piles she’d sifted through. She had her lips pressed together, and it was clear by the look on her face she was offering the photos begrudgingly.
I shuffled through the handful of pictures. I remembered them, of course, though I wasn’t sure why she’d singled out these ones in particular.
“Look at the backgrounds,” she said, grabbing back the top picture from my hand and glancing over it again.
Many of the photos were extreme close-ups, but this one was zoomed out, revealing the dismal stone wall behind the beaten, middle-aged man. Nothing but stone wall. No windows that could reveal something about the scenery around them. No furniture, no other people.
“What about them?” I asked, flipping through the others she’d handed me, all zoomed out, all the same dismal stone wall background behind bloodied and bruised subjects.
She handed the photo back. “I’m not much of a history buff, but that stone architecture looks old to me.”
It had definitely seen better days. “How old, do you think?”
She shrugged. “Old enough that a historian or someone like that might recognize it.”
Well, I didn’t know any historians, but I did know a young woman with degrees in a relevant field who probably knew more about old shit like that than the people who’d built it.
“And in case you were wondering, Javier doesn’t own any Medieval castles,” Leeri added. She spoke scathingly, and yet, there just wasn’t quite the same bite in her tone anymore. Maybe I was growing on her.
Yeah, like a fungus she couldn’t wait to have removed.
“I’ll see what I can find out about this,” I said, standing up and stretching my legs. “Grazie,Leeri,” I added, maybe not quite as begrudgingly. It was a clue, one I’d completely missed.
“How about instead of thanking me, you tell me howthisends,” she said as she stood up and met my gaze dead-on.
The right move probably would have been to play the tough bitch role. The more precarious she believed her situation to be, the more cooperative she might prove to be. But whether she knew it or not, Leeri was as much one of Domínguez’s victims as the rest of them. She just didn’t know it yet.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” I said, speaking honestly. “You’re a fed; obviously, that’s a problem. But you’re also Brute’s sister.” I shrugged. “I don’t know how to save you and save them.” I motioned to the Costas in general, to all the people she could ruin if she reported back to her superiors.
She smiled tightly. “The inner moral struggles of a criminal… I wouldn’t have expected that.”
I shrugged. “I’m a surprising person.”
She eyed me like she was assessing that comment, but she said nothing else.
It was time for me to make my exit. But I’d barely made it down the stairs when the front door flew open and a ball of energy shot in through it.
“Greta!” the three-and-a-half-foot, dark-haired ball of energy squealed as he charged at me.
I scooped him up right before he slammed into my thighs.
