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‘What did you do?’ Mariana whispered.
‘Let me handle this,’ John barked, and Mariana’s eyes went wide. ‘Go and take care of the boy,’ he said, gentler this time.
She nodded, disappearing from view.
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ John said.
‘Do what?’ Dornan asked, grinning.
The bastard was smug. He’d killed the woman he’d been willing to leave the cartel for, and he was fucking smug?
‘Let her see . . . this,’ he said, gesturing to the carnage. ‘Was that really necessary?’
Dornan didn’t answer. He pushed off the vanity, where he’d been resting one foot, and brushed past John.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
MARIANA
I’d never seen Dornan so indifferent in the face of death.
When he’d killed the woman in the backseat of his truck, he had cried. Wept as he pulled the trigger and delivered the bullet that ended her life. I’d seen the anguish in his eyes, seen the devastation that engulfed him.
Now he seemed almost bored with the fact that he’d just killed someone. And not just anyone.
He’d loved her, once. That was the part I found the hardest to accept. He’d loved her, and she’d left, and this was what happened when you left a man like Dornan Ross and never came back. Eventually, he found you, and brutally murdered you.
All of these things raced through my head as I stood in a small bedroom and watched the rise and fall of a young boy’s chest.
He might have been fifteen, but in deep sleep he looked younger. He was gorgeous, with olive skin and dark, long eyelashes that covered his closed eyes.
He looked exactly like Dornan. Like a miniature version, though he was almost as tall as him. I held a hand over my mouth as I took him in silently, not wanting to make a noise and risk waking him up. But it seemed like he was knocked out, and that he’d sleep through anything.
I wondered if he’d found his mother. As I was thinking all of this, Dornan entered the room and stood beside me, his hands in his pockets.
‘You can stop looking at me like that,’ he said, his voice like gravel. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, sending smoke wafting across the room.
‘You shouldn’t be smoking in the house,’ I said warily, and that made him chuckle. ‘Why not?’ he replied, tapping ash on the carpet. ‘The house is about to burn down.’
I thought of my family. How Emilio had burned them.
How the apple never falls far from the tree.
I looked from Dornan to his unconscious son, a coldness settling into my being. I felt shards of ice travel along my veins and arteries, turning everything frozen and black inside. Everything.
‘How could you do this?’ I asked him.
Dornan looked at the ground and then back at me, the fury in his eyes unmistakable.
‘What would you have done,’ he asked darkly, ‘if someone had stolen your child away from you?’
I thought of Murphy, the way he had been so heavy in death. Of Allie, her threats against Luis, and how much lighter she had been as I had stolen her breath away and then rolled her body into the water.
I decided that I wasn’t one to judge, after all.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
DORNAN
