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I smiled, despite myself. ‘Your eyes look heavy,’ I said quietly. ‘Like they’re weighed down with a terrible secret.’
He looked at the floor, a self-deprecating smile reappearing on his lips. ‘You always did know how to read me,’ he said.
‘What is it, Lindsay? What is so important that you had to come to Colombia to tell me?’
He lifted his head and met my eyes again. ‘We raided the Gypsy Brothers’ clubhouse. We found a fingerprint in Dornan’s room. Juliette Portland’s fingerprint.’
I stared at him in horror, disbelief settling into my chest like an old friend. There was a chance that John’s daughter – Adelita’s half-sister – was still alive?
‘It’s old. It has to be,’ I breathed.
‘It’s a fresh fingerprint, Mariana. We have reason to believe that,somehow, Juliette is alive. And she is with the Gypsy Brothers.’
EPILOGUE
MARIANA
When I was a girl, I’d dream about marrying my king.
When I met Esteban, I knew. I knew he was the one for me. Something about the way he looked at me seeped into my bones and settled there. Warm. Familiar. I loved him so much, there was this constant ache in my chest.
I was nineteen when I felt him take his last breath, in my arms in a dirty alley. My life was over. I thought I’d die, too.
I didn’t. That heart of mine kept beating and aching, missing my lover, missing our son.
When I was a girl, I’d dream about marrying my king.
I never thought Dornan Ross would end up my king. But he did. He made me his queen.
I didn’t want it.
He didn’t care.
Our wedding night was spent in a hotel room in Vegas, with me locked in the bathroom, staring at the wall as he threatened to smash the door down and then beat my head in.
He’d already killed our child. I wasn’t going to let him get inside me again. Wasn’t going to let him poison me.
I wasn’t going to let him corrupt me ever again.
It didn’t matter. He broke the door down eventually.
He got inside me again.
And that’s where he stayed, until the bitter end.
Because of all the things in life, love is the most confusing. The most all-consuming. The reason we breathe, the light in our darkness.
At sixteen, love devastated me, his perfect button nose and sweet baby smell overwhelming as my father took him from my arms and into the night.
At nineteen, love saved me, a dangerous man with a heart that was determined to own mine.
At twenty-nine love almost freed me . . . but in the end, love broke me.
I wish I could tell you that things ended differently – but I’d be lying. I don’t know if he regrets what he did, or if he’s happy, but it doesn’t matter, really.
It doesn’t change the fact that the man who loved me ended up being the same man who would destroy me.
