A tear spilled from the corner of Kira’s eye. Luca swiped it away with his thumb.
“I’m so sorry.”
He tried to smile. “Thank you.”
He looked out her window at the house, wanting to get to work rather than dwell on a past he couldn’t change. “This place looks like it belongs in Destiny’s neighborhood.”
“South Eagle is a little older, but it isn’t any less glamorous than North Eagle.” She pushed the door open, swiping her cheeks like she was trying to hide her reaction from him. “There are a lot of houses over a million dollars in both areas.”
“Probably because they all have this incredible view of the mountains.” He glanced at her across the hood of his truck and saw her nod. Then he spotted what was wrong. “The front door is open. Maybe you should stay in the truck.”
“If he’s hurt, you’ll want me with you inside the house.”
“Fine,” Luca said. “You can stay behind me.”
“Because of what I said at Destiny’s? Because that guy nearly killed me and so I might not be able to defend myself? Is that what you think?” She looked ready to cry again, but it had been an emotional day, and she was in need of rest.
“It’s so that I can point my gun at the bad guys instead of you.”
“Oh.”
Luca touched his lips to hers quickly, wanting to linger but knowing they didn’t have time. He wasn’t even sure they were safe right here. He turned back to the house, and she squeezed his side from behind him. That was all the reassurance she gave him that she understood what he’d said.
He stepped into the house first, easing the front door open with his gun.
“Should we call 911?” Kira whispered.
“We will. But I want to look around first.”
The issue of whether or not he believed the police in Renegade were corrupt didn’t need to come up now. But they weren’t in Detective Martinelli’s jurisdiction here. This part of the city was covered by a different police station, and the responding officers would come from there. Detective Martinelli might not be able to smooth out any issues they ran into—or stop another officer from implicating them.
Because the fact was that with all the investigation and snooping they’d been doing into the syndicate, there was no way Luca and Kira could remain under the radar. Eventually someone would come gunning for them because they got too close to the truth.
Luca had her wait by the door while he searched the house.
When he came back to her, he said, “Torres isn’t here, but you should take a look at what I found.”
“In here.” Luca led her to a small study, an interior door open at the far end. He walked her to the door and stood to the side to let her go in.
“You were going to show me this office? It looks like everything Dr. Torres owns has been tossed from its place and onto the floor.”
The entire house looked like this. It was one of the few things that could have distracted her from the fact that she’d told Luca the worst part of her history. In response, he had absorbed the news, deciding that getting to know each other better and spending even more time together was obviously the answer.
Maybe she hadn’t expected him to dump her then and there, but it was like her actions didn’t even faze him.
Then he’d reciprocated by telling her the darkest part of his story.
She couldn’t believe the racial profiling he’d endured.
Okay, so maybe she could believe it. But the idea they’d been falsely accused of a connection to terrorists that had his father seeing no other way out but taking his own life was beyond tragic. It had torn their family apart.
“Someone definitely broke in and tossed the place looking for something.” Luca waved her over to the open doorway. “But maybe they didn’t realize what they’d found.”
She frowned and stepped into the smaller room, barely bigger than a closet. Someone had drawn all over the walls in permanent marker. To anyone else it would’ve probably looked like the scribbles of somebody who might need the benefit of a ninety-day psych hold.
“Do you know what this is?”
She looked around, scanning the formulas and notes. Tracking the progression of Torres’s work to the inevitable breakthrough. “If they were looking for this, they probably just took pictures of it.”