Not from him.
Not like this.
My voice breaks on his name, so I force a smile he can’t see. “Oye, gringo. Took you long enough.”
For one second, there is silence.
Then Shady breathes out, and I know he heard the woman under the blood. Not cargo. Not bait. Me.
Toro’s eyes gleam, like he heard the same weakness I did.
He ends the call.
The silence afterward is enormous.
I stare at the dead phone in his hand.
My heart is still racing, but something inside me has changed shape. Fear is still there. Pain too. But under it is something harder.
Shady heard me. Road captain. Smartass. Liar when it suits him. Mine in all the ways I am still too mad to admit.
Shady knows.
And now these men have a problem they think they understand.
Toro turns the burner off and sets it on the table.
“He’ll come,” he says.
“Yes,” I whisper.
Toro looks at me.
I smile with blood on my teeth.
“But not the way you think.”
Chapter 3
Darling
Twenty minutes before Toro’s voice comes through the burner, Lady is bleeding on a phone screen, and I can’t get to her.
That is the first kind of hell.
The second is Diablo’s arm locked around my waist like he can keep guilt from tearing me open if he holds me hard enough. His body is hot behind mine. Solid. Familiar. Violent in the quiet way that scares me more now because I know what men can call love when fear gets in their hands.
“Let me go,” I say.
My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds wrong.
Diablo’s mouth is near my ear. “No.”
The word snaps something ugly inside me.
Vice Ink is too bright for this. Morning light cuts through the stained glass and spills red, blue, and gold across the old church floor like God dropped broken promises over the clubhouse. Coffee, cigar smoke, leather, and last night’s whiskey hang in the air. Under all of it, I swear I can still smell hospital soap on my skin.
I hate it.