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She deserves this time to be pissed off. It fucking kills me that she isn’t talking to Mila either, though. Mila doesn’t deserve that shit, especially not from my daughter. It’s my goddamn fault, and I don’t know how to fix it. Because I don’t think my daughter is necessarily pissed that I’m with Mila. That’s not why she’s ignoring us. She’s hurt because I’ve shared things with Mila that I won’t talk to her about. She feels betrayed.
How the fuck do I fix that when this is the one thing I can’t give her? I’m her father. It’s my job to protect her. Telling her the truth about what I do for the ATF and the men I work with isn’t protecting her. It’ll only serve to ensure she spends the rest of my damn career looking over her shoulder, worrying every fucking day that she’s going to lose me to some asshole with a grudge. I don’t want that for her.
But I can’t explain that to her, either. I’ve made a royal goddamn mess of things. All I can do right now is wait her out until she’s ready to talk. It’s not enough.
I know what I need to do to fix it. But fuck, I never thought that day would come. At least not for a long fucking time.
But it looks like it’ll be coming a helluva lot sooner than I thought.
“She needs time, baby,” I murmur to Mila, curving my hand around her jaw to tip her head back. “She’ll come around. We just have to be patient.”
Her face falls. “But—”
“Give her time, sweetheart. I promise you, she’ll come around.”
Mila’s beautiful eyes skim across my face, searching for something—some hint that I’m right, some assurance that she isn’t losing her best friend, some guarantee that I’m not going to lose my daughter. Eventually, she sighs again, the sad sound breaking my heart.
“Okay,” she whispers.
I touch my mouth to hers in a lingering kiss, my chest pulsing with emotion. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
I reluctantly climb into the truck, leaving my entire fucking heart behind.
Instead of going to the condo when I get to LA, I head to the office to see Finn. I find him buried under a mound of paperwork in his office, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights.
“Well, look what the fuckin’ cat dragged in,” he says, grinning at me. He crosses his arms, the seams of his shirt stretched to capacity. Finn is a big motherfucker. He played football in another life and could have gone pro, but decided law enforcement was more his speed.
“You’re the one who exiled me.” I lean against the wall across from him, smirking. “But I’m glad to see that you were in a hell of your own making while I was in Santa Cruz.”
His smile slips, his gaze drifting to the stack of paperwork on his desk. “Don’t make me kick your big ass out of my office, Roman. Half of this shit is your doing.” He rifles through it for a minute and pulls a stack of papers out, holding it out to me. “Sign all this shit while you’re here.”
“What is it?”
One dark brow wings up his ebony forehead. “You killed someone, motherfucker. What do you think it is?”
“Shit.” I push away from the wall, striding toward his desk to sign the fucking forms saying I’ve crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s and am fit to return to duty.
I snatch a pen from his desk, leaning down to start signing. I don’t bother reading the shit. Finn and I have worked together for ten years. I trust the man with my life. He wouldn’t fuck me over. He needs me too goddamn much.
“What’s the situation here?” I ask.
“Same shit, different day.” Finn sighs. “Guerrero and his people are lining up rival cartels and knocking them down. We just cleaned up our third dead body, and word on the street is that we can expect a whole helluva lot more before he’s finished.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter. It’s what we expected, but it’s still not what I wanted to hear. A cartel war is the last thing we need popping off. “The guns?”
He hesitates.
“Just tell me.”
“They’re the reason I called you back. The gun we found at the shooting last night is one of ours.”
I close my eyes, hanging my head in defeat. “I almost hoped they'd sent them across the border."
“Me too, but it looks like they’re going to use the fucking weapons we put in their hands to initiate this cartel war.”
“Does Brady know?”
