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“To catch a snake, you need to get close enough to it to cut off its head. Our snake is the very man that I allowed into our backyard, because I needed to see how he moved. I wanted access to his operations, and to see how he went about things. Everyone makes a mistake once in a while, we’re human after all. And that’s when it happened, he slipped up… He made a mistake, and I got all the answers that I needed.”
The picture was becoming clearer and clearer.
“Wha… what are you saying?”
“Felipe Valdez killed your father and brother.”
I tightened my fists in my lap as a small fragment of my heart cracked and shattered.
Present time…
The door opened. My husband walked in looking far more disheveled than he had left. His top two buttons were undone, and there were blood spatters on his white shirt. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and his hair was all over the place.
There was not a scratch or bruise on him. The only indication of any kind of violence was the bruises on his knuckles.
His blue eyes found my face, and the war that had been tormenting him eased ever so slightly.
“You shouldn’t be up,” his rough voice filled the room. He closed the door after him and walked to where I stood. “How are you feeling?”
“You were gone long.” My arms tightened around my body. “You left in the morning.”
The corner of his lips tilted upward, making my heart squeeze. Why was he so devastatingly handsome? I didn’t like the way my heart just reacted to him so easily.
“Getting answers out of a traitor is hard, bruja. There is an art to this.” His light-hearted joke fell on deaf ears.
I stared at my husband, the man who had come in and rearranged my entire life without warning. I had barbed wire around my heart, but somehow, he had maneuvered through the sharp landscape and touched my heart.
I didn’t know how. I didn’t know when. But Andres Valdez came into my life and stopped time.
“So,” I cleared my throat, “did you get the answers you were looking for?”
My question hung heavy in the space between us. I stared into his eyes, looking for any kind of indication that he, too, had been duped like the rest of us. All this time, all these years. I had sat across from my father and brother’s killers for years. Shook his hand, exchanged pleasantries, and invited him into my home.
My stomach churned.
“Andres…” I searched desperately for an answer he had yet to give. For months I had loathed him, and now that I was presented with a good enough reason to hate him, I prayed for the opposite. “What did you learn?”
He swallowed hard, the hardball in his neck bobbing up and down. “You know, don’t you?”
I nodded my head slowly, the tension in the air thickening, squeezing me to the point of uncomfortableness. “The real question is… Did you?”
Dimitri said he trusted him, otherwise he would have never given me away to be married. But I had my doubts. I wanted to believe in him, I wanted to believe that he was not the root cause of why my entire world had been flipped on its head.
My father… Fede… My mother…
They had all been taken from me that horrid night. The blade I carried pressed hot into my skin. I had put it on after Dimitri had left. He had insisted that Andres was innocent, but…
“No.” His answer finally came. He reached for me, but I instinctually moved away from his touch. “Amor…”
My heart squeezed. He had never called me that before. The sincerity in his tone nearly broke down the very fragile walls that had been threatening to crumble for some time now.
“So he did it. It’s true?” The crack in my voice was unexpected, and surprised me a little. I was good at compartmentalizing my emotions. But that had just seeped through the cracks. “Your father killed my family.”
He didn’t really need to answer. The picture was clear, and the clues that this man had been hinting at for months finally made sense. He was cryptic in how he spoke to me, and always made sure to bring up my father. He had been unknowingly taunting me like the fool I was.
“Yes.”
That one word had far more impact than a million sentences spoken at once. It not only brought the decade-long witch hunt to a close, but it conjured up a new level of anger and hatred from deep within my belly. It was the kind of hatred that you could taste in your tastebuds with every swallow.
