Heavy footsteps lumbered down the hallway, and within seconds, Alex stood in front of my cell twirling a set of handcuffs around his finger. “Well, it looks like your girlfriend has agreed to testify against you,” he announced, a smug lift in his voice. “I’m happy to say you’re going to be arrested.”
I briefly held his eye before leaning my head against the wall and staring at the ceiling. “Am I supposed to be shocked?”
He chuckled. “You’ll see the judge in twelve hours. Stand up, Cortes. Time to smile pretty for the camera.”
I let out a sigh of relief as a bald officer with a tree trunk for a neck shoved me into a new cell and slammed the door.
“Might want to get comfortable, asshole. I hear processing is slow with paperwork tonight,” he sneered, squeezing one of the bars with his ridiculously huge bicep to intimidate me. Too bad I wasn’t impressed. Bullets flew faster than fists.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I leaned against the wall. “Might want to lay off the gym candy, Arnold. I hear juicing shrinks your nuts.”
I hit a nerve—or at least one of the veins currently popping out in what used to be his neck—because he slammed his hand against the bar and muttered a few unoriginal racial slurs before stomping off. The whole thing would’ve made me laugh if it didn’t bore me so much. Men like him riled up so easily it lost all entertainment value.
Sighing, I glanced around the room, fatigue setting in. There weren’t any clocks, but the grit in my eyes told me it’d been at least twenty-four hours since Leighton and I had been dragged out of the townhouse. Just from experience, I knew even if someone posted bail immediately, it would be six to eight hours before I walked out of here.
“What a dick.” Pushing off the wall, I turned toward the hard bench when a low laugh drifted in from the next cell. Walking back toward the bars, I pressed my face against them and craned my neck. “Something funny?”
“Yeah, you.” A heavy Mexican accent floated between his own bars as a pair of arms dangled between them. “That pinche cabrón’s name is really Dick.”
I laughed despite the fucked-up situation. “Of course it is.”
“What’d you do to land your ass back in tambo?” he asked, his hands gesturing toward our neighboring cells. “I thought you were in Mexico City livin’ the good life on that big ass yacht.”
It irritated the hell out of me that I couldn’t see his face. Obviously, he’d seen me walk in and knew who I was. Only someone on the inside would know my rank and that Val had a weakness for the open sea.
Not sure who might be listening, I switched to our native Mexican dialect. “Quién eres tú y cuál es tú rango?” Who are you, and what’s your rank?
“No importa,” he growled, pulling his hands back and all but disappearing into his cell. “No hay necesidad de rango si no hay cartel.” It doesn’t matter. There’s no rank if there’s no cartel.
I started to remind him the Carrera hold on Houston was just as powerful as ever when his strong reaction triggered the full meaning of what he’d said.
If there’s no cartel.
I pressed my forehead against the cold steel. “Eres un oficial de Muñoz.” You’re a Muñoz official.
It wasn’t a question. I had no doubt we were two made men who’d battled on opposite sides of a war fought on the same soil. The Muñoz Cartel had been our only rival, and it dismantled just before I returned to Mexico four months ago, crippled after the death of their leader, Manuel Muñoz.
I should know. I was there when Val’s wife pulled the trigger.
“Sí,” he confirmed, switching back to broken English. “My congratulations to your jefe and his wife on their bouncing baby psychopath.”
I jerked against the bars, hissing out a warning, “Ten cuidado con tu maldita lengua, o la arrancaré de tu boca.” Watch your fucking tongue, or I’ll rip it out.
“Calm the hell down, Cortes,” he chastised, fueling my anger. “Nobody’s around. They think they’ve got you by the balls, so they don’t give a shit to listen anymore.”
“Why? Did Dick tell you that? Do you two have pillow talk after he pounds you in the ass?”
Fuck it. If he wanted to be an asshole, so could I.
Instead of pissing him off, my insult made him laugh. “Word on the street is Delgado and Diaz are dead. Sounds like an inter-personnel problem to me.”
I backed up. “What do you know?”
He paced while running his fingers across the bars—a stall technique designed to make me crazy. It was working.
“If you think Atwood is your only problem, you’ve been in Mexico too long,” he said, coming to a halt.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Houston isn’t that big, amigo. I have no interest in helping a Carrera, but, unlike your jefe, when it comes down to another oficial or a narcopolitico, I side with my own.” A hint of hostility crept into his voice, but I listened intently without interjecting. “You need to ask yourself who had the most to gain by shutting those two up permanently. Seems to me your problem is our fine mayor.”
His insinuation hung in the air. “Lilith Donovan may be corrupt, and she’s definitely a puta—but a murderer?”
His feet shuffled again. The next time he spoke, his voice was so close it sounded less than an arm’s length away. “Three of your men knew she liked to walk on the wild side. Two are dead. I’d ask the third before he is too.”
No. Only five people knew about that.
“You’re lying.”
He muttered under his breath. “You should know better than anyone how power can close steel bars. You think I’m facing twenty to life because I’m careless? I made a deal that went bad. Two guesses on who it was with.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Leighton
I wore white.
What seemed like a perfectly logical idea walking in now felt ridiculous as I exited the courthouse dressed in the abomination that now flapped in the breeze like a giant virginal flag.
Such an over-the-top gesture was unnecessary, but I’d walked into the clerk’s office with my head held high and asked for Melinda, speaking with conviction while signing both mine and Mateo’s names to a Declaration of Informal Marriage form. My hand didn’t even shake as I paid the obligatory thirty-one dollars, slipping Melinda two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills for her trouble.
Now, standing on the steps outside, I glanced down at my outfit with disdain. The long-sleeved, baby doll dress was covered in so much white lace I looked like an oversized toddler, but it was done.
In the eyes of the state of Texas, Mateo and I were married.
“Leighton? Do you want to sit down?” A gentle hand rested on my shoulder, dragging me out of my fog.
“No,” I said, letting out a resigned breath. “They’ll be here soon to pick us up.”
She squeezed my shoulder then settled her hand over her small belly. I snuck a glance out of the corner of my eye. Other than looking like she’d swallowed a toy ball, Eden Lachey hadn’t changed much. She still had shocking bright red hair that was piled on top of her head, but it was the black dress she wore that made me laugh. Sexy and form-fitting, when paired next to my sacrificial virgin costume, we looked like the living embodiment of yin and yang.