So I didn’t care what they thought Eden would want. I made my wife a promise on our wedding day, and until that steady goddamn beep flatlined on its own, I swore I’d keep it.
And I did.
Against everyone’s judgment, I brought my wife home. I converted the entire west wing of the newly renovated estate into a sterilized hospital ward. I staffed the best doctors and nurses money could buy and kept them on a twenty-four-hour rotating schedule. I hired physical therapists to keep her body healthy and brought in world-class musicians to play for her.
For twenty-four weeks, I comforted our son as he cried for his mother. For twenty-four weeks, I got up in the middle of the night and fed our daughter. For twenty-four weeks, I visited the west wing and kissed my wife—one cheek good morning and the other cheek good night. And in between those hours, I beat the living hell out of my men in the downstairs gym and expended any other residual energy doing unspeakable things in the Carrera Kitchen.
But then a miracle happened.
After six months of sleep, my wife opened her eyes.
Only nothing changed. I still held my son while he cried for the mother who didn’t know him. I still woke every night to feed the daughter who caused my wife to shake in fear when she was asked to hold her. And those kisses every morning and night were politely rejected.
And for eleven weeks, those same people tried to make me accept a new truth.
She’s gone through enough. Don’t push. She’ll come around, eventually. Give her time.
Well, eventually wasn’t good enough. Eleven weeks of silent dinners and cold showers tested the most patient of men.
That was why on the twelfth week, everything changed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Valentin
El Muerte had risen.
My father’s prophecy had come to fruition. Without my talisman by my side, the curse he placed on a sixteen-year-old boy who put a bullet in an innocent man’s head consumed me.
The Reaper was no longer just a name used by headline-seeking journalists looking to capitalize on the fear of American citizens. It was now a hunger that dwelled within me. It growled its demands the moment I awoke, and I obeyed, feeding its insatiable appetite for destruction until my head hit the pillow.
El Muerte’s hands were merciless, dripping with the blood of so many nameless men, they’d become scarred from the incessant torture. They were the hands of a monster. The touch of the devil himself.
The man I’d become was so vile even those closest to me kept their distance. My sister and her husband ran US operations from our base in Houston, rarely crossing the border. Updates were short and to the point and never accompanied by small talk. Even the central ring of my inner circle, my second-in-command, stopped questioning my increasingly excessive brutality in the Kitchen after finding himself up against a wall with a meat cleaver to his throat.
However, even with all of El Muerte’s wrath and hate inside me, there were two people who always overpowered him. Two opposing forces radiating such innocence and light, it compelled him back into the shadows.
My children.
It was late. Too late for them to be awake, yet as I stood at the top of the stairs, I heard laughter. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath, letting the carefree sound fill my lungs and soak my blackened soul. As always, it dulled the roar, layering a false peace around it that I greedily took. I didn’t know why Luisa had them up at this hour, but I wouldn’t punish her for it.
Ten minutes.
Ten minutes of redemption and then I’d leave them in peace.
But when I made my way down the hall and stood in front of my son’s open bedroom door, it wasn’t the nanny I saw on the floor with a book in her hand. It wasn’t the nanny my two and a half-year-old son sat leaned up against, enraptured and content. And it wasn’t the nanny’s arms that my nine-month-old daughter snuggled into, clapping and laughing with a bright smile on her face.
“Again, mamá!”
Eden laughed. “I’ve already read this story three times, Santi.”
I rolled my eyes. Rookie move. She might as well have been talking to the wall. She of all people should know that reasoning with Carrera men was a fruitless endeavor.
My good mood faded.
No, I suppose she wouldn’t.
As expected, my son refused to accept defeat. “Again.”
That secret smile tugged across her mouth. The one she always knew drove me crazy and did it anyway. “What do you think, Lola?” she asked, squinting down at the squealing baby in her arms. “Are you up for round four?”
Lola’s answer was a wet raspberry right across her face.
“Yucky, Yoya!” Santi glared at his sister and wiped his cheek. Pursing and twisting his lips, he wrinkled his nose as a deep vertical line sank between his dark eyes.
I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Physically, my boy was all Carrera, but that look had his mother written all over it. Not a soul on Earth could give a patronizing glare quite like Eden Lachey.
Or apparently, Santiago Carrera.
“Oh, you’re one to talk,” Eden snorted, reaching around his back to tickle his ribs. He fell to the floor in a mass of giggles and protests as she continued her assault. “You were the raspberry king, mijo!”
I laughed.
Until I didn’t.
He was. Santiago’s favorite pastime as a baby was blowing raspberries and sucking on his mother’s neck. Eden spent the first year of his life sporting so many hickies the staff started whispering.
And she called him mijo. She’d called him that since the day he was born.
She remembered.
For the first time in nearly three months, a fire lit inside me. Call it a spark of hope, but it was something other than all this nothing I’d lived with. My hands itched to touch her. My feet ached to step into the room and join them. And my fucking heart—that charred piece of shit in my chest I thought had withered away—ticked for the first time since hers had stopped.
As I stood there arguing with myself on whether or not to intrude, my son, given a reprieve, sat up and looked me dead in the eye.
“Papá!”
Shit!
It was as if someone flipped a light switch. Eden’s spine stiffened, and the cheerful mood in the room plummeted.
I had two choices. I could force her hand or walk away. And I’d done enough walking away.
Gritting my teeth, I walked into the room, ignoring how every step caused her to flinch. “Hola, son. Having fun?”
He nodded vigorously. “Mamá weed ‘towy.”
“Is that right?” I lowered a penetrating stare at her. “Well, I’m always up for a good story.”
And not just the one written on the pages. If Santi wanted a story, I had one that would blow Goodnight fucking Moon out of the water. It starred a sarcastic red-haired queen and the evil king who held her prisoner in his castle until she came to her fucking senses.
Eden kept her eyes averted, but I didn’t have to look at them to know the truth. I felt it and so did she. The connection between us wasn’t just physical. It was a living, breathing entity that could consume a whole room and raze an entire continent. It survived distance and defied death.
And despite what she wanted to believe, it transcended her own defenses.