Chapter 7

Alessia POV:

Dante came for me. But he wasn't alone.

Bella slid into the passenger seat of his black sedan, her movements fluid and proprietary. She glanced back at me in the rearview mirror, a small, triumphant smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth.

"Bella is my partner," Dante said, his voice flat. He didn't look at me. He just started the car.

He called her Bella.

"We were thinking of going hiking this weekend, weren't we, Dante?" she said, her voice laced with a casual intimacy designed to cut me. "Up near where your mother... had her accident."

She let the words hang in the air, a cloud of poison.

Dante said nothing. He just drove, his knuckles white against the leather of the steering wheel.

He took us deep into the Sonoran Desert, the landscape growing harsh and unforgiving. He stopped the car at a familiar, desolate spot. A simple wooden cross was hammered into the dry earth. Martha Gallo. Beloved wife and mother.

I knelt, my knees sinking into the dust. Tears blurred the rough-hewn wood of the cross, the world dissolving into a watery haze.

"I'm sorry, Mama," I whispered to the silent marker. "I think he did it. I think Dad was involved. Forgive me."

Back in the car, that whispered apology felt like a surrender. The desperate need for denial had evaporated, replaced by a cold, hollow craving for the truth. I pulled my mother's old laptop from my bag.

It was an ancient thing, but I knew the encryption program she'd used. It took a few frantic attempts-her anniversary, his birthday-before my fingers, shaking, typed in my own. The flash drive opened.

It was a journal. Her journal.

Photos. Coded notes. Names. "The Scorpion." "El Jefe." It was all there. A meticulous record of her investigation into my father.

A final entry, dated the day before she died, made the air freeze in my lungs.

He knows. I have to move the package. The cave. The place I showed her.

The cave. A small, hidden hollow in the rocks she'd shown me when I was a child. Our secret place.

I scrambled out of the car and ran, ignoring Bella's sharp call of my name. I found it, half-hidden by a tangle of creosote bush.

Inside, tucked into a recess in the rock, was a locked metal box.

I found a heavy rock and smashed the lock, the sound echoing in the stillness of the desert. I pried open the lid.

My throat closed, stealing my breath.

Stacks of cash. And next to them, sealed, rectangular bricks of white powder.

Dante appeared beside me, a silent shadow. His voice was calm, clinical, as if he were identifying a specimen in a lab.

"High-purity cocaine," he said, pointing to a small, intricate scorpion stamped onto one of the bricks. "His emblem."

And just like that, the denial I'd clung to-the last fragile shield around my heart-didn't just crack. It exploded.

It was all true.