Page 182 of The Final Cut

Marisol nods. “To an associate family. Another cartel with routes Isabel wanted secured. You were children, but contracts can be made early. Mother called it protection. She called it legacy.”

My stomach turns.

Me.

The spare girl. The one not trained. The one used to bind a man somewhere else, a family somewhere else, a future I wouldn’t have chosen and maybe wouldn’t have survived.

A cold sweat breaks over the back of my neck. Ever’s hand remains at my shoulder. His thumb presses once, grounding me before the room can slide too far.

“You were going to be sold,” Delia says.

Not cruelly. Factually. The truth lands anyway.

Marisol holds my gaze, firm now, resolute beneath the grief. “Your father and I agreed on one thing immediately. So did Cal. It wasn’t going to happen.”

Something inside me cracks open around the simple force of that.

They chose me.

They chose us.

Before the sheets, before the closet, before bullets and blood and fifteen years of lies, my parents looked at Isabel’s future for their daughters and said no.

Marisol looks down at her hands again. “So we got everything in order. Frank had Cal purchase a house through channels Isabel didn’t know. It wasn’t far enough away. We wanted another state, another country, another life entirely, but moving money and property without alerting her took time we no longer had. There were legal complications, papers that couldn’t be rushed, accounts she might have noticed if we touched them wrong.”

Nash tracks every piece, expression still.

“We used different names,” Marisol continues. “Your father’s family name. Hart. Ordinary enough to disappear inside. We cut my history out of every document we could reach. We paid cash when possible. We told no one who didn’t have to know.”

“And then?”

Her mouth trembles.

“One day, we drove away. No heirlooms. No photographs she could trace. No jewelry. No favorite toys, though Delia screamed for a stuffed rabbit until she fell asleep.”

Delia’s eyes close.

“I remember the rabbit.”

“I do too,” Marisol whispers.

My eyes burn. I don’t remember the rabbit.

I remember a closet.

The thought is so bitter I almost miss Marisol’s next words.

“We lived in that house for three years.”

Three years.

The number hits strangely. I was four when we left, and then I was five, then six, then seven. A whole life in child years. A life with bad whistling in the kitchen and scary movies watched with a blanket half over my face. A life where Delia had a green or yellow bike and my father maybe sang off-key and my mother pressed her hand to her chest when she worried.

“And then she found us.”

Marisol’s voice lowers. “I still don’t know how. Frank was careful. Cal was careful. Deacon hadn’t yet⁠—”

She stops. Deacon’s face doesn’t move. The room seems to hold its breath around the missing end of that sentence.