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It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen the blood on the walls when I came into the room. Or the bodies. I had. But after listening to gunshots and shouting while Lachlan sat helpless in the middle of it, I’d only cared about finding him alive. Everything else had stayed at the edges until I knew he was safe. I simply hadn’t let myself register any of it yet.

Now there was nowhere else for my mind to hide, and the rest of the room came rushing in.

The smell really hit me. Blood, gunpowder, and the damp cellar odor I’d known since childhood all mixed together in the stale air.

The guard Mateo had killed lay near the main door.

I had seen dead men before.

That was one of the uglier truths of growing up at Finca La Cruzona.

But I had never stood this close to what a bullet fired beneath a man’s chin could do.

Most of the top of his head was simply gone.

Blood had sprayed across the doorframe and ceiling and was running down the wall in thick streaks. One arm was trapped beneath his body, the other bent at an odd angle.

I slapped a hand over my mouth and nose, trying not to lose it.

“Don’t look at him.”

Lachlan’s voice came from behind me.

Too late, my eyes found Father.

Everything else disappeared.

He lay beside a small table on his back, one shoulder twisted slightly beneath him.

For one stupid second, my mind insisted he was going to get up.

Ciro Delgado did not lie on the floor.

Other men did.

Men who disappointed him. Men who betrayed him. Men who had something he wanted.

Father stood over bodies.

He gave orders while someone else cleaned up the blood.

He sat at the head of the dining table in an immaculate shirt with his cuffs buttoned and his cigar resting between two fingers while grown men waited for permission to speak.

He did not die on the concrete floor of his own dungeon.

Except here he was.

The bullet hole between his eyes was almost shockingly small.

That was the part I couldn’t stop staring at.

A dark, round, sunken pit in the center of his face.

Blood had run from it down the bridge of his nose, around his lip, and down his chin. His eyes, pupils blown wide, were still open, staring at nothing.

Behind his head, the wall told the rest of the story, smeared with blood, bone, and gray matter where the back of his skull had taken the real damage.

My father had always hated disorder. Shoes left by a doorway. Papers sitting crooked on his desk. A dinner setting missing the correct fork.