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God, I hated that smile.

I hated her face.

I hated that she was standing while Papá lay dead beneath my hands.

Her attention settled on Lachlan, on the way he’d positioned himself partly between me and the guns.

Her smile faltered.

Only for a second, then it came back meaner.

“How touching.”

Chapter twenty-one

Well, this was thoroughly fucked.

We were hiding behind a dead man’s truck in the middle of a cartel civil war. Rafael had bled out on the ground less than a minute ago. Isabella was still on her knees beside the father she’d only just discovered belonged to her, with his blood covering both hands. Somewhere on the other side of the truck, men were shooting at one another over Ciro’s corpse and whatever pieces of his empire they thought they could claim before the day was over.

And standing directly in front of us was the cunt who’d started it.

I kept Ciro’s pistol trained on Mateo and took in the rest of the scene.

Mateo stepped closer to me as the rifleman went right, the two of them spreading apart to divide my attention.

Smart.

The move also cleared the rifleman’s line of sight, positioning him so that the barrel pointed straight at Isabella’s head.

I adjusted my stance, keeping Mateo in front of my gun while tracking the rifleman in my peripheral vision. They were far enough apart now that I could cover either one with a quick turn of my wrist.

I just couldn’t kill both at once.

That decided everything.

A few minutes ago, I could’ve concentrated on getting us through the next gunfight, through the service door, and beyond the compound’s thick concrete walls. I’d been doing some version of that since Isabella opened my cuffs—find the threat, kill it, keep moving. Pain, thirst, whatever the fuck my left leg was doing could all be dealt with later.

But Isabella, with a rifle pointed at her head, had changed the equation.

At this range, I could put a bullet in Mateo before he fired. I could turn and get a second shot off at the rifleman too. On a good day, I probably could’ve killed them both before either man understood what happened.

This wasn’t a good day.

I was dehydrated, half-beaten to hell, and running on whatever adrenaline my body still had left. The rifle was already lined up on Isabella’s face. If my second shot was a fraction too slow, if the bastard’s finger tightened while he was dying, if I missed by an inch because my arm decided two days of torture had finally caught up with it—

No.

I’d gambled with my own life plenty of times, but there was no fucking way I was gambling with Isabella’s.

Rafael had looked me in the eye while he was dying and trusted me with the only thing in the world that had mattered to him. But the truth was, the old man hadn’t created this need to keep her alive. He’d only put honor behind something I’d already decided.

Isabella had done the rest herself.

She’d done it when she brought a bottle of water to a stranger chained beneath her bedroom. When she came back after hearing Isabeast torture me. When she opened my restraints, even though she knew I could overpower her the second my hands were free.

And definitely when she walked back into that dungeon with the key instead of using Ciro’s death to save herself.

Somewhere along the way, Mouse had become mine to get off this fucking mountain.