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“Gia,” he pressed, “if you have information we can use, I need to know. I can protect you.”
“No, you can’t.” His face blurred through her tears. “Not from this.”
Vincente kept proving, again and again, how futile escape truly was.
“You’re hiding something.” Caleb’s voice carried an edge now. “Tell me.”
She shook her head. Saying it out loud meant reliving it—the gunshot. The helplessness that had rooted her feet while a man bled out in front of her.
The chill in Vincente’s eyes. Juan’s laughter. The crew’s indifference.
Caleb stepped in. Close enough that she could feel his heat.
He cupped her chin in his palm. “Whatever it is, baby, we’re in this together.”
His tenderness shattered her walls.
The truth she’d choked down and kept hidden for over two months spilled from her lips.
“Vincente…he shot him.” The words wobbled out. “I saw him die.”
The fingers on her chin tightened.
“So much blood.” Her voice dropped. “It stained the white deck. I can still smell it.”
A metallic, sweet odor. She saw blood, smelled it often in her practice. But this…Not even the stiff ocean breeze could wash it away.
She shut her eyes, too late to stop the flood of memory.
“I tried to help him. Vincente held me back—said Antonio was a DEA spy.” Her laugh was bitter. “That this was an unfortunate part of his business and as his future wife, one I needed to understand.”
Her throat swelled, nearly choking her. “Vincente’s cousin, Juan, dragged Antonio’s body to the railing…I watched him sink.”
And she’d screamed, the wind ripping away her cries.
Silence stretched between them.
Caleb's hand dropped away. He exhaled, rough and quiet. “Jesus.”
“I stayed a few more days. Tried to act normal, so he wouldn’t watch me too closely. Made a plan. Then I took out as much money as I could from my accounts and hopped on a Greyhound bus headed west.”
His lips thinned. “You were afraid.”
“I was selfish.” She swiped at her tears. “Vincente and Juan would be in jail now if I possessed an ounce of moral courage. Antonio’s family doesn’t know what happened to their loved one. Did he leave behind a wife? Children who will grow up without a father?”
It sickened her every time she thought about it.
Her Louis Vuitton suitcase sat in the corner. Reliving the memory brought back the suffocating terror, the helplessness.
A tremor shook her.
Run.A new name. Another city.
She could stilldo it.
But Jennie was out there.
Scared. Alone.