Page 92 of Victorious: Part 3

“She never told me…” Lock’s face crumples with fresh grief.

“Because she was protecting you,” Black Swan continues. “She didn’t want any fuss. She’d had threats before, and the club always took care of them. She thought this would be the same.”

The room falls silent except for the hum of the ventilation system.

“What else do you know?” My stomach is now churning with guilt that I was supposed to be Livvy’s savior.

I was supposed to go in and protect her that day.

I failed her.

I fucking failed.

Black Swan meets my eyes. “His mother, Lucia Rojas. She’s his weakness, the only person he’s ever truly loved.”

“His mother?” Nighthawk leans forward.

“She’s passed away now, but the crux of it is that he put hismother in the prison system way back in the day to start it all. She helped him build the whole thing.”

Furrowing my brows, I scowl. “He put his own mother in prison?”

She nods. “Yeah, she offered, apparently, believing in his cause. She began the process of the pregnancy chambers below the prison. She recruited a woman inside called Layla to help mastermind the entire thing, and together they orchestrated this whole system.”

“Jesus,” Lock mumbles.

“Javier’s mother trained Layla until his mother died in the prison system, and Layla took over as the leader. Javier lost his shit when his mother died, and that’s when he started planning his coup over Rico, because Rico didn’t offer his mother the usual Rojas Cartel funeral. Word on the street was that Rico told Javier it’s because she was a woman.”

Snorting out a laugh, I shake my head. “Lovely.”

“Javier tried to tell Rico she’s been instrumental in building the next wave, but Rico just denied the request. So, Javier started planning, with Atlas, the birds, and everything else he could do to wipe his uncle off the face of the earth, all because he refused his mother a proper Cartel funeral.”

Something inside me shifts, the final piece of the puzzle clicking into place.

The one mission I have left as Blue Jay.

To make Javier suffer as much as possible before I watch the life drain from him.

Torturously.

Painfully.

Slowly.

“You’re sure about this?” I ask.

“I’ve been tracking his movements for years. His mother is the one constant in his life, the one thing he’s completelyobsessed over. It’s almost a little creepy.”

Lock looks up at all of us, his expression haunted. “So, what happens now? To Miranda? To me?”

Letting out a long breath, I stand. “Now, we go back to the clubhouse. We debrief, we plan, and we figure out how to use this information.”

“And Black Swan?” Nighthawk asks, raising her brow at me.

I look at the woman who was there when Livvy died, who tried to save the woman we all loved, even while trapped in Javier’s web.

“She comes with us. It’s time she learned what it really means to be free.”

Lock shakes his head, standing slowly. “This is insane…all of it.”