I could feel my eyes welling up with tears. Suddenly all the fight had drained out of me. It was all true. All of it.
“Alana, please,” he whispered, taking his hand away from my mouth. I couldn’t even scream. My mouth curled up as my lungs hardened, the tears choked deep inside. I couldn’t breath, I couldn’t do anything but try and keep the horrible sadness inside.
“Please,” he said again. “Don’t cry. Don’t. I know I messed up. I know you think I’m horrible and I am a horrible person. I’m a bad man. I’m no better than the worst. But please, please know that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill you, not for all the money, not for anything. I would never hurt you.”
“You lie!” I cried out, a sob ripping out of me. “You’re hurting me right now, to the bone!” I turned my head away from him, my eyes squeezed tight as tears spilled out of them and onto the pillow. I felt so stupid, so foolish, so fucking alone. I was alone again like I always was.
The man I loved was only here because he tried to kill me. The man I loved never loved me at all.
I had nobody now. I never did. Not my brother, not my friends. I was as good as dead.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” I sobbed. “Why didn’t you kill me?”
“I couldn’t,” he said, his voice ragged. “I couldn’t do it.”
“You should have. You should have pulled the trigger and ended this!” I screamed the last part and then collapsed into sobs. I felt like my body was being torn apart, my lungs and heart and breath all squeezed by the sorrow that was running so violent and deep.
“Alana,” he said, burying his face into my neck. He was shuddering against me, trying to breathe himself. “I fell in love with you.”
“Liar!” I yelled.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. I’m not lying. I love you. I love you and I would have told you the truth but I didn’t know how. I was too afraid to lose you. Alana, please, I can’t lose you.”
I put my hands up to his chest and tried to push him off me. “You’ve already lost me.”
“No.”
I blinked, trying to look through my blurry vision at him. His own eyes looked blurry too.
“Let me go, whatever your name is.”
“It’s Derek,” he repeated, grabbing my arms and holding me tight. “It’s Derek Conway and I am not going to let you go. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’ll scream,” I warned him, not kidding. “I’ll scream and get you thrown in a Mexican jail and then what the fuck are you going to do, huh?”
Panic shone his eyes, their blue color so hard and cold above me. “Alana, listen to me. You can hate me for lying but don’t hate me for loving you.”
“I hate you because you tried to fucking kill me!”
“But I didn’t!” he roared in my face. “And I’ve been trying to keep you alive ever since! Do you think it’s easy to lie, to worry if the person you love loves you or the lie? Do you think I didn’t wrestle with the truth every fucking day? Well I did, when I wasn’t trying to figure out how to keep us both alive.”
His words meant nothing to me now. None of this meant anything to me. He didn’t kill me but in the end it would still come, whether it was from his gun or someone else’s. In the end I would still die alone, in a dark, sharp place.
I was empty, I was nothing.
I needed to leave.
But his hold was strong. “No,” he said shaking his head. “I will not let you go. The man who sent you those photos knows where we are. He is Esteban Mendoza and he’s the righthand man of your brother. I know him, I’ve worked with him. He’s trying to ruin Javier, bit by bit. Starting with you. When you’re out of the picture, he’ll go after Marguerite maybe, or Luisa. But he’ll get rid of everyone. He’ll do this until Javier is run to the ground.”
That got my attention. I was sure I’d heard Javier mention Esteban a few times but I had never met the guy. If this was true, I had to tell Javier. But Javier would want to know who I heard it from and when that came out …
“Your brother has to know,” Derek said. “And we have to get out of here.”
“I am, without you.”
“Don’t be stupid!” he yelled, his face going red. “You won’t leave here alive if you do so. I promised to protect you.”
“Yeah well promises don’t mean anything coming from someone like you!” I yelled back. “A liar. A killer. A murderer.” I clamped my eyes shut in frustration. “Shit! Shit!” Even though I didn’t trust him, I knew he was right. Someone was setting him up, framing him or exposing the truth. But whatever way you wanted to word it, that someone knew we were here. Whether Esteban was the one behind it or it was a lie that Derek concocted to keep me here, I was fucking screwed.