Page 93 of Obsession & Oath

“Fucking hell, Dante. Please tell me you didn’t.”

I can feel the eyes of everyone around me, making me want to itch under my very skin.

The only person I can stand to look at is Mia, who offers me a very small, very tentative smile.

I nod once at her before clearing my throat. “Carmen Rubio is her own fucking person. I will not let you kill her.”

Chapter26

Carmen

If there were a part of my brain still capable of processing humor and irony, I think I might laugh at my new, humble abode.

The cold stone walls of the cell press in around me feel familiar, yet not familiar enough. What does it say about me that I wish that they were different walls? A different cell. Long for it, even.

I wonder if something in me might be broken now.

Too many cages and too many places I would have loved to have called home. The Rubio mansion, for instance. Home. Home for over two decades. Home because my mother’s memory is etched into the walls, amber and sweet, sweet smiles.

And yet.

I’ve visited these cells before. I’ve just never ventured onto this side of the locked door. I’ve never spent any time here at all, really.

Now, it’s my existence. There are no iron bars, no dark stonework, no familiar footsteps walking down the corridor outside. No one to offer me reprieve from the silence with a complaint about bachelorettes. No Italian curses.

Just this simple, clinical space devoid of all character.

My father threw me in here without a word, without a glance, and I know he knows.

I think he might have known even before the pregnancy confirmed it.

How?

The thought gnaws at me—my father’s coldness, his silence. It’s suffocating. Because I have a thousand questions. And he has a thousand answers I’m not sure I want to hear.

What will happen to me now that I’m carrying Dante’s child? What happens if Lacruz finds out? Why make the exchange now when he was perfectly happy, leaving me to the mercy of the Italians for five months?

What happens next?

I should feel guilty. I should be afraid of what my pregnancy means for the Cartel’s alliances. My purity was everything, my one bargaining chip, the one thing I could offer that made me useful in my father’s eyes.

Yet here I am, and everything is ruined, but the guilt I know I should feel is...distant. Like it belongs to someone else. Like it belongs to the person I was five months ago.

Something changed in Italy. Hell, now that I have all the time in the world to think about it, I think something more than changed. That place rewired my brain entirely, making me think bigger and wider and want impossible things.

It made me want a life of my own. One where I get to make my own choices.

And in that life, my pregnancy is a good thing. The Cartel is an ocean away, and Dante is by my side.

I know Ishouldhate Dante for making the choices he did, for putting me in this position, for leaving me behind. But I can’t bring myself to hate him. Even now, after everything, I can’t hate him.

I miss him.

I miss his stupid fucking face and his stupid fucking laugh and his stupid fucking arms. And I want to kick myself for not saying goodbye. I’ve already screamed about it, feral and desperate, now that there’s no one around to hear me.

My throat aches from misuse. My lungs ache because I’ve been trying to breathe without him, and it’s so unbearably hard.

Damn it. Everything is such a mess.

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