Page 54 of Merciless Oath

I realize I hit a sore spot and grin triumphantly.That’s the winning ticket. This kid is in love with the redhead.

“Guess what, asshole?” I growl, laughing cruelly in his face. “She doesn’t want you. She wants me. That’s why you’re just a lowly thug on her payroll and I’m the one she’s desperate for.”

“Fuck you,” he grunts, trying to spit in my face but failing with his busted mouth. Valentina appears at my side, ready to play good cop like we planned.

“Enzo, you’re being cruel,” she whines. “Let the boy speak, will you?”

She slinks over to Ivan, getting entirely too close to him. I shift a few inches, ready to grab her if I need to. I trust her, but I don’t fucking trust him.

“Come on now, let’s get her name out in the open,” she cajoles him. “You want that, don’t you? You want everyone to know her name because she deserves the glory?”

Ivan’s eyebrow twitches, and his eyes dart back and forth between us as he tries to decide which card to play. For a second, I think he’s going to spill the truth, but then he goes rogue and grabs Valentina. Her body slams down onto the pallet beside him, as she yelps in shock.

I don’t think. I don’t exist. In fact, in that second, nothing exists. I raise my gun and shoot him square in the chest.

“Enzo!” someone yells behind me.

“Fuck,” Valentina growls, extricating herself from his grasp.

“Alexandra,” Ivan whispers, choking on his own blood. “You never deserved… Alexandra.”

Rafael pulls me out of the room as a second shot rings out. Alfonso leads a pissed-off Valentina out of the freezer, his gun dangling from his hand.

“Never,” Rafael growls, getting into my face, “let emotions control your actions in interrogation. We use our emotions to give us power, not to make decisions. Never again, do you hear me?”

I pull away from him and storm outside, desperate for some air. I know I shot him too soon, I know I did it because I lost my control, but what does it matter? We got the name—Alexandra.

“Eight!” I yell as everyone pours out of the warehouse in search of me. “Fucking eight!”

“Yes, yes, we know, The8,” Alfonso grumbles. “Calm down, Cavalli.”

“No, you don’t understand.” I stop pacing. Everyone stops as well, waiting for my revelation. I suck in a deep, slow breath and let it out. “We’ve had the answer the whole time. Eight. It sounds out the initials A.T.—Alexandra Tavinsky.”

“We need the long version of this story, stat,” Rafael announces, leading us to the car. We pile inside and he pulls out of the lot, leaving his men to deal with the bodies.

“I dated her in college.” I launch into the story as we merge onto the freeway. “Dated is a strong word, honestly. We hooked up for a few months, five or six, not sure exactly.”

“What happened?” Rafael asks, glancing over his shoulder at me.

“Nothing, really,” I confess. “At least, that’s how I felt about it. Things just fizzled out.”

I explain how I met Alexandra at a party the summer before my final year. We danced around our attraction for a fewmonths, finally gave in, had some fun, and by Christmas, I’d broken up with her to focus on my last semester.

Once I graduated, I moved out to California right away, and then I met Valentina. I never even thought about Alexandra after things ended.

“What was she like back then?” Valentina asks, her brow creased in confusion. “I mean, was she this insane?”

“Hell no.” I almost laugh. “She was totally normal. I mean, okay, no one’s totally normal, right? She had some interesting quirks, and she was kind of… what do you call it? Intense, I guess.”

“Intense?”

“Yeah,” I say slowly, suddenly seeing red flags I never noticed before. “Things with her seemed somewhat premeditated, as if she’d secretly planned every accidental encounter, and?—”

“She stalked you?” Rafael clarifies.

“Okay, now that we’re talking about it, maybe,” I admit. “At the time, it seemed kind of accidental and fated. Like she’d run into me at a coffee shop holding the same book I was reading, and we’d get to talking, but that kind of stuff happened way too often to be a coincidence.”

“Was she a redhead?” Alfonso asks dryly. “Because if she was and you forgot, I’m going to have to kill you.”

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