Malo - Page 71

Beast’s face darkens.

“Agreed,” he mutters. “Thor, get a car. We’re taking this fucker for a drive. He can bleed to death. He’s a liability, and I don’t want him stinking this place up any longer.”

El Serpiente cries out in protest, but it’s too late for that. He’s done for. I wrap my arms around Maria and pull her close to me, letting her nestle against my chest. She’s trembling hard, and it’s obvious she’s struggling to contain herself after what just happened.

“Hey, it’s all right,” I promise her. “Está bien. He’s gone, okay?”

She nods against my shoulder, slipping her arms around me and hanging on tight. The eggs are still on the stove, and I turn the burner off before I manage to burn this whole place down by accident.

“We need to get this place cleaned up,” she tells me, nodding down to the floor. I know it’s her way of handling what’s just happened, focusing on the practical instead of the emotional.

“Yeah, I know,” I tell her. “But you need to rest first. You still haven’t had breakfast.”

“If you think I’m going to be able to eat with that thing sitting there,” she shoots back, nodding toward the severed hand still leaking blood on the counter. “You’ve got another thing coming.”

I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it, even in the midst of all this darkness.

“You’re right,” I agree. “You know, I think we might be able to make use of that thing.”

CHAPTER 49

MARIA

“Oh, this place looks amazing!” I exclaim as I step through the door and into my father’s new apartment.

He grins, spreading his arms wide, as he welcomes me in. “You like?” he asks.

“I love,” I reply. It’s exactly the kind of place I would have imagined for him in Houston; large and airy, with a garden attached outside where he can get plenty of sun. He looks to be a different man than he was just a few months ago, when we got him out of the grasp of the cartel. He’s so much fitter, so much stronger, even doing some training with the Kings to make sure he’s got the skills to defend himself should anything come up again in the future.

“I’m so glad you’ve got your own home here,” I tell him, and I give him a hug.

“Yes, and it’s not too far from the university, too,” he agrees. “So I won’t have to commute far to work.”

“You’re going to make such a wonderful professor,” I tell him. “You’ll be every student’s favorite, I’m sure of it.”

He laughs. “Well, let’s wait and see,” he replies. “I’m looking forward to teaching. It’s been far too long since I shared my knowledge with the world.”

He shows me around his new home. Not everything has arrived from our old place back in Monterrey yet, but it’s being shipped out as we speak, and it’s not going to be long until he has all the memories of his old life back at his fingertips once more. It’s a little sad, thinking about our house on the market, but I know this is what we both need—a new start, a chance to leave everything behind and begin again on our own terms. It’s going to do us both good, I’m sure of it.

My father has landed a teaching position at the University of Houston, working part-time with Bella’s mother to develop a cure or at least a more effective treatment for what she’s going through. When he reached out to them to let them know he was going to be living in the area for a while, they practically fell over themselves to offer him a job there, beyond excited to have someone of his stature working for them. As for me, I’ve moved my research from London down to a lab at the university, where my father is spending some of his free time working with me on a drug that will serve as an antidote to the shit he made for the cartel. El Serpiente is gone but that doesn’t mean someone couldn’t get their hands on his creation. We’re still not sure if they are actually going to send it out into the world and get it distributed, but there’s no way we are going to take that chance, not if we can avoid it.

It feels good to be back at the lab again, after all this time being kept from my work. I’ve been so focused on making sure that everything is okay with my father, it’s been hard for me to remember that I had a whole career of my own before all of this went down, too. But that is my happy place, and I know it always will be. The world makes sense when I’m working on some new development in the lab, piecing together everything I need to create this antidote for my father’s drug. He took note of everything he worked on for the cartel in his head, and we’ve been using that to build out a working cure for anyone who ends up taking it.

Honestly, for me, this project is even more personal, because of how close I have become with Malo since the cartel was brought to its knees. Being around him, seeing how much he’s changed, it’s the kind of gift I didn’t know I needed. To see how hard he has worked on himself, how seriously he takes his recovery, it’s inspiring to me, a reminder that we can always leave behind the things that harm us, if we want to do it enough.

And sobriety, he’s told me, has been far easier this time around. Because he’s not always thinking about where he’s going to get his next high. No, he’s been focused on the moment, instead of thinking about some kind of future where he’s going to need to use again. He cleared out everything that might have been a trigger from his life, scrubbing his room from top to bottom of anything that could even hint that it might be a good idea to use. He’s even come in to the lab a few times for us to run tests on him to get an idea of how the drug my dad created impacts the body, wanting to do anything he can to help.

The two of us have been all but living together these last few months, and I can’t get enough of his company. He hasn’t made it official between us yet, which is fine by me. I’m not even sure it has crossed his mind to ask me to be his partner in a more direct sense, given the life he’s lived and everything he’s done.

Not a problem. I’ve got plenty going on in my own life right now, and I’m not going to let what we have be upended by the societal expectations upon us. God knows I’ve learned in the last year that life doesn’t always go the way you think it’s going to, and sometimes it’s easier to just take your hands off the wheel and let what’s going to happen, happen.

At least I know El Serpiente is gone for good. That’s a relief I didn’t know I needed. I can still remember, all too clearly, that mad look in his eyes when he pounced on me in the kitchen, the feel of his hands wrapped tight around my throat as he tried to make me pay for betraying them. It was strange, even then, I didn’t feel scared. When I looked into his eyes, I could tell that he knew he didn’t stand a chance anymore. He’d lost everything. That was his last-ditch attempt to take back some control, and he had wound up signing his own death warrant. Thor and Beast had driven him out to the middle of nowhere, and dumped him far from the road, where nobody would find him. With the gunshot in his knee and the severed stump of his right wrist, plus a final parting shot to make sure he never hurt anyone else again he was gone. He was likely lying there, in the hollow of some tree somewhere, where nobody would stumble across him for years to come, that is if the animals didn’t get to him first. An anonymous, ignominious death, just like he deserved.

It’s still strange to imagine that, without the cartel, I would never have met Malo. If I hadn’t been forced to become an informant for them, seduce him, get close to them, there’s no way I would ever have stumbled across him, no way the two of us would ever have crossed paths. Which seems impossible to me now, because he’s taken up residence in my heart, this man who has fought so hard to escape the demons that have pursued him his whole life. As we’ve grown closer, he’s shared some of his past with me, the horrors he faced back in Mexico, and well, I’ll just say that it makes sense to me as to why he wanted to get out. And thank God someone like Beast found him, someone who could see there was so much more to him than his addiction.

“You should bring Malo around to visit sometime,” my father says, as we finish up the tour of his small apartment. My heart flutters at the idea, but I do my best to keep my face neutral.

“Maybe,” I agree, the corners of my lips curling up before I can stop them.