Emerald Blaze (Hidden Legacy 5)

I pulled out my phone, found Alessandro’s number, and texted him.

Where are you?

Where do you need me to be?

I was a fool. On the roof of my building. Look for the Christmas lights.

He didn’t respond.

I switched to Patricia. Someone’s coming to see me. Let him in.

Okay.

I leaned my elbows on my knees and hid my face in my hands. The ache gnawed at me, relentless. What if Nevada ignored me and went to see Victoria anyway? What if I failed?

I ran through my preparations in my head. Victoria would go for Gisela first. My aunt was a walking calamity. She spent her life bouncing from one man to the next, always on the fringe of crime. Both Bern and Leon despised her. She was like a comet—every time she appeared in our lives, disaster followed. If I were Victoria, I’d grab her. She was a veritable treasure trove of sensitive information only a close family member would know, everything from how four-year-old Leon used to wet himself when her then-boyfriend would scream at him to Mom’s PTSD. She didn’t know everything, but what she knew would hurt and it was exactly the kind of information Victoria weaponized.

“What are you thinking?” Alessandro asked.

I lifted my head. He sat on the rail under the string of outdoor lights. The black and grey fabric of his long-sleeved shirt and pants blended with the night. He looked like a thief on the prowl from the neck down and a prince from the neck up. The glow of the lights caressed his face, his bold, strong features, carved jaw, perfect cheekbones, amber eyes under the sweep of dark eyebrows . . .

“If I were smarter, I would kill my aunt,” I said.

“What did she do?”

He didn’t look shocked. He wasn’t outraged. He simply assumed that if I was thinking about it, it had to be necessary. This is who we were. Birds of a feather.

“Nevada is thinking about confronting Victoria tomorrow on my behalf. I tried to convince her not to. I don’t know if I succeeded. If she goes after Victoria, my grandmother will retaliate, and Gisela would make a handy weapon and a good bargaining chip. No matter how fucked up she is, she’s still my aunt and Mom’s sister.”

“If something were to happen to her, would your mother try to save her?”

I nodded. “She would. I should kill Gisela and solve the problem permanently.”

“But you won’t.” He said it with complete conviction.

“No, I won’t. I have to look my reflection in the eyes in the morning.”

“Do you know where she is now?”

I showed him my phone. “In the Royal Club inside Zona Rosa of Mexico City. I’m tracking her phone. She’s banging a guy who calls himself El Temor.”

“The Fear? Is he a criminal?”

“He is a luchador. Just to be clear, I’m not asking you to kill her, Alessandro.”

“I know.” He smiled. “It’s not you.”

He believed in me. I leaned on that like a crutch. I shouldn’t have called him to this roof, but I was desperate for someone who understood.

“I did pay a local PI firm to keep an eye on her. If I call them, they will take her off the street and sit on her until I tell them to let her go.”

“Now, that’s you. Are you thinking of pulling the trigger?”

“If I do, Victoria will know. I’ve been pretending that I have no idea where Gisela is and have no interest in finding her, because I want Victoria to aim her first blow there. If I show my cards, she’ll switch her primary target.”

“That’s a dilemma,” he agreed.

I hugged myself. I wanted him to come over and hold me. I had this absurd feeling that if only he touched me, everything would be okay somehow. If all the people in the city disappeared, and it was only me and him on this roof floating alone in the fog, I would be perfectly happy. I should’ve felt guilty over it—I was a sister, a cousin, a daughter . . . but in this moment I didn’t care. It was just me and Alessandro.

“You found Arkan after you left,” I said. “What happened?”

He looked at the city, handsome like a painting, silhouetted against the distant lights, then turned to me, and grinned. It was a sharp Alessandro grin, bright and self-mocking. “He killed me.”

“He what?”

Alessandro sighed. “I’d been looking for him for so long. He would surface somewhere, and by the time I got there, he would vanish into thin air, like a ghost. I would start over, collecting traces of him until he reappeared. We played this game for years. I don’t know if he got tired of being chased or if it was a coincidence, but two weeks after I left Houston to look for him, I found him. Or rather he let me find him. I tracked him down to the Montreal Malting Silos, a big abandoned malt factory. Towers and towers of concrete, thirty-seven meters high, in the middle of the city by the river.”

“Did you go in?”

“I did. In my stupid head, it was going to be me against him on top of those silos.”

It had already happened, so why was I so scared for him? “It wasn’t.”

“It was me, him, and four other Primes. I took down three. Then the telekinetic threw a semi at me. I dodged the first pass. The second caught me. It swept me off the roof and I fell off the tower.”

Thirty-seven meters. One meter equaled roughly 3.28 feet multiplied by 37 . . . 121.36. He fell one hundred and twenty-one feet. Oh my God.

“I don’t remember the impact,” he said. “I remember falling and then just black. I must’ve been clinically dead for a few seconds, because they took my weapons but didn’t bother putting a bullet in my brain. When I woke up, there was pain.”

He said it so matter-of-fact.

“Most of me was broken. I couldn’t move my legs. There was so much pain and it was hot and white.” He raised his hands and made a spreading motion as if smoothing a blanket on the bed. “An endless ocean of it. I was on my back and decided to let myself drown. I failed and it hurt so much. I lay there, looking at the sky, waiting for my magic to give up, and I thought of you. It wasn’t anything deep or profound. I remembered your face and thought, I would really like to see her again. So, I turned over, passed out for a bit, and when I came to, I started crawling. Sometimes I’d black out, then I would come to, remember you, and crawl a little more. No, no, don’t cry for me.”

I realized heat wet my cheeks.

“Please,” he said, his voice quiet. “I don’t ever want to make you cry.”

I couldn’t stop. The tears just poured out. He’d crawled for hours, broken and in agony. If I could murder Arkan a hundred times, it would never make up for that.

Alessandro stopped talking. I brushed the tears from my face with my fingertips. “What happened then?”

“There is a field next to the factory. Eventually I crossed it. Someone saw me and called an ambulance. When I woke up in a hospital room, it hit me. I survived. I would see you again. I decided then that I wouldn’t waste this chance.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“It took me some time to recover. Walking was a problem for a while. Holding a fork too. I could grip it, but I couldn’t aim with it. I was training and thinking of what I would say to you. And keeping an eye on Arkan.”

“How?” As long as he kept talking about Arkan . . .

Alessandro smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Arkan types like he wants to punch through the keys. He murders keyboards. His staff orders them in bulk, and I managed to swap one of mine into the lot. It goes dormant until he says specific words, so it’s practically invisible to his bug sweepers. Once a day it sends the recording to one of my email addresses. So I was listening to Arkan run his pack of killers, and then he mentioned your name on a phone call.”

Alessandro leaned forward, focused, cold, lethal. His magic whipped out of him, spilling into a dense, potent current. “I meant what I said, Catalina. I won’t let him touch you.”

“I know.” All of the tension, pain, and anger churned inside me. I couldn’t contain it any longer. I had to let it go or I’d explode.

“Your wings are out.”

My wings had unfurled, ghosting in and out of existence. My magic was leaking. We stared at each other, me with my almost transparent green-and-gold wings and him wrapped in a flow of his power.

“Your turn,” he said. “What did you promise Victoria?”

There was no room for lies on this roof.

“I gave you up,” I told him. My voice sounded flat. The more matter-of-fact I was about this, the easier it would be.

His eyebrows came together. “How?”

“You ran into Diatheke alone to save Runa’s brother and ended up teleporting to Benedict’s secret lab. Augustine was the only one who knew the location of it. I needed information to trade to him, so I went to see my grandmother. She gave me what I needed. In return, I promised her that I would never leave House Baylor. I will never marry into another family like my sister did, Alessandro. My family is my responsibility until I die.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I had this silly fantasy that you would fall in love with me. I knew your family would think I was beneath you, but in my stupid head, somehow it would all work out and we would live together happily ever after. Victoria took that away from me. I don’t regret it. I would’ve given her anything to find you.”