“What is it, angel?” I ask.”I…I just wanted to say thank you,” she whispers. “For today, I mean.”

“De nada, conejita.”

She stands there for a moment and then turns to leave, but I don’t want her to go.

“Did you have a good time? At the movie, I mean.”

She pauses, turning those wide eyes back to me. “I did,” she whispers. “The movie was good.” A shadow passes through her eyes. “Sad.”

“You mean Mufasa’s death,” I guess. She cried during the movie when Mufasa died, but I don’t think she wanted me to know it. I ached to dry her tears for her but didn’t. Every expression that crosses her face and every thought in her mind fascinates me. I want to know all of them. I want to be the one she turns to when she’s happy and when she’s sad. Hell, I just want her.

She nods.

“I’m sorry you lost your father so young, Faith.”

“Me too.” She bites her lip. “I’m sorry you lost your sister too.”

“So am I.”

“Can…can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“What happened to her?” she whispers.

“I don’t know.” I glance away from her for a brief moment, steeling myself against the inevitable rush of memories her question brings roaring to the surface. “Alivia was ten years older than me, but we were always close. When she left home for college, she decided to stay on campus with friends. She started dating a guy her junior year, but no one knew much about him. He didn’t attend school with them. They thought he was involved in a gang, but she swore he wasn’t. She left campus to meet him one night and never returned.”

“Oh no,” Faith whispers, her honey eyes swimming with sympathy. “Did…did you ever find her?”

“No.” I shake my head. “I believe the man she was seeing was a Zeta.”

Faith’s stricken eyes widen.

“He took her across the border into Nuevo Laredo. No one in Nuevo Laredo was willing to talk with the threat of the Zetas hanging like a sword over their heads. Leads dried up from there.” I scrub a hand through my hair, expelling a heavy breath. “I accepted long ago that I’d never know what happened to her.”

It’s not hard to guess though. They either killed her or sold her into slavery. It’s a horrible thing to hope your own sister is dead, but for her sake, I do hope it. It’s been twenty years. God only knows the horrors she would have lived as one of the Zetas’ sex slaves in that amount of time. I would wish that kind of pain on no one.

“What happened to your parents?” Faith asks.

“My mom had a fatal heart attack when I was nineteen. My father had a stroke three years later. He passed not long after.” I was a surprise baby, born late in life. Losing Alivia aged my parents considerably. They were never the same after she vanished. They never recovered. Eventually, the grief of loss and the pain of not knowing took them both.

“I’m so sorry, Octavio,” Faith whispers.

“No more than I am.”

“Was your dad a cop too?”

“No. He worked in the IT field. My mom was a pediatric nurse.”

“Is your sister the reason you went into law enforcement?”

“Yeah. I wanted to find out what happened to her, and I guess I wanted to help make sure no one else ever had to go through what my family went through.” I glance at the file in front of me before flipping it closed with a heavy sigh.

As Franklin suspected, our tipster might not have been wrong about Kincaid. I’m not sure where that leaves me, or what I’m going to do about it. Kincaid is a damn good cop, one Roman trusts. Hauling him in on charges is going to cause a lot of problems for this city, and I don’t know what to do about that. We need him on the streets…but can I really leave him there if he murdered three people?

“Can I ask you a question now?” I ask Faith.

“Yes.”

“If a good cop did something wrong a decade ago to avenge his family and you found out about it, what would you do?”

She tilts her head to the side, studying me. “How wrong?”

“He may have killed the people who murdered his family.”

“Was his family innocent?”

I nod.

She thinks over my question for a moment, considering it carefully. “I don’t know what I would do,” she admits, “but I think what you’re really asking is what you should do.”

I sigh. “I have no fucking clue what to do. If I pursue this case against him, a lot of people are going to get hurt. Including some that mean a lot to me. If I don’t pursue it, I’m essentially looking the other way when my instincts are telling me there’s something here.”

“You pride yourself on doing the right thing.”

“I took an oath to uphold the law and do the right thing, even if doing it isn’t the easy thing.” I scrub a hand through my hair, truly baffled. The world isn’t black and white, not even when murder is involved. I know that. I accept it. But this case has so many shades of gray I don’t know what the right thing to do is. “If I pursue this case and find out he did it, I’m not jeopardizing just his future. Roman believes we need him to help keep our gangs in line, and I don’t necessarily disagree with him.”

“Look into it,” Faith says, taking a step into my office. “You can always decide what to do when you have your answers, but if you never even look for them, I think it will always bother you. You don’t strike me as someone who is content to have only bits and pieces of the puzzle.”

“I’m not.”

She nods like she already knew that and takes another step toward my desk. “You’re a good cop, Octavio. You’ll know what to do when the time comes. Until then, follow the clues. Maybe you’ll find out you’re worrying for nothing.”

“Maybe.” I lean back in my chair, folding my hands together on my stomach to study her. “You think I’m a good cop?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“But you don’t trust me.”

“I tr–”

I cock a brow, daring her to finish that lie, but she doesn’t. Having confirmation that she doesn’t trust me shouldn’t bother me, but it does anyway. It’s also my fault.

“I’m sorry I threatened to take your door off the hinges,” I murmur to her. “I shouldn’t have said that, no matter how frustrated I was. You should know that I didn’t check it. If you want to lock your door, that’s your right.”

She nods but doesn’t say anything.

“I’m going to earn your trust again someday, angel. One of these days, you’ll tell me what you’re trying so hard to keep from me. You’ll let me help you.”

“The only thing I need help with is getting the Zetas to stop looking for me so I can be free,” she mutters, refusing to meet my gaze. “The only thing I want is freedom.”

“You’re free with me, Faith.”

“No, I’m not.” She offers me a sad smile, turning for the door. “You may be nicer about it than they are, Detective, but I’m as much a prisoner here as I was there. My cage is more comfortable, and my captor is less of a brute, but any freedom I have is an illusion, as easily snatched away as ever.”

“That’s not true.”

“No? If I wanted to walk out the front door right now, you’d let me?” she asks.

I grind my teeth together, pissed because she’s right and we both know it. There’s no way in hell I would let her walk out that door. She thinks it’s because I need her help, but she’s wrong. I can’t let her go because I think it might actually kill me if something happened to her. If the Zetas found her or hurt her, it would tear my world apart. I already lost a sister to the bastardos. I won’t lose Faith too. But I can’t tell her that. She wouldn’t believe me even if I did.

“Oscar wants me back so badly because my mom and stepfather stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from him before they fled,” she whispers after a moment. “He’s certain she’ll come back for me someday, so he decided to keep me close to ensure she had to come to him to get to me.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I know you care about what happens to me, but I’m a means to an end for you just like I was for him, Octavio. I don’t kid myself about that. Maybe you shouldn’t either.” She offers me another sad smile and then ducks out of my office. “Goodnight.”

I sit there for a long time after she leaves, staring into space. Every part of me wants to stomp after her and tell her that she’s wrong. I want her to know that I’m nothing like he is and that the only thing I want from her is whatever little crumbs she’s willing to give me.

My entire adult life, I’ve focused on finding out what happened to my sister. Even after my parents died without answers, I kept searching, hoping to piece together which of the Zetas took her and what happened to her. Eventually, I had to come to terms with the fact that I’d never know. I started focusing on finding a way to make them pay after that.

I want them out of this city so badly it borders on desperation. But I think I’d walk away from that mission if it meant keeping Faith. She’s been here for two weeks, and she’s already becoming something vital to me. Something irreplaceable.

Too damn bad for me, because to her, I’m just another man keeping her in a cage.

I sigh heavily and flip open the file on Kincaid again, reading through it from cover to cover. By the time I’m finished, I’m almost certain there’s something here. Something I have to pursue. I jot a few notes and then stow the file before opening the one on Faith and the Zetas, flipping through it without really seeing anything.

Why is Fuentes so sure her mom will come back for her?

Nothing I’ve found thus far holds any answers on that front. Her mom was physically and emotionally abusive. Not even Faith has any illusions about the woman having any soft feelings for her. I doubt Fuentes has any either. So what does he know that I don’t?

I have a feeling finding the answer to that question is the key to giving her the freedom she so desperately craves. It might tear my heart out of my chest to watch her walk away…but letting her go is the only way to prove to her that I’m nothing like Fuentes.

“Más tira el amor que una yunta de bueyes,” I mutter the old idiom about love being a strong motivator, returning her file to the drawer and climbing to my feet to go to bed. I stop in shock right outside her bedroom.

For the first time in days, her door isn’t closed against me.

It’s standing wide open.