I shifted against the headboard. “What do you stand to lose?”
“There may never be pay off, but there will always be risk.” He blew out a sigh, thinking. “My resources are better spent other places—commanding a business that allows me to keep the Badlands running. I’d be taking up resources that save lives.”
Helping others was more than important to him. It was his way of life. I still wasn’t sure why, or if he had ulterior motives, but if people were better off in the end, wasn’t that for the best? “And what do you have to gain?”
He dropped his hands between his knees. “Peace of mind. And something I want very much. Suddenly, it’s within reach—if I’m right and can prove my suspicions.”
I inched a little closer. “Is it dangerous?”
His eyebrows cinched. “How so?”
“You traffic weapons. Is it something that will give you inexorable power over other cartels?”
“What if it was? Would you tell me to grab it before someone else could?”
I pulled my knees against my chest under the sheet. The right weapon in the wrong hands could be devastating. But to use it as an offense wasn’t any better. Obliterating others to save myself was something I didn’t think I could live with. “No.”
“Smart girl. A weapon of mass destruction was a good guess,” he said. “But wrong answer. We’ll have to work on that.”
I frowned, a sliver of dread twisting through me.
“This mission isn’t just for me, but my reasons for pursuing it are selfish—”
“How?”
He blinked at me, moonlight bathing him. Even when I’d hated him fiercely, I hadn’t been able to ignore how devastatingly handsome he was. But in this moment, with his pain showing, his beauty was a thing of wonder. “It’s selfish because as someone who’s had nothing, I recognize how much I have now,” he said. “And I’m grateful for it. But I want more, Natalia.”
“More?” I asked under a coat of goose bumps. “Power? Money?”
“It’s not about money. I’ve already spent enough money and time pursuing it, only to come up empty-handed.”
“Then why continue?”
He cupped one hand over the other, forming a fist nearly as big as a child’s head. His knuckles whitened, and a familiar tremor moved through me. I’d seen this kind of contained fury before, and I’d missed it—in Diego. “Revenge?”
He stared straight ahead. “When is it ever not about that?” he asked.
“But it’s never only that.” Cristiano, like his brother, had also witnessed his parents’ death. It was a scene I’d envisioned many times, but for the first time, I saw him in the room, too—not just Diego. “Revenge stems from other things, like pain. Are you in pain?”
Slowly, to my surprise, he nodded, but to my even greater surprise, it broke my heart a little. They’d only been boys. This boy, in front of me, had experienced something from which he hadn’t healed. And he was here now, asking for permission to find what he needed. Maybe even looking to me for more. That was a new kind of power, not sexual or physical, and not the kind of emotional we’d been dealing with up until this point. These wounds lived deep, amongst distrust and lost hope.
“I’ve been through this with Diego,” I said. “If it’s revenge you seek, leave it. If it’s against me or my father, I beg you to see how we’ve already suffered.”
“It’s not against you, my lovely wife. I promised you earlier tonight, and I meant it—where you’re concerned, I’m done scheming. But for you, I still want many things. Not just revenge, but closure, happiness, even love.”
My throat threatened to close with the conviction in his voice. Revenge and closure. Those two things could tempt the devil. They fit easily into my life, but into many areas—revenge and closure for my mother. My father. Or against Diego. Cristiano too. Happiness and love were murkier—and much scarier coming from Cristiano’s mouth. “You’re a formidable man. I don’t need to tell you that.”
“I am.”
“So why can’t you take this like you do everything else?”
“It can only be given.”
An eerie feeling fell over me with the familiar words. I had been given to him. So was it a person? Was he trying to command the same loyalty, devotion, and fidelity from someone else that he’d tried to from me?
“I have tried taking it regardless,” he said with resignation. “Now, what I wonder, is just how much I’d give up.” He paused, running both hands over his face. “I have unmet needs. And a fierce desire for answers. I want to regain a sense of what I lost. I want . . .”
My heart pounded with the yearning to understand how I could give such a powerful man and equally broken boy what he wanted. Maybe even what he needed. “What?” I asked softly.
“If I go on, I may confront things I’m not sure I want to know. And in the end, there’s no guarantee I’ll get what I want.” His jaw firmed as if it was difficult to admit. “That I’ll even meet those needs.”