Where Evil Waits by Kate Brady Page B

once or twice he’d even been sorry himself. But he’d long ago accepted the fact that Luke Varón wasn’t the sort of man a woman took to meet Mom and Dad. He was dark and callous, driven by demons and immersed so deep in the life of the cartel that he’d occasionally, after some particularly heinous act, found himself with his back against an alley wall, panting, whispering histrue identity over and over again in a panic:
Lukas Mann, thirty-eight, Hopewell, Ohio. Mann. Luke Mann. Two wholesome parents in a wholesome town, a passel of siblings and a white picket fence…
    The momentary reminder had never mattered. In a decade, he hadn’t seen his family for more than a couple weeks total—he hadn’t even made it home when his father died. There had been a few days last year when he was between the fall of the Rojàs cartel in Colombia and the rise of Collado’s takeover in Atlanta… a handful of short days when he’d gone back home, thinking he was finished with the underworld, used his own name and spent some time helping his brother, a sheriff, clean up a string of murders in their little hometown. He’d watched Nick let go of a grudge that had existed between the two of them for years, watched him fall in love, and he’d wondered, just for a moment, if he’d ever be in those shoes.
    Then came the news: Collado had slipped through the cracks of the Rojàs takedown. How quickly Luke had been sucked back into the life, and spent the next several months setting up house in Atlanta—under Montiel’s wing. “Security,” they called him, a title that meant nothing and gave him access to everything.
    He was Luke Varón this time. Hit man, breaker of legs, and murderer of dissidents. Terrorizer of young women and teenage boys.
    Then again, he thought, looking at the young woman walking toward him just now, this one didn’t frighten all that easily. She came at him with her shoulders square and steel in her eyes.
    “Here,” he said, pouring her a mug of coffee. He topped off his own from the same pot, slanting a grin. “So you won’t think I’m trying to poison you.”
    She peered at him as if that’s exactly what she’d thought, then took the mug. “Why didn’t you kill him?” she asked. “Andrew.”
    Luke met her eyes. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, that he wouldn’t have hurt Andrew deliberately. But he was Luke Varón.
    “I was incarcerated,” he said. “You knew that.”
    She looked at him as if she’d hoped for a better answer, and for the first time he could remember, he regretted the ruse. The disappointment in her eyes cut into his soul.
    Nothing he could do about that. He had to play on—at least until Collado was in custody. Maybe later…
    Stop it.
    Her shoulders drooped and Luke’s heart went out to her. She was scared. She was hurting. She was exhausted. She was going to miss Louie Guilford’s funeral tomorrow, leaving a whole bunch of people in shock, grieving for her and Aidan. Her friend, Sally—Guilford’s wife—had been calling her phone since early morning. Luke wasn’t looking forward to telling her that.
    “Is Austin sleeping?” he asked.
    “Aust—” she started to ask, then closed her eyes as if she’d tasted something bitter.
    “You should start using the name. And you are Krista. Get used to it.”
    She lifted her chin, a gesture that reminded him of the gritty blonde he’d first met at the courthouse, not the jittery brunette who now stood holding a coffee mug so tight her knuckles were bloodless. She met his eyes with an unyielding gaze.
    “What was my husband to you? Why would you go to all this trouble to find his killer?”
    “Twenty thousand dollars.”
    “Bullshit.”
    He treated himself to a slow appraisal of her new look. “You look good as a brunette. Not that you didn’t look good as a bl—”
    “Stop it.”
    His gaze snagged on her breasts and he canted his head. “You should lose the bra. It doesn’t fit the