Prologue
Mexico City
It was the first time he’d made a public appearance in years, and the people of Mexico could hardly believe it. They lined the street in a thick mass barely held back from the passing funeral procession by Mexico City police standing in a human chain.
The black limousine crawled along behind the hearse, hampered by heavily armed SWAT team members on foot, surrounding the vehicles and creating a wall of protection four men deep.
Fights broke out as the vehicles passed. Those who viewed El Jefe Grande as a benevolent saint went head to head with those who considered him a stone-cold killer— asesino a piedra fría.
On the rooftops lining the main thoroughfare, sharpshooters from three different police departments were spread out, searching for anyone who might intend harm to the occupants of the limousine.
Inside the vehicle, behind dark-tinted, bulletproof windows, Nico Ortiz Morales, aka El Jefe, looked out at the people and felt numb.
He didn’t flinch when a man with a gun broke through the police line at one corner and made it all the way over to the window before a SWAT member shot him dead, flecks of brain and blood spatter landing on the window.
At that moment, he wondered if his heart had died along with his wife.
He’d loved her more than anything else in his world.
And yet that love had not saved her.
She’d killed herself anyway. Her beautiful body found splayed out like a virgin in their wedding bed. He couldn’t help but imagine her in front of her vanity, carefully applying her makeup while he was on business in the dark reaches of the jungle. While he was building his drug empire, she was pulling on her silky wedding gown that still fit after fifteen years and penning the note that would shatter the remains of his broken heart.
While he was speaking to coca farmers in Columbia about cocaine, she was pouring herself a glass of their most expensive wine from their estate’s cellar. She ordered the house staff not to disturb her, and then she proceeded to empty the prescription bottle into her mouth. She had not even finished the glass of wine before she lay dead on their bed, clutching the wedding ring she’d removed from her finger.
He’d returned home to find her body. It was later, after the coroner had come and taken her away, that he had found the note on the nightstand. She’d always been a romantic and had sealed it with red wax.
He’d ripped it open carelessly. It had taken him two attempts to comprehend what he was reading.
She could no longer live with the guilt of betrayal. She’d betrayed him not once, but twice.
Most recently, she’d betrayed him by embarking on a year-long affair with a young Parisian fashion designer she’d been secretly financing. The young man had killed himself when she’d broken off the relationship earlier in the week.
The second confession was by far the worst betrayal.
She’d lied about the death of his daughter.
In the end, it was why he’d ordered her burial in a plot in Mexico City away from his own family plot.
And yet, still he’d mourn her publicly and attend her spectacular funeral mass at the largest Catholic church in Mexico City. It would be a service befitting the wife of someone of his status. The public would expect no less.
But once he’d honored her with a funeral mass worthy of her position as his wife, he would never allow himself to grieve for her again.
She’d tainted his love and grief by the second confession. The one she’d seemed to add in at the last minute as if it were a postscript.
And fool woman that she was, she hadn’t even realized that the second confession would be the one that brought him to his knees. He could have lived with her affair. After all, she’d once forgiven him for the same transgression.
But the second secret—the one she’d kept from him for the past two years—had been the ultimate betrayal.
It was unforgivable.
His daughter—his own flesh and blood—was not dead as she’d told him two years ago.
The child was alive.
And living in San Francisco.
Her name was Rosalie.
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