Chapter 13 Hearts Under Fire

• Valentina’s finger hovered on the trigger. The barrel dug into her palm. Her vision swam between the two figures in the streetlamp’s sick glow: her mother, pale and trembling, and Mateo Duarte, cigar smoke swirling around his calm smile.
• Everything circled back here.
• Her heart thundered. Memories of childhood laughter inside this very city. Then the day her world cracked: her mother’s last letter, stained with tears. Every step she had taken since learning to kill, to lie, to trust, and betray boiled down to this.