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    Something cold and feral flashed in his gaze, and Esther fought down another surge of panic. It was tempting to ignore Cesar, but she couldn’t forget that he had made this deal. He had climbed into bed with the Chavez cartel, and if anything was precious to Cesar, it had always been his own skin. His quick instincts and visceral reactions had made for good business decisions, but right now she was in almost as much danger from him as she was from Lopez.
    She clenched her jaw as she rubbed at her wrist, the words she wanted to spit locked at the back of her throat. She would stop this madness, and if she had to lie through her teeth to do it, then that was what she would do. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything. I can’t, it’s too late.”
    â€œOkay.” Some of the feral tension abated. He let out a breath, dug in his pocket and handed her a white linen handkerchief. “I know it doesn’t look good. It’s not what I planned, but I’m handling it.” He turned away. “If I hadn’t signed with Lopez, we would have been out on the street within a week.”
    Esther blotted blood from her mouth as he shuffled papers and slipped them back into the manila folder.
    Fool. Lopez was the one who had put them there.

Four
    E sther locked the door of her office and crossed the room, blind to the morning sun flooding through the French doors and gleaming off the rich hardwood floors. Cesar had finally left for work, an hour later than he usually did, and Tomas had just pulled out of the drive with Rina in the passenger seat. Esther had asked Tomas to take Rina to school on the pretext that she was feeling unwell after slipping on the steps of the pool, the piece of fiction Cesar had devised to explain her split lip and bruised jaw. She had iced her jaw before going to bed, and a few minutes spent applying makeup this morning had hidden most of the damage.
    Bending, she opened the doors of an exquisite Louis XV bureau. Reaching inside, she pressed on a section of paneling and a secret drawer at the side of the bureau slid open.
    The address book in the drawer wasn’t secret—Cesar knew about it—but it was sensitive and entirely her business. With the media’s interest in Cesar, and now her, it was expedient for the stability of their business that certain details of her past were never revealed to the press, and one relationship in particular.
    The book in hand, she walked to the French doors and stared in the direction of the garage, which was partially hidden from her view by a screen of shrubs and palms. Cesar had said he would be out all day, but she didn’t trust that he wouldn’t turn up unexpectedly to check on her.
    The previous evening she had convinced him that she was prepared to go along with his partnership with Lopez. By the time she had gone to bed they had reached a fragile accord, but she had no illusions that would last. Cesar had promised to give her breathing space to allow her to “adjust.” The offer had made her skin crawl and she had finally given in to the fact that Cesar was no longer operating in a normal way.
    Despite his formidable business talents, Cesar couldn’t work out an equation that to Esther was obvious. She and Lopez existed on different sides of a very stark line; it was a truth that had been acknowledged on a subtle level the first time they had met and that had been reinforced at her dinner table. Lopez could control Cesar—to the extent that he had entrusted him with the bank transfer—but if he didn’t know it already, he would soon know from his research into her background that he would never be able to control her. The second Lopez knew she had unmasked him, it was game over. By her calculations she had bought herself a day, maybe two, three at the most.
    When she was satisfied that Cesar had gone, she took a seat behind her desk and flipped through the address book until