The safe house bathroom filled with steam as hot water pounded against the tile. Alejandro had driven them there himself, taking back roads through the hills outside Culiacán, his knuckles white on the steering wheel long after the danger had passed. His men were still at the chapel, cleaning up bodies, scrubbing blood from stone, making sure no trace of the Sinaloa ambush reached the authorities. But Alejandro had refused to let Mariana out of his sight. He had pulled her into the house, into the bathroom, into the shower, his bloody clothes still clinging to his skin.

Now she stood with him under the spray, watching the water turn rust-colored as it swirled down the drain. The blood of four men, washed from his face and hands and hair. The blood he had spilled for her. She should have been horrified. She should have been shaking, crying, begging to go home. Instead, she felt a strange, fierce calm. The same calm she had felt when he killed those two men at the summit. The monster was real. The monster was hers. And the monster had saved her life.