Cam should have been gloating.

She’d been right all along.

Alex Castillo was exactly the same. He hadn’t changed a bit. Still on the wrong side of the law, still working on a way to get himself put behind bars. Or worse, killed.

But the news didn’t make her happy.

It devastated her.

She didn’t want Alex to be caught up in crime or to be in constant danger. As much as she’d hated him for breaking her heart, she’d never wished for anything bad to happen.

That wasn’t exactly true. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d gotten his heart broken by the next girl he was bound to get involved with. She would have been fine if he’d never found another woman to date ever again.

But those things were different. Those feelings were dictated by the aching loss she’d experienced with their breakup.

She blinked. The last thing she needed was a maudlin trip down memory lane. Not now. Not when she’d actually gotten a semblance of an answer from him.

“What gang?” she asked.

He shifted in the bed, his eyes cast downward, focused on the sheets.

She repeated the question.

It looked like it took a concerted effort for him to lift his gaze back to hers. “I can’t do this,” he whispered in an anguished voice.

She tried to focus on the words he was speaking, but all she could hear was the emotion in his tone.

“Do what?” she found herself asking.

“I can’t put you in danger.” She bristled but he held up a hand. “Hear me out. Please.”

She clenched her teeth and waited. She didn’t want excuses, dammit. She didn’t want trite responses. She wanted answers.

“The one thing I swore I’d never do is put you in danger,” he said softly. He squeezed his eyes shut. “It was the reason I left.”

Her mouth dropped open and she leaned forward, thinking maybe she’d misheard him. “What?”

“The reason I left. Why I broke up with you.” He swallowed. “It was for you.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “What the hell are you talking about?”

A muscle in his jaw pulsed.

“Are you saying…?” Her voice trailed off and she had to force herself to swallow down the lump that was quickly forming in her throat. She tried again. “Are you saying you broke up with me to…to protect me?”

“Why else would I have done it?”

She gaped at him. She’d grappled with that question for weeks. Months. Hell, it still flitted through her mind every once in a while. Something would trigger a memory and she’d be right back in her mother’s living room, watching in disbelief, feeling her world fall away from her as he spoke those cold words, severing the bond they’d forged.

“You had a future,” he told her. He wore a pained expression, and she didn’t know if it was from physical or emotional discomfort. “But only if it didn’t include me.”

Cam was reeling. “But…I loved you.” They were hard words to choke out, and as soon as she said them, she regretted it. Did they make her sound vulnerable? Weak?

He winced, as if the words were even more difficult for him to hear than they were for her to say.

“We made plans. We had dreams,” she said, more to herself than to the man across from her.

“I know. And I ruined them,” he said. “You deserved more, Camila. You still do.” He looked away. “I don’t want to be the one to mess those dreams up. To mess anything up. And being here, answering questions—that messes shit up. I know you don’t believe me. I can’t expect you to, not after everything I’ve done. But please trust me when I say that what’s driving me now is the need to protect you.”

An iron fist tightened around Cam’s chest.

Her mind was spinning, but this time there were more than questions swirling through her brain. A flood of emotions rose up like a tidal wave, threatening to wash away all semblance of rational thought and level-headedness.

Alex had blindsided her.

Completely.

She didn’t know what to do, how to proceed.

She didn’t know the protocol for this. There wasn’t a manual to pull out, to reference.

Cam glanced back at the nightstand, at the phone still within arm’s reach.

She was at a loss for how to move forward; this much was a given.

But she knew one thing she wasn’t going to do.

She wasn’t going to tell Nate what was going on.

She wasn’t going to tell anyone.

Not yet.