When I got back to the warehouse, Andrea was sat slouched at a table with his long legs stretched out and twirling a gun between the fingers of one hand and a small laptop to the side of him.

I walked over to him and put the parcel on the table, along with the 'you owe me' note and the gun before sliding it across to me.

"You could have told me," I stated.

"Told you what?" he asked looking up for the first time.

"That one, I needed 5,000 dollars and two, the gun isn't loaded," I said.

He didn't respond but instead gestured to the man who had driven me.

He picked up the parcel from the table and left the warehouse again. It was at that point that I noticed the four smears of blood on the floor.

"Whose is that?" I asked quietly.

"Oh, the blood?" he asked casually before he pointed to the first smear. "That one is Esteban. Then Richardo, Eduardo and Guillermo. They are all dead."

"W...what?" I stuttered although slightly relieved that Luca and Leo's names were not amongst them.

"You failed the test," he stated.

"I brought you your stuff, didn't I? Is that not what you wanted? And how is this anything to do with shooting four people?!"

He reached forward and pressed a button on the laptop and a muffled recording began to play. It took me a while to realise what it was but when I did, my heart sunk three miles into the ground.

A tape of my conversation with Leo in the phone box.

Andrea looked up to me, with a dark expression a cocked his head to the side as he stared me down before turning off the recording.

There was an agonising moment of silence before he finally had the kindness to end it.

"I've always had my suspicions that you were lying to me, Blanca, and then that phone call earlier was one of my men telling me that he couldn't trace the existence of an Eleonora De'Meritchi fitting your description anywhere. So I had to put it to the test," he explained. "Now do you understand why they had to die? I can't have this 'Leo' finding you and you gave their names as leads for him."

I didn't reply? How could I? There was nothing I could say that would make anything better.

"Who is he anyway?" he said tapping the gun on the table. "Your real mate? The owner of that huge mark?"

"Yes," I said shakily.

"Would 'Leo' by any chance be shortened from Alpha Leonardo Antonio Loren?" he asked still staring intently.

I looked up to the ceiling and took a short breath in. It just kept getting worse.copy right hot novel pub