“Babe.” His voice went soft. Gentle. “Everyone these days has security cameras, and you can bet anyone in our business has them. Marco had to have removed the tapes. He must have brought them back to Paolo, so Paolo has evidence of you arriving with your case of wine. The case of wine that was never found at any of the crime scenes.”

Her heart thudded again. The sandwich tasted like cardboard and she forced herself to swallow. “Anyone in our business?” she repeated. “You’re in the same business my grandfather was in?”

She’d dreaded asking the question. All along she’d been dragging her feet, avoiding it, hoping that a miracle would happen and he would be anything but what he appeared. The Lospostos name was associated with crime. With murder.

Elijah’s gaze turned diamond hard just that fast. The soft lines in his face disappeared and he looked . . . intimidating. Dangerous. Very, very scary. His hand slid along the back of her chair and then into her hair.

“Baby, I grew up in a family so deep in that shit we bathed in it. Every relative I had was or is involved. I cut my teeth on enforcing and then gunrunning. I told you from the beginning I wasn’t clean. I wouldn’t have been sitting at your grandfather’s table if I had been.”

The blow was much harder to take than she expected. She found herself hunched over, the cheese sandwich a stone in her stomach. She couldn’t look at him anymore because he would see how that piece of news affected her—she didn’t have a poker face. His admission shouldn’t have stunned her, but it did.

“Mi amor,” he said softly. “You know my name. You hear or read the news. I’m not going to hide what my family is. It would be ludicrous to try. I didn’t know any other way of life. I didn’t know there was any other way of life.”

She twisted her fingers together in her lap beneath the cover of the table, keeping her head down, allowing her hair to fall around her face, hiding her expression. She’d promised him she’d give herself time to process, but how did anyone process what he was admitting?

“Finish eating, Siena, while we talk.”

She pushed away from the table. “I’m not hungry anymore.” If she could have, she would have run from him. Run from the room with her hands over her ears. It was so much easier to be the girl coming home from boarding school believing her grandfather owned a winery and just didn’t like having little children around.