Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  And then she remembered Hugo making her come with his hand. She still felt him on her body.

  And then she remembered the burns.

  Nine years ago, her colleague had seen Kabakas walk into a fire—an explosion. If he’d survived, he would have burns. But then, everyone knew the story of the fire. Other people in the world had burns. He said he’d been burned nine years ago. People lied. If he were some sort of Kabakas superfan, that would be what he would say.

  I’ll send a team, Dax had said. We’ll take him down and get the proof.

  Fuck.

  She washed up and put on a fresh uniform and fresh granny panties and headed out to the kitchen, breathing in the scent of coffee. Nobody around.

  She wandered through the place and to the back. The sun peeked over the hills, lighting up the rows of the green savinca bushes. She saw Hugo and Paolo, both wearing broad-brimmed hats, heads bent over the bushes. Farmers.

  They seemed to be studying the leaves. They went to the next plant and studied that one. Then to the next. Hugo walked behind Paolo, moving stiffly. At one Paolo walked behind Hugo, and Hugo moved normally. Hiding the pain. Not a surprise.

  Had the pain at least lessened? And how much of the night did he remember?

  She wandered back to the kitchen, stopping by the locked cabinet. She fingered the padlock. Decorative, but strong. She could get in. She should get in. There were pirates holding a tanker. If Dax thought that offering up Kabakas’s whereabouts would grease the wheels for an end to the standoff, then it would work. Dax’s assumptions on the geopolitical level were always spot-on—she knew that. And the sure thing was always the best—she knew that, too. But turning that Brujos guard, Sal, and getting a bargaining chip through him—she wouldn’t have offered it up if she didn’t think it would work. She knew the sound of a disgruntled employee. They could offer him a lot.

  She ran a thumbnail over the ridged side of the lock. Burns didn’t make him Kabakas. A lot of people had burns. Anyway, her colleague had seen Kabakas die. They’d recovered bodies. They didn’t have Kabakas’s dental records, true, but her colleague wasn’t stupid.

  And with that, she returned to the kitchen. She lifted the sturdy silver press pot. Partly full. For her? She poured herself a cup and set to work on the scrambled eggs. She’d put chicken and egg and sliced avocado on the side, a regional favorite.

  Eventually, Paolo wandered in.

  “Good morning, Paolo,” she said.

  He mumbled his good morning.

  “Do you and Hugo like cinnamon on your plantains?”

  He watched her blankly. Cinnamon was a big word for him.

  “I’ll just put it out.” She set the chicken roasting. He seemed content to stay. Was he beginning to warm up to her?

  “Does Hugo teach you other languages?”

  If Paolo understood, he hid it.

  She put up a finger. “Spanish.” She put up another: “English…” She put up a third finger with a questioning gaze. It would be interesting, for example, if he was teaching Paolo Chinese or something.

  He just looked at her. Yeah, he understood. “The code,” he finally said. “It allows you to determine any answer?”

  “For fractions,” she said.

  “Say more.”

  She wiped her hands on her apron, stifling a smile—that was Hugo’s line. She covered the potato cakes and grabbed a stack of paper plates she’d spotted the day before. “You have to convert it, just like a code.” She cut a paper plate in half, then one half in quarters. She gave him a half and a quarter. “Add this.”

  He looked up at her.

  She pointed at the half, then the quarter. “This plus this.”

  He frowned, confused. She then cut the half into quarters. “Now?”

  “Three quarters.”

  She smiled. He straightened. That was how she could tell when it clicked, that making the fractions all of a kind, a family, was the key. They went through several more paper plates, doing eighths, thirds. She gave him new plates to cut up and convert. After, she showed him the trick of multiplying crosswise. He practiced while she checked the chicken. He was incredibly smart, this kid.

  While he practiced the crosswise trick, she wrote him a note where the common denominators revealed the letters. Like a real code.

  He went at it with gusto as she flipped the cakes…which had gotten a bit burnt. She put them under a cloth and started two more.

  He wrote her an answer back, watching over her shoulder as she cracked the code, laughing when she got it. He liked writing the code better than cracking it, which was fine with her.

  He wrote her a new one: No cinnamon. She laughed. This kid was smart as hell. And the drill—he’d ace that fucker now. There was another word for her to decode. Paolo laughed as she slowly worked it out.

  She felt Hugo before she saw him. She straightened up, turned and met his eyes. He seemed so huge and cold and unmovable.

  But God, the way he’d touched her last night. Her face heated.

  He turned his dark eyes to Paolo. “Are you distracting her?”

  “We’re playing a math game,” she said.

  Hugo narrowed his eyes.

  Paolo scurried away.

  Hugo turned to her, searching her face. “Games are not how you are to teach.”

  “Why? It makes it fun for him. Fun to work with fractions.”

  “You would disobey my instruction?”

  “Well…he understands it now.”

  “You will teach future lessons from the book.” He made his oo’s long. Boook.

  “Why?”

  A flash of surprise. “Because you will.”

  She pressed her lips together.

  “Private thoughts, señorita?” His eyes glittered. “You are an expert in math instruction?”

  “No, but I know this is the way to teach fractions, considering…”

  Her words trailed off as he advanced on her, and suddenly she was back in the opium and lavender scented room, being consumed by him and his fingers. “Considering what?”

  “That he can solve the problems now.”

  He eyed her suspiciously. “Do you have other talents I should know about?”

  She fought not to show her alarm. This was why you didn’t break character. “I like games, that’s all.” Liza loved games. She wouldn’t have been able to teach math with a game but she loved them. Was he just trying to rattle her?

  He was so close now, his breath stirred the hair around her forehead. “You do not teach with games. It is not how you prepare for life.”

  “So it all has to be hard and harsh and unpleasant?”

  He tilted his head and looked at her strangely. “I do not know, señorita. Does it?”

  Her heart was pounding now. She’d been worried about him busting through her Liza disguise.

  She should have been worried about him busting through Zelda.

  “Breakfast is getting cold.” She pushed past him and went into the kitchen to grab the plates.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He stood at the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, watching her set the table.

  In one deft stroke, Liza had done what he never had—made a game with the boy. Drawn him into play.

  Had Paolo wanted to play all this time? Hugo had never played as a child—not that he could remember, anyway. He’d learned early on that showing any kind of happiness was the fastest route to punishment at the hands of the man married to his mother. So he’d stuffed down his happiness. You couldn’t take away what you couldn’t see.

  After he’d learned the truth about himself and run off to the islands, he was too old for play, and the fighting men he’d joined up with were the opposite of playful. He’d liked it that way. He’d imagined he’d found his tribe.

  He’d assumed that Paolo, coming from blood and hate as he had, would be well past play. He’d imagined that they were connected in at least that way.

  And then in came Liza, creat
ing a secret world of fun just big enough for the two of them, weaving a story, winning him over, all in the space of one morning. He’d stood watching with the strangest feeling in his belly.

  He’d gotten used to getting what he wanted and taking what he wanted, molding the world around him.

  She was changing everything.

  She said, “I’ll go grab the serving platter.”

  He slammed a hand on the doorframe before she could slip by, remembering the way she had felt.

  He remembered every second of her. Every breath of her. She fascinated him—dangerously so, perhaps—because he still didn’t know her. Last night had only underlined that.

  “You will obey my instructions in your work with the boy,” he said, gripping the wood. “It is important that you obey my instructions.”

  She bristled. Just that one movement made him go hard. “Fine.”

  His gaze fell to her lips, parted in surprise. “You disagree?”

  “The boy is a real person who needs…more than instruction,” she said.

  “You don’t know what he needs.”

  “He needs more. He needs you, Hugo. God, he idolizes you so much, but you keep your heart as locked up and closed up as that little cabinet,” she said. “See him, Hugo.”

  “You think I do not see him? I see him and hear him in ways that you never can.” He still heard him crying out on that bloody field. Even now, Hugo was desperate to silence those cries. “You will teach out of the book. The book is superior.”

  “The facts don’t serve at your whim,” she bit out.

  He leaned in. “But you do.”

  Her nostrils flared. Her eyes flared. All he could think now was how badly he wanted to drag his lips down the side of her neck and taste her heartbeat. To move inside her.

  “Don’t you?” he whispered.

  “So it seems.” She ducked under his arm to grab the platter.

  With a casual attitude, he wandered in and took a seat at the head of the table.

  She ferried in the dishes, not looking at him. He couldn’t have that, couldn’t be banished from her sphere. “Liza,” he said, and when she looked up, he pointed at a napkin she’d dropped on the way in.

  She stared in disbelief. She wasn’t cut out to be a domestic—not in any way. God, he wanted her to never leave.

  “Did you not agree to housekeeping duties?”

  She picked it up with an exaggerated motion, then she did something shocking—she grabbed the sides of her skirt, and curtseyed. An angry, mocking curtsey. His mother used to have to do that—curtsey. But she’d never curtseyed like Liza. It was a fuck-you curtsey.

  She came around and set a last dish on the table. “Do you want me to call the boy?”

  He stared at her levelly. Was she mocking him? “I thought you had decided to call him Paolo.”

  “So I can call the boy by his real name, but I can’t practice math with him in any sensible way? Maybe I need a drill to memorize, too.”

  He wanted to laugh. How had anyone traded this woman in a card game? He moved toward her as the dead move toward light. “Maybe you do need a drill to memorize.”

  The space between them surged with energy and need. He wanted to kiss her more than he wanted his next breath. He could feel the rise in her spirit. She would meet him. Everything was between them.

  Suddenly Paolo was there, taking his seat. He dug into the chicken.

  Somehow, Hugo found the will to turn. One step. Two steps. He went to the side table where he’d left his book and brought it to his seat at the table. One Hundred Years of Solitude. He’d read it before, but he was a man who enjoyed reading a book over again, letting it speak to him in different moods. “You will place my book here with my coffee at the breakfast table. I read my book at breakfast.”

  He opened it without looking up, conscious of her curiosity—about the book? Or did she imagine that he should converse with Paolo at the breakfast table? He wanted her to say it, to push just so he could push back. When he was reasonably certain she wouldn’t speak up, he flipped a page and fixed her with a glare. “The boy and I have a big day. We’ll need lunches prepared to take to the field.” He gave her instructions.

  She nodded and left.

  He stared at the page, still feeling her. Again he went over the night before. The way she’d come to him. The music of her thighs under the slide of his palms. The way she’d gasped and trembled. How long? she’d whispered. How long have you had these burns?

  Nine years, he’d said.

  The words swam on the page. She hadn’t asked what happened. She had asked, How long?

  Alarm bells clanged.

  What happened? Were you burned? Those were natural first questions to ask when faced with scars such as his. But to ask how long… Who asked that?

  Somebody who knew about Kabakas asked that.

  Somebody who suspected.

  He closed the book and picked up his fork, though he was no longer hungry. Nobody could learn his identity. It wasn’t simply a matter of protecting himself; he had to protect the boy. He would protect him with everything. The enemies of Kabakas would go after the boy.

  He could not allow her to live if she’d guessed about Kabakas. It was too dangerous.

  No, she could not know.

  He felt the boy’s eyes on him. The boy monitored him the way the villagers monitored the weather, sensitive to the minutest shifts in pressure. He dug in, just to put the boy’s mind at ease.

  Llapingachos. Finally. They were decent, too. They were nothing like Café Moderno’s but decent enough. He piled on a bit of chicken.

  There was no way she could know, this American prostitute. She could not have known he’d be at the airfield. And even if she had, no hunter could arrange that. It was far too elaborate. Insane, even. Handcuffed, helpless.

  No, he was spinning notions from the empty air. This is what came of bringing a woman like this into his home. He’d always confined his sexual liaisons to Bumcara. Here he was, focusing on the help.

  Preying on the help.

  Like his father.

  The realization turned the food in his mouth to cardboard. He could feel the boy’s eyes on him, sensing his shift in mood.

  “Bueno,” he grunted, forcing himself to scrape the fork along the plate, gathering up another bite.

  The boy resumed eating.

  Hugo chewed the food woodenly. Preying on the help. Was he no different from his predator of a father? The Bolivian oilman who’d fucked the maid, cuckolded the husband, ignored his biological child? The oilman who’d destroyed his family’s happiness? His mother had been a maid. What choice did she have? What choice did Liza have?

  He disgusted himself.

  He and Paolo spent that day walking the rows on the sunny side of the field with their small scythes, cutting the stems with buds that were ready to go. There was a shape the bud took on when it was just about to unfurl, a certain outward swell, and you had to get them out of the sun and into the citric acid solution, or you were done. They collected them in the large wheeled trays, bundling them in groups of 120, and brought them to the shed to be cooled. Everything with the harvest was in groups of twelve—so much of it followed traditional tales and rituals, and those processes had gotten built into the trade.

  His burns pained him, but the window for the harvest was shutting—once the flowers started to bloom, they became worthless to the floral wholesalers, who bought only tight, mature buds with the telltale swell. And he always helped the boy.

  There was something strange about the plants, however; the leaves looked shiny. That was not normal.

  They came in late and ate dinner silently. He instructed her to stay in her room that night and she did; she seemed as interested in keeping a distance between them as he did. He got through the night with only a small bit of opium.

  The next day after breakfast, he drove down to the village.

  Still deserted. His heart fell.

  The villagers
needed to be out harvesting their crops. How could he prove to them that the danger was past?

  The sunny sides would be popping soon, and then it would be too late. Hugo and the boy could live without doing a harvest, but the villagers could not.

  He drove to the spot north of the village square where Paolo always seemed to get cell service. There he contacted his PI, who gave him background on Liza.

  Hugo listened, fascinated, as the investigator recounted her history. Her father was in the army, stationed in Japan on the American base at Okinawa. He had married a woman from town. Liza was an only child, though the investigator wanted to dig into that more—there was something strange there. He wondered if a child had been given up. Liza had graduated high school with good grades and had even attended college for a year. There were photos of her as a dancer in Vegas. Later, head shots; Liza the Hollywood actress. According to the investigator, the only role Liza had landed was that of a high-priced escort. There were photos from that period, too—mostly parties. Liza in beautiful dresses and hanging on the arms of various men. Liza on a yacht. Liza always laughing. She had a blog, too. The man forwarded the link to him at the end of the call.

  Hugo leaned on the Jeep, reading the blog hungrily. It was about an American soap opera. Liza had many opinions on amnesia, it seemed, and carried on lengthy discussions in the comments. She was kind, this woman, replying to each and every person. A hostess in this little space.

  He got into his Jeep and drove up the winding path out onto the mountainside where terraced fields hugged the terrain, a great expanse of brown and green. His nerves always calmed in the fields. He drove to the point where the entire terraced range was visible.

  The sight chilled his bones.

  The upper-edge field, the slice that got the longest day of sun, was awash in red, a blade in the heart of the village. Months of income lost.

  He’d said El Gorrion wasn’t coming back, but they hadn’t believed him. Why should they? They did not know him. They thought him an American dilettante; a hobbyist reclaiming his South American roots. He had encouraged this image.

  Right before harvest was the worst time to scare the farmers from their fields.