Crazed: A Blood Money Novel

by Edie Harris

  Before Ilda, he’d never experienced possessive need over a woman, and he certainly hadn’t felt it since. She remained unique to him, and years later, the animalistic urges growled louder than ever. He wanted to stamp MINE over every inch of her body, put his name—his real name—on display for all to see. His mark, so that they’d know not to fuck with what was his.

  Now that he knew about Arlo, it was a thousand times worse. He’d missed so much. First breath, first cry, first smile, first step. Instead, she had grown from baby to toddler to little girl in the midst of a bloody cartel war. For God’s sake, there was a man with his lips sewn shut short yards from the house in which she slept every night. Everything in Casey screamed at the wrongness of this, all of this.

  To the depths of his bones, he knew that Ilda and Arlo belonged with him, home in the United States. Watching Arlo learn and play, listening to Ilda sing...holding them both within his arms. His promise to Ilda on the day of their wedding, that he’d take her anywhere she wished to go, still stood. He could delegate some of his responsibilities in the company to his trusted seconds, Henry and Finn, and spend more time with his family. They didn’t need to live in Boston; in fact, he’d wondered more than once in recent weeks if a change of pace in Chicago might do him good, somewhere near Beth and close enough to offer Vick an assist with the new Faraday office. But he intended to let Ilda decide, just so long as they got the hell out of Colombia.

  That is, if she agreed to leave with him. He couldn’t blame her for resisting. He’d failed her utterly and continued to do so at every turn. A truth that had hit him hard the night before when he had finally gotten around to viewing the satellite footage Della sent.

  In the initial aftermath four years ago, Casey had pored over the rolling image feeds, watching rescue crews rush to the scene of the burning chapel, putting out the fire and sifting through the smoking rubble. Members of the Orras cartel had bombed the small church firmly within Pipe’s territory to send a message: nothing and no one was safe from Orras rage. Any and everything under the protection of the Marin cartel was at risk from its enemies. As though assassinating Théa wasn’t message enough. The structure had collapsed shortly thereafter, but most of the rescue workers had needed to wait for the building to cool before they could dig for bodies.

  After twenty-ish hours of searching, they’d pulled the body of the priest who had married Casey and Ilda from the wreckage. Casey had watched another few hours beyond that, waiting with wet eyes and damp cheeks to see if they’d find her. But when the crews broke for water, with stooped shoulders and shaking heads, Casey realized there was nothing left to wait for. No one had known they were at the chapel to begin with. No one would know to look for a second body. So he’d shut off the feed and told Adam to bury it in a file on the private family-only server—and to keep his mouth shut.

  Last night, though. Last night, Casey had fast-forwarded to where he’d left off four years ago and forced himself to watch for the miracle of Ilda’s rescue, a rescue he knew was coming, no matter that his fists remained clenched and bloodless for every minute.

  He should never have stopped at twenty-four hours. Ilda had been trapped, fucking entombed, for so much longer.

  A noise behind him, the sound of a door opening and closing softly. Light footsteps approached. From the corner of his eye, he watched as Ilda knelt in the aisle next to his pew to genuflect before the rustic cross hanging above the altar. A moment later, she sat beside him, slender hands clasped tightly in her lap and the faint scent of exertion clinging to her petite frame.

  Silently, he handed her the water bottle he’d brought for himself, gratified in an undeniably primal way when she took it and drank deep, allowing him to see to her needs without argument.

  When she finished, he broke the quiet, keeping his voice low in deference to the sanctity of this place with so many shared memories between them, good and bad. “How did you know I’d be here now?”

  “I didn’t.” Her gaze was fixed on the simple red, orange and blue stained-glass window placed high on the front wall, near the rafters to shaft multicolored daylight down on the altar below. “My uncle retired last year, to a cottage a few miles away. I told Franco that Arlo and I were going to spend the afternoon with him, then put her down for a nap and left out the back. My uncle is watching her until I return.”

  “You walked miles in this heat?” He didn’t like that.

  “No, I ran.” Crossing her legs, she bounced her dangling foot, showing off a dusty running shoe. “Did you find what you wanted?”

  What he wanted. He barely controlled a wince at her words, the exhaustion in her husky voice, remembering too well her accusation. “How did your meeting at the school for the deaf go this morning?”

  For the first time since arriving, Ilda looked at him, and he met her dark gaze, wondering what she saw in his face. “How do you know about that?”

  He shrugged, not especially keen to admit that he’d followed her—and Pipe and Arlo—like a sad creeper from the gates of the hacienda to the school’s front door. Instead, he waited for her to answer, hoping she would give him this much. Just this tiny peek into his daughter’s life, please. Please.

  A heavy sigh preceded her capitulation. “She’s so smart, Casí. My baby is so smart, but she can’t communicate.” Ilda slumped back against the pew. “Right around the time Arlo turned two, we realized she was watching our mouths, trying to see the shapes our lips made, and she would mimic the shapes, but with no sound. We worked with her to develop a system of hand gestures so she could tell us what she needed, but we’ve hit a wall. So has she.” Shoulders hiking up around her ears, Ilda shot him a sideways glance, as though worried he judged her for doing the best she could in a difficult situation. Silly woman. “I’m worried about her cognitive development if we can’t learn to effectively communicate. I can tell that Arlo is frustrated when I don’t understand her, because she knows what she wants, but sometimes all we can do is look at one another and frown.”

  Weariness weighted each word, and Casey linked his fingers together to keep from reaching for her. “Three seems so young to start school.”

  “The administrator told us this morning that we were late.” Ilda pinched the bridge of her nose. “Apparently, Arlo ought to have been learning to sign at eighteen months. Of course, this school didn’t even exist in Medellín until a year ago, but that didn’t stop this woman from basically calling me a bad mother.”

  Anger choked him. “Bitch.”

  “Agreed.” A smile ghosted across her lips before she sobered. “Anyway, we’ve got Arlo enrolled starting in two weeks. I’ll take classes with her in the mornings, so that we’re learning the signs together, and then she will socialize with other hearing-impaired children in the afternoons. And eventually, maybe I’ll stop feeling like I’ve completely failed my child.”

  Unable to keep his distance at the obvious evidence of her hurt, Casey settled an arm around her slim shoulders and tugged her tight to his side. Ilda snuggled in with a shaky exhalation, head resting on his shoulder, and together, they sat in comfortable quiet, breathing in the cool chapel air. A temporary détente, and a welcome one. He permitted himself a moment of simply enjoying the feel of her curvy body pressed to his harder lines. He stroked the warm bare skin of her upper arm, revealed in the athletic mesh tank top she wore, momentarily shell-shocked at the privilege she was granting him, a privilege he hadn’t imagined would again be his.

  He dipped his head, pressing his lips to her crown and the wild curls she’d once again constrained in a vicious braid. She tensed but said nothing, and he took that as a victory, however small. “I finally know what happened here, to you.”

  “Funny, so do I.”

  He swallowed his smile at her tart tone. “Four years ago, when I made it home, I had satellite footage pulled of the time the chapel was bombed.”

  “You can just...do that? Pull satellite footage?”

  “Perk of the job.” Really, t
here was no need to freak her out with exactly how deep his family could dig. “What I’m trying to say is that I only watched the first twenty-four hours after the bombing, the first time around. I thought—I assumed—you’d died.” Casey cleared his throat. “I didn’t know I’d need to watch for thirty-seven hours to witness your rescue.”

  “I was in the basement.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “There was shouting, and the priest knew I wasn’t supposed to be found here, so he had me go downstairs while he investigated. I’d barely made it to the bottom of the steps when the explosion happened. The door slammed shut, and bricks...buried me. I was unconscious for a long time. I woke up when the fire reached the basement. My shoulders were shredded.”

  His arm tightened around her as he angled his head to glance at her shoulder blades. There beneath the hot-pink mesh were jagged white scars, pale against her sun-dark skin. “Oh, baby. I’m so sorry.”

  It was as though she didn’t hear him. Or maybe she simply didn’t care what he said. “I prayed for life, for death. For you to come for me.”

  He swallowed past the knot in his throat. “But I didn’t come,” he muttered, already hating her next words before she spoke.

  “No. Pipe did. He literally dug me out of the rubble.”

  Casey knew. Casey had seen. The footage showed Pipe rolling up in his SUV, a dozen brigadiers trailing behind, for what had obviously been a photo-op moment. Side-by-side with the fire chief, Pipe had walked across the wreckage, making a show of lifting and looking. Then he’d lifted and looked and found Ilda’s lone piece of luggage. Recognition had struck, and real panic spurred him. Suddenly, everyone was digging. Afternoon was fading to evening when Pipe disappeared from sight and reappeared minutes later with a limp, sooty, bleeding Ilda in his arms.

  Hand to God, it was one of the most heroic feats Casey had ever witnessed, and Casey had seen some seriously heroic shit in his thirty-four years. “I will always be grateful he found you.”

  “He more than found me—he didn’t leave my bedside in hospital, after. Then he brought me to the hacienda to recuperate. I had a broken collarbone and fractured femur and needed help with the most basic tasks.” Slowly, her hand crept over his middle, plucking at the heathered gray jersey of his T-shirt.

  He waited, sensing her hesitation, but damn, waiting sucked. He generally bulldozed through most of his conversations these days, not tapping much into his well of patience since leaving the CIA and taking the directorial position within Faraday Industries. Ilda deserved patience, though, and understanding, care and respect, so he could keep his goddamn mouth shut long enough for her to say what she so obviously itched to say.

  “I wasn’t fully healed when I realized I was pregnant, and I hurt too much to think twice about telling him. He guessed, correctly, that you were the father but never said a word in judgment. He escorted me to every appointment, took care of me when I was sick and then Arlo was born and he was still there. He made sure I ate, showered, slept.”

  Pipe had stolen Casey’s life, his rights to the moments Ilda was describing. Ilda was his wife, Arlo his daughter. But there was that selfish narrative again, and Jesus fucking Christ it was hard to quell. “Was it...was it bad?”

  “Let’s just say I never had that pregnancy glow everyone goes on and on about.”

  “No, I mean after.” Though he hated hearing about her suffering. He ought to have been the man seeing to her needs, not Pipe. Never Pipe.

  She fidgeted against him but didn’t shift away. “Only the early days, when Arlo was in neonatal care. He fell in love the minute he set eyes on her, you know. He and...and Théa, they’d wanted a big family with lots of children. Pipe and I grieved together for who—what—we’d lost.”

  Every word was a blow to his gut, nausea churning. An acute sense of loss swept over him, roughening his voice. “And now you’re his fiancée.”

  “He didn’t push me, Casí. He didn’t rush me or force me. At the time, I thought he was the best choice for my daughter. He’d be able to keep her safer than I could on my own.”

  “I can keep you safe.” Outside of Colombia, they’d be safe as houses. Nothing and no one would ever touch them. “Our lives would’ve been so much different if I’d only watched the satellite footage a few hours more. I would’ve come back immediately and—”

  “Don’t tell me what you would have done.” She straightened, putting dreadful distance between their bodies until he bit his tongue to keep from voicing a complaint. “Or what you tried to do. I’m not... I can’t hear it right now. Not on top of everything else.”

  He drew his hands into his lap, resting palms down atop his thighs. “When you’re ready, I’ll tell you. Anything. Everything.” Not a single piece of information would be withheld from her ever again. Keeping secrets had destroyed them the first time around—he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

  Propping his arms on the pew back in front of him, he closed his eyes, unable to look at her as he admitted his failure. “I looked around for the marriage certificate, but you were right. You survived, but it didn’t.”

  “Casí.”

  Was that pity in her tone? Oh, hell no. He shook his head, shifting in the pew to face her with what he knew must be a fearsome expression. “I can’t abide by a proxy annulment, not when I know it was real, that I was real with you in that moment. And not when I’m not Catholic.” Pausing, he scrubbed a palm over his buzzed scalp. “I’m sorry I’m not Catholic. I suppose that’s one more lie you can hate me for.”

  “Oh, Casí.” From pity to patronizing in two seconds flat. “I always knew you weren’t Catholic.”

  His shoulders straightened, and he frowned. “What? How?”

  A blush suffused her cheeks. “You’re circumcised.”

  And Catholic men from South America, by and large, were decidedly not circumcised.

  Well. That was one secret he couldn’t hide.

  Ilda tugged her braid over one shoulder, toying with the neon elastic. “So? What, um, what are you?”

  “Jewish.”

  She blinked at him. “Practicing?”

  “On the High Holy Days, yes.” His maternal grandparents had emigrated from their homeland of Morocco to settle in Toronto, where his grandfather had practiced internal medicine. Their only daughter—Casey’s mother, Sofia—had attended medical school at Harvard, met Frank Faraday during an excursion in Cape Cod and ultimately altered over two centuries of latent Protestantism on the part of the Faradays by insisting on raising her children Jewish.

  Abruptly, Ilda stood, adjusting the hem of her tank over the waistband of her skintight black workout capris. “I know how badly you wanted to find the certificate.”

  Light from the stained-glass window haloed her head, casting her in a glow so stunning she stole his breath. Looking at her hurt. Being near her hurt. Fuck, maybe he was a masochist, because he never wished this pain to end. “What I want doesn’t matter, Ilda. What does is bringing my brother home in one piece—that’s why I’m here.” He studied the play of emotions on her beautifully familiar face. “But you should know that I’m not going to give up on us. I don’t have it in me to let you go.”

  Frustration won the battle for dominance in her expression. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “How about you stop telling me what you plan to do and convince me to go along with those plans?” When he said nothing, feeling like he’d accidentally stepped on a landmine and not sure how to disarm it, she heaved an aggrieved sigh. “If you recall, Casí, I pursued you. I decided, after considering what I knew of you and the man you were, that you were worth my time and my heart. I must have had a reason, yes? If you want me to even consider what you want, make me remember that reason.”

  After fumbling at her waistband, she tossed a folded paper into his lap, the edges blackened. As he opened the parchment with shaking hands to reveal their marriage certificate, she spoke, old pain layered into every syllable. “I took it from the priest’s
office that day because I thought we might need it for proof wherever we were going.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, a hand lifting to her throat as she stared down at the paper he held so carefully. “I put it in my pocket. One of the nurses at the hospital, after...after, she put all my belongings into a bag.” Her swallow was audible in the silence of the sanctuary. “Pipe told me Casímiro Cortez had died, and I never wanted to look in that bag again. I had one of the hacienda staff put it in a closet.”

  His hands smoothed over the crinkled corners, staring at their signatures next to one another on the simple form the priest had set before them after speaking their vows.

  Ilda nodded jerkily. “You were right. I married Casey Faraday. I didn’t remember that you filled out your half of the certificate after I’d done mine, until I found the bag in the closet last night.”

  The day before their wedding, Casey had been scouting possible chapels, needing to choose one that was out of the way but near enough that he could collect her as soon as the tactical team had completed its mission. Something about the priest at this chapel had gotten to him, though. A gleam in his weathered eye, perhaps? Regardless, Casey had flashed his American passport at the old cleric and passed over a decent chunk of change—for the donation box, of course—to avoid the necessary Certificate of Impediment he’d normally need for their union to be legal, seeing as he was neither Catholic nor Colombian.

  Staring at the written proof of their marriage, an event he’d feared every so often that he’d invented in his mind, a tragic fantasy, stole his voice. He lifted his gaze to hers, locking onto the deep brown irises without blinking.

  She stared back. “It was never filed with the government,” she whispered, “but in the eyes of God, we are one.”

  “We are in my eyes, too, Ilda.”

  Glancing at the watch on her wrist, she hurriedly exited the pew, again dropping to genuflect. “I have to go.”

  He stood, slowly, his body feeling like one giant bruise. “How do I contact you?” These covert meetings, where he accosted her in public or she barely escaped her minders, were too dangerous to continue.