* * *
That night, I pull Selina tight into my arms, as if I’m the only thing holding her down to earth, keeping her here with me. I know that’s not true anymore. She loves me. The thought both warms my heart and turns my insides into a twisted mess. She only thinks she loves me, because she only thinks she knows me. If she knew the truth, if she knew who I really am, she would realize how thoroughly undeserving of her heart I really am.
But maybe there’s a future in which her love can fix me, mend me into the sort of man she deserves. I used to think I was meant to ruin Selina Palacios, break her down into someone who could belong in my world. But what if she was meant to save me? What if there’s a world in which we can both belong, two twisted and broken and fucked up souls? What if there’s a future in which we both get to be happy and whole?
“Do you think we were destined to be together?” Selina asks, as if sensing my train of thought. She’s pressed into my chest, and her words reverberate through her body, their rhythm thrumming against the beating of her heart. I can feel the thick bandage on her side through her nightie, and it makes my pulse speed up. “Like, fate brought us together?”
“No, princesa,” I murmur truthfully, despite my own musings, and brush her soft hair out of her face. Her forehead is a little damp with perspiration. She’s in pain, but refuses the pills the doctors sent home with her. That’s my princesa. I used to think she was porcelain, but she’s iron, through and through. “This was never supposed to happen. But I made it so. Do you still hate me for that?”
“I do,” she says, without hesitation. Then, more apprehensively: “Do you think it’s possible to hate and love someone at the same time?”
I think about my mother. Right up until the very end, she said she loved my father, and I think she meant it. She never said she hated him, but she had to. She loved him, and she hated him, right up until the day it cost her her life. But I’m not my father, and I never will be.
“I do,” I repeat back to my wife. Her breathing is slow and steady against my chest, and for a moment I think she’s finally fallen asleep, but then she speaks again.
“Why don’t you just cover that up?” she asks, and I realize she’s looking at the tattoo on my forearm, the one I’m absently rubbing with my thumb.
I shrug, careful not to disturb her with the motion. “I don’t know. I never really thought about it before.”
“Get me my lipstick, off the vanity,” Selina says suddenly. On a day when her body isn’t held together by stitches, I’d remind her not to give me orders, but tonight, I let it go. I slide out from under her gently and find the tube in question on the vanity. Holding it makes my pulse speed, remembering what happened the last time I held such an object, two nights ago. But this tube is golden in color, and when I flip it over to read the name, all it says is Beso.
I climb back into bed and hand the lipstick over. Selina takes it and applies the color with a practiced hand, not even needing to look in the mirror. Then, she leans over and presses her lips against my forearm, covering up the thick black lines with a scarlet kiss.
“There,” she says, smiling up at me with those damn red lips. “All fixed.”
When she looks at me like that, I forget everything. I forget that her fix will wash away by morning, that we are still in mortal danger, that there will come a day when she stops looking at me like that forever.
I just capture her lips in mine and kiss her, as hungrily as I can without worrying about hurting her. But her hands are slipping under my shirt, her tongue pushing mine for more.
“You’re hurt,” I say after I pull away, fighting the desire that’s making my pants tight.
“So be gentle,” Selina says, her eyes wide and wanting, her hands roaming dangerously low.
“You’re in pain,” I try again, fighting a groan when she reaches her destination.
“So make me forget,” she begs, in a quiet voice I can’t say no to.
So I oblige, making my princesa feel good, making her moan with pleasure instead of pain, until she finally falls asleep in my arms, her mark smudged, but still bright on my forearm.
* * *
It only takes a few days for me to start losing my mind, confined to my bed like this, but Javier doesn’t let me so much as walk myself to the bathroom until I get the green light from the private doctor he hired, a man paranoiacally vetted and likely threatened with a slow death if he even accidentally hurts me. Still, it’s not so bad. Though Javier is far more careful with me than he needs to be, he makes my bedrest feel infinitely less torturous. And then, finally, a little over a week later, I’m back on my feet again, albeit a bit slower than usual.
Kate left only a few days ago, after a very tearful goodbye, during which she tried to bail and stay until my recovery was complete at least a half dozen times. Now she’s safely in Nantucket, and the mansion is dustier than it’s ever been. Aside from Brock’s skills in the kitchen, my kidnappers-slash-roommates are terrible homemakers. Despite Javier’s strict orders to take it easy, I decide it couldn’t hurt to just tidy up a little. That’s how I end up in the study, tidying up Javier’s desk, the one that once was my father’s. Neither of them has proven capable of keeping the room in order, or the desk unburied in paperwork.
The bottom drawer on the left side is slightly ajar, and I bend down to shut it, wincing at the pinching pain in my stitches. At the last minute, I pull the drawer open instead, my curious fingers acting before my mind orders them to stop.
Inside is a safe, something small but heavy. It’s too new to have been my father’s, or even Max’s. It’s Javier’s. He put this here.
My heart is pounding so hard it almost hurts. This is it. Whatever Javier is hiding, from me, even from Miel, this has to be it. If nothing else, it’ll be a clue.
And whatever I feel for my husband, whatever fucked up version of love I’ve finally come to accept, it’s not enough to stop me from reaching for the dial.
I have to know what’s in there.
So I spin the numbers, first to Javier’s birthday, a date still emblazoned in my mind.
Then to mine.
Then to the date he took me.
Nothing.
Of course a man like Javier is too smart to be using dates like that. I’m probably never going to crack the code, and my calves are already starting to cramp up from crouching here.
But then I remember one more date, one I didn’t realize I’d even stored in my memory.
The date Javier’s mother died, most likely at his father’s hand. The date that marks the birth not of the man I married, but of the monster who forced our union.
I turn the dial. The metal door clicks. I inhale.
It takes me a minute to convince myself to pull it open, my heart in my throat. What if it’s nothing?
What if it’s everything?
I feel like I might throw up, and it’s not just from the throbbing pain that my nervously twisting guts seem to have newly provoked from my bullet wound.
I open the safe, and exhale.
It’s just some cash, some random documents, including our marriage certificate, and—
There’s something bulky at the bottom. I push the papers aside and pull out a necklace.
Big, shiny, with a huge diamond in a bed of emeralds at its center.
It takes a moment for realization to sink in, because my mind is working overtime to deny the undeniable.
It’s my necklace, the one my mother used to wear. The one I was wearing the night my brother was killed.
The one his killer stole from me.
* * *
Former detective Reggie Andrews slams the car door shut behind him and punches the steering wheel, hard. The aging Mazda gives a choked honk, making passing pedestrians jump and glare at him.
Fired by the APD, laughed out of the room by the FBI, and denied a meeting with the DEA. So far, it hasn’t been a great start to the year.
And now Andrews’s credit card is bei
ng declined, unable to even handle the four buck charge for a peppermint latte. Officer—Detective Daley—keeps encouraging him to drop this vendetta and look for a new job, or at least she used to, until she stopped picking up his calls. She claims to be busier with the new job, but Andrews knows she’s tired of entertaining his obsession with this case. But what’s a man to do when something evil is happening right under his nose, and the people responsible for defeating evil are refusing to take him seriously? He takes the matter into his own hands, that’s what he does. If Andrews is the only person with the balls to take down Atlanta’s up-and-coming crime family, well, then he better stop fucking around gathering evidence no one is interested in, and start coming up with a plan of attack.
He grabs the worn folder out of his glove compartment and opens it to his latest findings. There’s the photos he took outside of Grady a few weeks ago, after Selina Palacios was shot. They show Palacios and Vega, of course, along with two men Andrews hasn’t been able to identify yet, and a tall, pretty woman with a deep complexion and a head of wild curls, labelled with a post-it note that reads Miel Conde? There’s also a transcription of a call he heard last week over the police scanner he bought online. A man at a bougie bar in Buckhead had a few too many and was overheard making loud, slurred threats against “that bitch” Selina Palacios, before the cops arrived and sent him home with a warning. He should have been taken in, but what’s wealth for if not to avoid nights spent in the drunk tank? Andrews skims through the transcript, trying to find the man’s name, because how does that saying go? An enemy of my enemy is my friend? Ah, there it is, the name of Andrews’s new best friend.
Mateo del Rey.
* * *
Caleb Guerrera tries not to flinch as his father, a man known to most only as El Sombrerón, yells another Spanish profanity and kicks a chair hard enough to send it flying against the brick wall, where it shatters into pieces. Marcela, his father’s wife, a woman barely older than Caleb himself, slaps a hand over her mouth to stifle a surprised shriek. Caleb tenses, ready to distract his father should he turn toward the nervous young woman next, but the man remains oblivious, slamming his fists down on the table instead.
“I told you it should have been me,” the elder Guerrera rages, turning a red-eyed glare to his son. “I wouldn’t have missed. That rich bitch would be dead now if you hadn’t convinced me to trust that amateur hijo de puta.”
“It’s too dangerous for you to do these things yourself, you know that,” Caleb says in a measured tone, watching the other men in the room eye each other knowingly. Rumors of his father’s instability have been spreading far too fast, despite his and Marcela’s best attempts to keep the mad kingpin in check. There’s no such thing as a trusted advisor when the throne begins to look weak. All you can ever truly trust is family—no matter how cruelly that family has been treated. “We can still strike down Vega, and soon. Te lo juro.”
“It’s not enough, it’s not enough,” his father mumbles, a familiar sound. Vega’s betrayal last year couldn’t have come at a worse time. What began as a simple mission to stomp out a rogue rebel quickly became a complicated mess as El Sombrerón’s mind deteriorated into paranoia and obsession. If Caleb had returned home sooner, taken the situation more seriously, maybe they could’ve nipped Vega’s little rebellion in the bud before it had escalated to this. Now, everything is at risk, and every day that Caleb spends wrangling his father’s bloodthirst is another day Vega gains power on the outside.
“We’ve gotten word that they’re back at the Palacios estate again,” one of the men pipes up in Spanish, sounding more confident than he has any right to. “There’s still too much security, of course, but maybe next time they—”
El Sombrerón yells again, pulling the Magnum from his waistband and shooting the speaker directly in the head. Caleb flinches and the other men startle, and Marcela can’t swallow her shriek as the man collapses, his blood quickly pooling on the cement floor. Marcela used to be stronger, but then again, her husband used to simply be ruthless, not perilously unstable. Caleb’s been doing his best to protect his step-mother, a woman he’s only met a handful of times since his father wed her half a decade ago, but there’s no telling what goes on behind closed doors. Right now, Caleb takes a step toward his father as the kingpin takes one toward Marcela, but the dog at her feet doesn’t wait, raising his hackles and growling at the man that was once his master. In response, the German Shepherd gets a vicious kick to the ribs, sending him across the room and making Marcela whimper, arms wrapped tightly around herself.
“Saquen al fuckin’ chucho,” the elder Guerrera snaps at no one in particular, then turns back to Caleb, successfully distracted. “Stop telling me what I can’t do. Get me Vega and his bitch, alive, so I can bleed them myself. Before I lose my patience.”
Caleb finds Marcela’s eyes across the room. They’re running out of time. If they don’t kill Javier Vega and Selina Palacios soon, El Sombrerón will raze his own empire to the ground in his quest for revenge.
To be continued…
Thank you so much for reading Glass Cage! I hope you enjoyed the continuation of Javier and Selina’s story. If you did, please consider leaving a review. That would really help me out as a new author.
Selina and Javier’s turbulent romance concludes in Iron Cage. To be notified as soon as that book becomes available for pre-order, subscribe to my mailing list HERE.
To find more books by me, drop me a line, or follow me on social media, you can visit my website at www.francescabaez.com.
Glass Cage Page 18
