by Logan Fox
She stormed forward with a strangled cry, raising the Taurus with the full intention of pistol whipping the smug son of a bitch as he leered at her.
It should have been easy: he was tied up, she had a gun.
He knocked the gun from her hand with his bound wrists, shot up from the chair, and barreled into her with a shoulder as she spun from the momentum of the blow that had disarmed her.
She thumped to the floor, bruising her hip. He reached her before she could scramble up further than her knees. Grabbing her arms, he drove a knee between her shoulder blades, using his other leg to knock her off her knees.
Air whooshed out of her in a gasp as her belly struck the floor. She squirmed in pain, doing her best to get out from under him, but he was too heavy.
A hand worked into her hair and yanked back her head. Her eyes teared with pain, but she blinked that moisture back with iron determination, throwing the man a scowl over her shoulder.
“You let me go, you—”
“No, pumpkin.” The man’s voice was quiet, almost pleasant. “This time, you listen to me.”
“Finn’s going to fuck you up. You get off me right—”
“Christ, girl.” There was a whisk of fabric, and then the man looped his scarf around her head. “I didn’t ride through a fucking blizzard for this shit.”
Heat flashed through her body, ice dousing her a second later.
He was going to strangle her.
She screamed loud enough to scour her throat. Bucking and writhing with everything she had, she tried to get the man off her.
“FINN! FINN!”
“Fucking hell,” the man muttered, and then the scarf was between her teeth. A yank brought her head up like a rearing horse, and then the man tied off that strip of wool, silencing her. Rope slithered around her wrists, then her ankles. A hard tug later, she lay hogtied on the rough floor, panting through the woolen scarf, hair and sweat in her eyes and her body aching where his weight had crushed her against the wood.
The man stood, walked around, and came to a stop in front of her. She stared at his boots for the longest time before she dared to look up. He was nothing but a looming shape, her dark hair blocking out most of him. The man crouched, wrists on his bent knees, fingers dangling. She shook her head, and gave a muffled yell when he reached for her.
“I’m not your enemy,” he said quietly. “And Milo can vouch for that.”
He watched her for a few seconds, and then hooked a finger behind the scarf, tugging it away from her mouth. She worked her jaw, and then tossed hair from her eyes as she glared up at him again.
“Who sent you?” she whispered, her voice rough from the screaming.
The man laughed. “No one.”
She stared at him, her mind blank. “But…”
“Yeah.” The man had a rueful smile on his mouth now. “I’m Milo’s—”
Finn’s voice cut him off. “Lars?”
Cora spun her head to face the door. Finn stood in the doorway, pistol aimed at the man standing over her.
Lars stood, brushing off his jeans as he let out a quiet chuckle. “Speak of the devil.”
5
End of the story
The fear that had filled Finn with such acidic panic retreated like an ebbing wave. He lowered his pistol and came inside the cabin, closing the door with an absent kick of his boot as he tugged off his gloves. Cora lay at Lars’s feet, hogtied and shivering. She had marks on her legs, on the small of her back where the long-sleeved shirt she wore had hiked up.
“Guess you didn’t tell her I was coming?” He turned to Cora, nudging her with his boot. “Ever think to let people speak before you go and make fucking assumptions?”
“Assumptions?” Finn said in a low growl as he went to his knees beside Cora. “What the fuck—?”
“Little miss Fight Club over here wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise.” Lars crouched on the other side of Cora, and helped Finn untie her.
She stood, yanking her arms free from both his and Lars’s grip when they tried to help her up. Then she hurried forward, scooping up a blanket from where it lay discarded on the floor, thankfully covering the dark circles of her nipples where they shone through the filmy fabric of her shirt.
Of Lars’s shirt.
Lars brushed his hands on his jeans and went into the kitchen, flicking a light switch against the wall. “Power off?”
“Tree took out the power line.”
“Fuck my life. Thought this place was a bit snowier than usual. Wrong fucking time for you two to be out here.”
“It’s the only place—” Finn began.
“Yeah, yeah.” Lars glared at Cora and then back at Finn.
Finn growled deep in his throat. “You said you’d be here Sunday.”
“Yeah, well, you scared the living bejesus out of me with that call yesterday. Thought I’d be picking up body parts from here to Timbuktu.” Lars set down a pair of coffee cups and started heating up the water in the pot, adding more from a bottle of filtered water standing nearby. “You check the generator?”
“Tree,” Finn said, absently picking the rope from the floor and winding it back into a coil. “We’ll need to get a repairman up here.”
Cora stood, a scowl spreading over her face as she turned to watch them conversing.
Lars glanced up, straight at Cora. Then he turned to Finn, eyes blank, mouth in an unreadable line. “What say you we go take a second look?” Lars murmured, hiding his mouth behind the rim of his cup before taking a small sip.
“You’re not even going to apologize?” Cora stepped forward, her legs flashing through the edges of the blanket. It only came to mid-thigh, and her skin was still pebbled from cold.
“Soon as you do, pumpkin,” Lars said dryly. “I’m offended you think I’d hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” Cora’s eyes went wide with incredulity. She hiked up the corner of her shirt, revealing a bruise on her ribs. “That’s exactly what you—”
“Get back into bed,” Finn cut in, gesturing up the stairs. “You need to get some sleep.”
Cora let out a frustrated sound and thumped her way up the stairs without a backward glance.
He could feel the weight of Lars’s eyes on him.
“She sure knows her place,” Lars said quietly. When Finn spun to him, Lars hid a small smile behind his mug. “Is she waiting there for you?”
“That’s not—” Finn cut off with a growl.
Lars snorted.
“We’ve been on the road since yesterday. She’s barely gotten more than an hour’s sleep.”
“I should be calling her bunny if she’s got that much—”
“She almost drowned in the Rio Grande.”
He swiped his mug from the counter and stomped out the door, not waiting for Lars to follow.
“What, she decide to head back home to Mexico?” Lars called after him. “’Cos I’m getting all sorts of Latino vibes from her.”
Finn snorted, and cast Lars an incredulous stare as he handed him the torch. “What the fuck happened back there?”
“Girl thought I’d come to snatch her, I guess.” Lars took a swig of his coffee as they worked their way around to the back of the house. Snow swirled around them, driven by a sporadic wind that seemed to have exhausted itself. “Pointed that pretty pistol at me and wouldn’t let me state my case until she had me tied up.”
“Tied up?” Finn paused, giving Lars a wide-eyed stare.
“I made her think I was tied up.” Lars passed him and went over to the generator, brushing away snow from the control panel. “She assumes a lot, that girl.”
“So you hogtied her?”
“She was being obnoxious,” Lars muttered, and threw Finn another half-hidden smile before taking a long swallow of his coffee. “Plus, hogtied girls are much, much more reasonable than any other kind.”
Finn squeezed his eyes shut with his fingers.
“Jesus, this thing’s dead,” Lars shifted his weight.
“I told you—”
“Think I brought you out here in the fucking snow for that?” Lars turned to face him. “Tell me what’s going on, Milo. With you. With this chick. Everything.”
Finn glanced up, and Lars followed his gaze. They were under the bedroom window, but it was closed against the cold. The lamp cast very little light, but enough that it was obvious Cora wasn’t close to the window.
“She’s cartel. Capo’s daughter.”
Lars lowered his cup, mouth slowly falling open. “Fuck,” he said, with emphasis.
“Exactly.”
“And this Texas thing?”
“Supposed to take her to her uncle. Or, her father’s business partner.”
“Creepy,” Lars muttered, taking a sip of his coffee and shivering theatrically when a gust of wind blew snow over him. “Hurry, it’s fucking cold out here.”
Finn shrugged inside his parka, glancing back at the generator as he strode away. Movement caught his eyes. He looked up, catching the tail-end of a shadow before it disappeared from behind the bedroom window’s glass. “Which I would have done. Couldn’t get hold of her father.”
“Me neither. Think something’s happened to him?”
Finn laced his hands together, urging his gloves tight around his fingers. “He was at a funeral in Sinaloa. There was a shoot-out.”
“Jesus,” Lars muttered. “He still alive?”
“Don’t know.” Finn shrugged. “Now I don’t know if I should take her to Texas, or wait to hear from her father.”
“Which might never happen, if he’s six feet under.” Finn glanced back as Lars drained the last of his coffee. “So what’s putting up your back about Texas? I mean, I trust whatever weird fucking sixth sense you have going on, but—”
“Her bodyguard told me not to trust the man.”
Lars snorted. “He have proof?”
“I don’t know. I had to shoot him.”
Lars moved his head to the side and lifted a hand to his face. “Jesus, Milo—”
“Client’s orders.”
“The fuck?”
“Then there was a hit on the exact route I’d been told to take. Didn’t think it was bullshit after that.”
“Thinking there was an informant?”
“Yeah. My thoughts—the bodyguard.”
“But why’d he rat himself out like that? You make him beg for his life or something?”
Finn shook his head. “He didn’t beg. He was more concerned with her.”
“Seems to be happening a lot, people being overly concerned with this chick.”
He ignored the comment. “Soon as I can make contact with her father—”
“Milo, just take her to fucking Texas. That’s the contract. If her daddy said she’s to be shipped off to cowboy land, then you take her there. We take her there. End of the fucking story. Everyone lives happily ever after. ‘Cept for her, ‘cos she’s cartel and shit. Probably zero happy endings in store for her.”
Finn spun to him, and Lars drew up short. The torch light cast a bright glow on the snow below them, and reflected back into Lars’s eyes, making them look more white than green.
“What the fuck’s your problem?” Finn whispered.
Lars gave a small shrug. “Strange…I was gonna ask you the same thing.”
6
Pretty boy
“Don Zachary’s busy,” came Ailin’s gruff Irish twang from behind the partially closed bathroom door. Zachary paused, the hand holding his straight razor barely touching his throat. His nondescript face peered back at him—brown eyes the color of mud, sandy brown hair swept back from a forehead marred by faint frown lines. He was pushing thirty-eight, and life had tried to etch those years deep into his flesh. But he’d always been too healthy for his own good—his face was that of a thirty-five-year-old’s, perhaps a few years younger.
“Please, Senor Ailin, I have news—”
“Then ya tell me. I’ll pass it on verbatim like, yeah?”
“I—I will speak only to—”
“Let him in,” Zachary called out, sliding the razor up his throat and flicking the foam from its blade. “I’m almost done.”
From the faint grumble Ailin gave, he wasn’t happy about letting the boy in. But he knew better than to challenge an order Zachary gave. There was still a scar on his cheek from the first and only time he’d insisted Zachary had been wrong.
The bathroom door opened. Angel appeared in the mirror, head turning until he saw Zachary standing by the basin. His eyes dropped to the floor, and a faint blush bloomed on his coffee-colored cheeks.
“Perdón, señor, I—I didn’t—”
“It’s Don Zachary, boy.” Zachary slid the straight razor up his throat, watching the young man’s reflection. “Not Senor.”
“Perdóname, Se—Don Zachary.”
Was it because he only wore a towel that the young man seemed so flustered? Or was it the sight of the distorted, marbled flesh that covered the left of his body?
“What did you come here to tell me?”
Angel’s eyes flashed up, flickered on Zachary’s scars, and struggled eventually to the reflection of his eyes. “I—I think I find him, Don Zachary.”
“And who is it that you think you found?” he asked quietly, scraping the last stripe of shaving foam from his neck.
Angel shifted his feet, and dropped his gaze again when Zachary turned to face the young man. Patting at his face and throat with a damp towel, he leaned idly against the basin as he waited for Angel to find his voice again.
When his men had dragged Angel and his brother, Marco, from the Rio Grande like a pair of drowning rats, they’d been defiant, angry, scared. He’d offered them work in the cartel, and both had accepted. Marco without hesitation, Angel with the wary reluctance of a man who’d already lived three people’s worth of hellish lives in his twenty-odd years on earth.
Both excelled as halcones—the cartel’s eyes and ears. Cautiously watching from the shadows came naturally to them. He hadn’t asked after their pasts, but they had to have been living on the streets for several years before scratching together enough pesos to pay a coyote to take them over the border.
“Señor Martin,” Angel said.
“Spit it out, boy.” As much as he enjoyed the young man’s presence—he had an exceptional beauty to him, both he and his brother—he had a busy day ahead of him.
Angel’s eyes flickered up at the sound of his voice, but then darted to the floor again. “A truck, this…this Land Rover?” Angel glanced up and, this time, held Zachary’s gaze. His eyes were so dark there was no telling where his pupils ended and his irises began. Paired with thick, black lashes and dark brows, the young man’s gaze could become fairly intense. Somehow, the world hadn’t yet trampled his youthful exuberance.
“You followed it?” Zachary took a bottle of aftershave from the rack beside the basin mirror.
“A week. It comes back same place, every day.”
“And that place is?”
“Dirt road by fence.” Angel’s eyes glowed. “Gringos and Mexicans. Lots of cars, black windows.”
The boys must have gotten close if he and Marco been able to note so much detail. A dangerous thing to do, especially when they’d been sent to scout out a possible route used by Javier Martin’s men. One that might lead to the massive lot somewhere in the western part of Texas where Martin was said to be operating from.
Angel and Marco had happened upon one of El Calacas Vivo’s men, celebrating in a local pub in El Paso. The more alcohol that had flowed past his lips, the looser they’d became. Soon, everyone knew he was one of Martin’s sicarios—recently promoted—and that he’d be swimming in women and cash in mere weeks.
It hadn’t been happenstance that Angel and Marco had been in that bar. They’d been hanging out in seedy pubs close to the border for the past two weeks, convinced that they’d pick up the trace of rival cartel members that sometimes used bars for their business transaction
s. There were rumors some of those bars were even money laundering outfits for ECV or Sinaloa.
The brothers were expendable—all his men were—so Zachary had given them the go ahead. Of course, there was always the chance they’d try to run. But they were broke, illegal, and their strong accents and wide-eyed stares gave them away. They’d be picked up by border patrol within the week, something he made sure the other men they spent time with would constantly remind them of.
For how long the threats would keep them close, he couldn’t tell. Perhaps they’d become loyal cartel members, rising in rank until, one day, Angel and Marco would replace Ailin and Rodrigo as his lieutenants—tasked with keeping him safe and taking care of some of his more delicate transactions.
The smell of mint and cedarwood drenched the air as he smoothed his aftershave over his cheeks.
“Have you seen Martin yet? One of his sicarios?”
Angel shook his head and dropped his gaze again. “But we return today. We will—”
“No.” Zachary stepped closer and lay a hand on Angel’s shoulder. The young man was still dusty; no doubt from whatever position he and Marco had been in in the dirt, possibly out of sight behind scrub. “You will stay here.”
“Por favor, Sen—Don Zachary.” Angel’s eyes flashed up to him. “Another day and—”
“You fought with one of my men.”
Angel tensed under his hand. The young man inflated his chest, but didn’t deny the fact.
“I cannot abide infighting. Not now, not ever.”
Angel twisted out from under his hand. “Pendejo insult me.”
Zachary couldn’t keep the faint smile from his mouth. “I don’t consider the term ‘pretty boy’ an insult.”
“Is for me.” Angel’s eyes sparked. In their depths, roiled a loathing so deep and dark that it made the hair on Zachary’s nape stand up.
“But you are a pretty boy.” He surged forward, grabbed the young man’s throat, and slammed him into the wall.
Angel’s hands came up, but then he dropped them to his side, stiff, as if he was forcing his own muscles to obey him. There was hardly any distance between them now, and that air smelled of dust and cedarwood.
