by Logan Fox
Lars waited impatiently, scanning the small rock passage they were in for the best route out. When Milo finally alighted beside him with a grunt, he cocked his head to the left.
They both cringed when someone called out in Arabic loud enough for it to echo down to them.
Lars led them through the rock passage. It took a sharp bend and then ended abruptly where a boulder had fallen down to block the path.
“Shit,” he whispered with feeling, and then started climbing up the side of the passage, trying to see if he could go over the boulder.
Behind him, Milo murmured something unhappily under his breath and then followed.
It took thirty minutes of intensely quiet climbing and creeping before Lars was convinced they’d lost their tail. They’d been heading at a gentle decline for the last ten minutes or so, with no sounds of pursuit.
Lars paused to wipe sweat from his forehead, and gave Milo a good hard glare when the man caught up to him.
“Milo, right?” he asked, trying to keep the snap from his voice and failing miserably.
Milo nodded.
“What, you fucking mute all of a sudden?”
This received a glare.
“What the hell was that up there? I was this close to getting him!” Lars held his fingers a cunt hair apart, but Milo wasn’t even looking at him. Those blue eyes scanned the towering rocks around them, the sky, anything but Lars.
“Hey, buddy, you deaf as well?”
“You hear that?”
Jesus, if he had a voice like that, he’d be saying shit all the time just to hear how it sounded. Milo’s words came out like weighted silk. Had he been a singer or something before this? He sounded like he could do one of those operas where you had no fucking clue what the guys were singing about, but you knew some hectic emotional shit was going down.
And now that Milo had drawn his attention to it, he could hear what sounded like the wail of a dying beast.
Or wind howling through a cave mouth.
“Cave,” Lars said simply, and then headed for it.
Milo followed; the sounds of his boots thumping on the rocks preceding him. It took them a few minutes and another short rock climb to reach it. Milo fell behind, but Lars was too curious to find out if he’d been right to wait for him. He went on ahead, loving the feel of his muscles burning as he hauled himself up and over the last ledge.
The cave was large, dark, empty. Lars stood at the mouth, squinting to try and make out anything from inside.
“Too obvious,” he said, turning back to Milo.
The man was nowhere in sight.
Shit, had he lost him?
“Milo?” Lars whispered, and then rolled his eyes when he realized how futile the gesture was. The cave was on an outcrop of rock—the wind was so fierce up here and it would drown out anything he had to say below a shout.
He waited for a few seconds, and then let out a huff.
The idiot probably hadn’t been able to scale that last climb. Maybe he’d gotten wedged in somewhere.
He knew he shouldn’t be smiling, but he’d been alone out here for a long fucking time. It was nice to have something to smile at, even if it was someone else’s misfortune.
He climbed down again, and retraced his steps.
Milo was right where he’d thought he’d be; stuck in front of that last rock climb.
“Jesus, you take any longer and I’ll be fifty before we get out of here,” Lars muttered. “What’s the problem?”
Milo gave him a long-suffering stare, and then lifted a bleeding hand. “You make it look easy.”
Lars laughed, and hurriedly cut it off, throwing a guilty look around. But whoever’d been chasing them had obviously given up somewhere along the way.
He lay on his belly and held out an arm. “Come on. You get up to that little ledge there, and I’ll haul you up.”
Milo looked incredulous at this statement. Lars was having second thoughts himself; Milo wasn’t just large, he looked heavy. Muscles stretched against his fatigues and made the hems of his standard issue t-shirt look like it was about to split.
“Okay, I’ll help you up,” Lars rephrased, giving Milo a rueful smile. “Come on.”
Milo glanced around and tried scaling the rock wall again. Lars could clearly see his mistakes—he didn’t know how to spot natural defects in the rock and kept going for only the most obvious rocks butting out. And those were too far away from each other, leaving him spreadeagled and stretching for each grip.
“You’re doing it wrong, genius. See that teeny little crack there? Get your fingers in there.”
Milo glared at him, and then hesitated before grasping for the slit in the rock. Surprisingly, he got it in his first try and held on like a barnacle.
“Good. Now a foot to the left and a little up…see that little shelf? Try to grab it—” Lars cut off. “Good. Now you’re getting it.”
Milo’s only response was a grunt. He reached for another small cleft in the rock, and Lars gave a grudging pout. He was a fast learner, this one.
He stretched out his arm for Milo when the man came within reach.
Which was right about the same time that the sound of pounding feet echoed hollowly through the rock passage behind Milo.
The man’s eyes went wide, and flickered up to Lars. They stared at each other for what felt like minutes, but couldn’t have been longer than a split second.
In that time, Lars could feel the man’s panic. Stuck halfway up a rock wall, he could fall down and possibly injure himself on the way. Or, he could try to make it up the rest of the way.
Either way, those approaching feet were many and hurried—they would probably reach him before he could hide.
Lars flicked his fingers. There was less than a foot of air between him and Milo.
“Come on,” he whispered furiously. “Jump.”
“Jump?” Milo looked down, behind him, and then back up at Lars. “I’ll pull you down.”
“Nuh-uh,” Lars said, without knowing if this was as much a fact as he was stating. “Come on, buddy. What are you, one sixty? One eighty? I can handle it.”
“Two ten,” Milo muttered. And then jumped, as if he didn’t want to give Lars a second to reconsider.
Lars wrapped his fingers around Milo’s wrist and the man clenched his wrist with a steel grip that made the muscles beneath ache.
Again, those blue eyes pierced through him. Lars kicked back, gritting his teeth as he tried desperately to haul Milo closer to the top of the ridge where he could get a hand hold.
But his left knee encountered a patch of dry sand, and whatever grip he’d had, he lost.
They both slid two feet over the side of the ridge, Lars’s stomach scraping hard against a serrated strip of rock. It stung, and he knew it would be bleeding. He managed to grab the ridge with his free hand, clinging on for dear life.
When he found Milo’s eyes again, a quiet resolve filled those blue irises.
“Run,” Milo said.
Then he let go.
Lars tried to hold onto him, but both their arms were slick with sweat, and he just didn’t have the grip to keep a two-hundred-fucking-sixty pound man with one hand. Not unless he grabbed him with both, and that would mean losing the only grip he still had.
Milo scrabbled for purchase against the rock wall, but found none. He landed with a twisted, muffled cry on the ground below.
Surprisingly, despite the approaching footsteps, Lars heard one of his bones breaking.
He flinched, and darted back as a troop of Syrians rounded the corner. Flattening himself against the rock and doing his best not to breathe, he squeezed his lips together as he heard Milo bellow in pain.
They were dragging him away through the dust.
He shouldn’t have let them, but he did. Because he’d counted a rough ten men before he’d kicked back to hide. All armed. All looking pissed off as hell.
It would have been suicide for him to show his face. He’d left all h
is weapons back on that rise; most Milo had chucked unceremoniously into his duffel bag not an hour ago.
So he cowered there in the dirt, smelling his own blood and sweat as Milo’s wide eyes mocked him. And, minutes later, when the sound of his thumping heart had died down, he could hear the wind again.
This time, it sung to him. And it sounded like Milo’s deep, melodious voice saying, “Run.”
Over and over again.
Run…run like the coward you are.
14
Angel's place
It was a tradition at Zachary’s ranch that everyone present at dinner time would share a meal in the dining room. Sometimes, there wasn’t enough space at the polished oak dining table. But even then, members of the Plata o Plomo cartel would pull up chairs from other areas of the house and sit against the walls, plates on their laps, eating whatever Nikita had made for dinner. And the cook always made sure to cook more than enough food to feed everyone. Tonight, the dining table groaned under the weight of a thick and fragrant Asada de Bodas - a red chile pork stew.
Zachary sat in his usual seat at the head of the table, with Lady to the one side and Blue to the other. They’d receive the occasional scrap of pork from his plate, but only once he’d sucked off the spicy sauce.
Seated on either side were Ailin and Rodrigo. Further down the table, the hierarchy of his sicarios became apparent. Except for the seat opposite him.
Angel sat slumped in his chair, eyes downcast. He wore fresh clothes, but there were smudges under his eyes. As Nikita came around the table ladling stew into everyone’s bowls from a massive pot one of her underlings carried for her, Angel didn’t look up.
Tonight, there were just enough men to fill the table. And all but Ailin and Rodrigo had given Angel a curious look when they’d filed into the dining room a few minutes earlier.
Zachary took a sip of his ‘94 pinot noir. Ailin did all the wine pairing when he was at the ranch; he had experience as a server in an upper-class American restaurant where he’d been expected to know the best vintage to pair with each entree. It was only when his brother was gunned down in a cartel-related shooting that he’d joined Plata o Plomo seeking revenge.
Zachary had long since granted him that revenge. But Ailin had stayed, seemingly satisfied with the perks of his new position.
“Buen provecho,” Zachary said, when Nikita had served everyone.
Voices murmured, “Gracias,” and “Thank you.”
Angel didn’t move. From what he’d been told, Angel hadn’t eaten a thing since Ailin had brought him back from the barn.
Zachary drew deep on the cumin and cinnamon scented fog steaming up from his plate. He took a tortilla from the pile closest to him—accompaniments to tonight’s dish were scattered all along the center of the long dining table—and heaped some of the thick stew in the middle.
Around him, his sicarios discussed anything that wasn’t business—the weather, how the horses were favoring those that gambled, gossip from their hometowns.
Rodrigo slapped stew into a tortilla, heaped a few pinto beans on top, and rolled it into a messy burrito. Half slid out before he could bring it to his mouth.
“Are you in a hurry, Rodrigo?” Zachary asked coolly, taking another sip of his wine. Rosa had done an outstanding job with tonight’s meal. The chile stung his tongue just the right amount, complimenting the piquant flavors infused into the cubes of succulent pork.
Rodrigo froze, and slowly put his tortilla down. It fell apart, and he watched it sadly for a few seconds before lifting his eyes to Zachary. “Lo siento.” The man took a long swallow of his wine, his eyes flashing down the table and settling on Angel. They went back to his plate, and he began eating again, slower this time.
The man was bursting to be gone from the table and return to tracking down Eleodora Swan. He’d reported back to Zachary not an hour ago that one of his falcons had picked up a new lead in New Mexico. A stolen vehicle reported to the police, and its owner mentioning that the lowjack installed in the car put the Jeep somewhere in the mountains above Silver City. Someone matching Cora’s description had been seen in the area a few minutes before the theft. It seemed she was accompanied by someone—not her bodyguard, obviously, but perhaps the replacement Rivera had arranged last minute.
Perhaps Antonio Rivera wasn’t as naive as he’d first suspected. Something had to have made the man decide that Bailey, Cora’s former bodyguard, wasn’t trustworthy enough to escort her from their safe house in Phoenix. That had been the reason Rodrigo and Ailin were scrambling falcons from around the country to try to locate her. They’d even greased a few hands at Arizona’s local law enforcement office to have a news station broadcast a report on Eleodora’s disappearance. One tip had already put them within arm’s distance of the girl back in Payson…before she’d miraculously escaped. Hopefully there would be more.
Zachary touched a napkin to his mouth, and sat back in his chair. “Go,” he said, waving at Rodrigo. “I don’t want to see you again until you’ve found her.”
Rodrigo ducked his head, already scraping back his chair. He turned to the other sicarios seated around the table, giving them a flustered, “Gracias,” before hurrying out the room.
From the corner of his eyes, Zachary could see Ailin sitting up straight. He’d been eating at a measured pace, but with the determined bites of a man intent on getting his food down as quickly—and furtively—as possible. He’d almost consumed an entire burrito.
Zachary sighed. “Go with him.”
Ailin didn’t even bother to excuse himself. Zachary watched the man’s broad back as he hurried from the room, and gave his head a rueful shake. They were incorrigible, those two. Patient, trusting, utterly dependable. And as loyal as the two pit bulls sitting like Sphinxes to either side of him.
“Angel,” Zachary called out, with a wave toward the other side of the table. “Come sit here.”
Conversation lulled for a few seconds. The men around the table all looked across at Angel, who lifted his head as if it was too heavy for his neck to support. “Senor?” The young man’s voice was leaden.
Zachary waved a hand to Ailin’s empty seat. “Come.”
Two dozen eyes watched Angel as he got to his feet and moved to the head of the table to take Ailin’s seat.
Conversation picked up, but it was sporadic and low, as if every ear strained to hear Zachary while trying to keep up the appearance of conversation.
“You must eat something,” Zachary said, pushing away Ailin’s plate and putting down an unused side plate from the stack a foot away. He made up a burrito for Angel, perfectly folded, and nudged the plate closer to him.
“I feel sick,” Angel murmured. And indeed, the boy turned a shade paler at the sight of the food.
“Is your body sick, or your mind?” Zachary asked quietly. “I have medicine for your body. And your mind will heal itself in time.”
Angel turned his head. Where his coffee-colored skin had been ashen, it now burned with spots of color. “It sickens me, what I have done.” The boy’s English deteriorated the more animated his voice became. “That man—how he deserved it? Even if he is capo. I am no one to him. He is no one to me. Why—”
Silence fell over the table like a shroud. Angel cut off, glancing at the line of men down either side of the table. Spots of anger became a blush, as if he’d just become aware of his audience.
“Por favor, Don Zachary,” came his unsteady voice. “I—”
“It is good to be angry.” Zachary scooped some pinto beans onto a fork and chewed them for a few seconds before swallowing them down with wine. “Anger is a tool you can use. Fuel for a fire that can burn forever. It is when that fuel runs out that you must start to worry about your future.”
Angel’s brows drew together, his lips parting. He gave his head a shake and shoved away the plate of food as if the smell of it was making him nauseous. “Where is my brother?”
“He is safe.”
“Where?�
��
A garrote could have sliced the thickening silence like a knife through gelatin.
“I have sent him to scout the road you assume leads to Javier Martin’s compound,” Zachary said. A few of the sicario’s eyes widened, confusion flashing over more than a handful of faces.
He could understand why; he’d never explained himself to anyone before. His word was law—and questioning it was a capital offense. He liked to decorate bridges with the headless bodies of those that dared to defy him.
Angel sat up straight, clenching his fists on the table. “Alone?” he said, voice low and thick with anger.
The atmosphere in the room became tainted with wary anticipation, as if the men could sense violence approaching like a thunderstorm.
“Do you think your brother is incapable of doing anything without you by his side?” Zachary asked calmly, taking a long, slow swallow of his wine as he studied the young man over the rim of the wine glass.
“No, I—” Angel cut off, his mouth thinning in a furious line. “I want to be with him, not here. Not doing—”
He ended the sentence with a moan that issued from somewhere in the back of his throat. Moisture flooded his eyes, the boy blinking rapidly. “Por favor, Don—”
“Your place is with me. Here.” He lifted his knife, toying with it as Angel watched him barely suppressed fury. “Unless you prefer going back over the border.”
For a moment, it looked as if the young man was considering the option. It didn’t hold enough weight to sway him though—his shoulders sagged and he looked away, fixing on Lady. The dog’s tail swished softly against the floor; the only sound in the room.
Zachary looked up at the men. “Is there something wrong with your food?” he asked, voice dripping acid.
The men bent their heads and began eating, but conversation didn’t resume. Zachary dipped his voice low, and leaned in to Angel. “There is so much potential in you, Angel. All that pain…if I can teach you to channel it in aid of the cartel, your success will be limitless.”
Angel quivered, and hurriedly looked away. Even his fists began to shake, as if it took everything he had not launch himself across the triangle of table separating him from Zachary.
