by Logan Fox
She turned. Javier’s face was inches from hers, his dark eyes filling her world. She stared at his mouth as he spoke again, but white noise drowned out what he was saying. Cora leaned forward, her eyes fluttering closed, expecting her lips to touch his, but finding air instead.
Her eyes flew open. Javier stood a foot away, face set in a deep frown. He opened his mouth to speak, but then his phone rang.
The sound propelled her back in time. Pseudo-reality snapped around her like an elastic band, shivering. She was on the back of a gelding, but bareback. Clinging to his mane as the landscape blurred around her. She gripped as hard as she could, willing her eyes to close before it fell so she wouldn’t have to feel that pain again.
“Not now!” Javier’s voice fragmented the memory into a thousand shards that spun away like she was the center of an invisible explosion.
“What?”
He turned an angry face, considering her where she lay in the bed. “Wait.” He stabbed at the screen of his phone and slid it back into his pocket.
Javier stepped forward, moving too quickly. “Don’t play games with me, Elle,” he said. “You said you hid it. I need those files!” Suddenly, Tío was no longer charismatic and irresistible, but deadly. A shadow black with plague. Cora fumbled urgently in her belt for her Taurus, but it was gone. And the top button of her jeans unbuttoned.
Who’d unbuttoned her jeans?
“Looking for this?” Finn asked. He’d materialized besides her, her Taurus on his outstretched palm. She took it, cradled it to her chest. It was cold and hard, but comforting. “Where’d you find it?” Her thumb traced the inscription on the side, but it felt different. Like distinct ridges, not the barely discernible calligraphic etches she remembered. They stood up so high she could trace their shape and read each letter.
Not ‘Creo en ti, mi corazón’ but ‘aqua’.
She blinked hard, and squeezed the Taurus. It went crump against her chest, and she dropped it in shock.
A water bottle fell into her lap and then rolled off her bed and onto the floor. Her heart raced as her mind scrambled frantically for reality.
“What’s going on?” she moaned. Her fingers gripped soft sheets.
Finn came walking to her from across the room, where he’d been whispering with Lars. The closer he got, the bigger he became. Javier, standing a few feet away with his hip against her dressing table, looked lean and tall in comparison.
“It’s okay, Cora,” Finn said. “You’re safe.” But his eyes told a very different story. They were dark with worry, his mouth an unmoving line she recognized by now. The last few moments of reality rushed in, leaving her woozy before she could grasp a single, clear thought.
“Saddlebag,” she blurted out. And then blinked back sudden tears. Her fingertips still thrummed where she’d felt the inscription on her Taurus. “It’s in my saddlebag,” she repeated again, turning to Javier.
The man’s eyes glowed with a dark light.
“Why did you put it in there?” Javier’s voice drew shivers on her skin.
“When we were galloping,” she said, her words blurring together as her mouth began another furious stutter. “Thought it would fall. Break.”
Javier turned without another word and strode for her bedroom door. He left streaks of black in the air like demon dust.
“Tell me what you gave her,” Finn growled after him, getting to his feet. He still held Cora’s hand, but he wasn’t squeezing it anymore.
Javier laughed, paused at the door, and said, “For every downer, there’s an upper.”
Several men filed out behind him when he clicked his fingers and left the room. There was silence—or there would have been if the air hadn’t churned like an ocean.
Ouch. Her knee thumped pain in memory, and she soothed it with a quick brush of her fingers over the bandage. Bandages that felt rough and cool compared with her skin.
How come she’d never noticed how soft her skin felt? How smooth her waist? She undid her bottom button of her shirt and felt at a rib bone. It moved when she pressed on it.
Hands caught her wrists. There was anger in Finn’s eyes when she looked up.
“What did I do?” she said, pouting.
“Nothing,” he murmured. “Stay. Rest. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
But when that bedroom door closed behind him, it slammed with the same leaden thump as a coffin lid.
She hadn’t had a chance to tell him she’d been lying. Her fingers brushed the low bulge in her jean pocket. She put a trembling hand inside and drew out the necklace. Santa Muerte grinned up at her with that perpetual, toothy smile. Her robes shifted as if a breeze blew on those molded folds.
“What did I do?” Cora murmured.
The pain was worse this morning. It had woken Angel from a troubled sleep, one where he’d kept jerking awake thinking he’d heard Marco’s terrified yell.
He’d heard that sound too often on their trek from Michoacán to the border. He knew now that he should never have trusted the coyote. But, at the time, he couldn’t have gone another day selling his body to survive.
If he could go back, he’d have put up with that torture for the rest of his life. At least, then, Marco would never have had to experience the things he did.
Marco’s innocence had been stolen, and it was entirely his fault. A debt he’d never be able to repay, but would keep trying to the rest of his life.
Footsteps. More than yesterday. Three, perhaps four men.
Angel willed himself into a sit. His entirely body was stiff and aching, like he’d aged a hundred years overnight.
The gate leading to the cells swung open. A light appeared, too yellow against the gray-green bricks. The prisoner diagonally opposite him shrank away from that light as if it burned him.
Angel slunk forward, welcoming it.
The jailers may have been used to this darkness, but light meant they’d brought someone who wasn’t.
Javier Martin.
The man was too resplendent, silhouetted against the grimy backdrop of the cells opposite Angel’s. He wore pressed, light blue jeans, a cowboy hat, and a white linen shirt so bright it stung Angel’s eyes.
He didn’t recognize the jailers; this was the first time he’d seen their faces after being dragged down into his cell yesterday.
The man in the crisp clothes didn’t say anything for a long time. He studied Angel through the grates with a slight sneer on his face, as if he would want a wash after having to come down to the cells.
“Don Javier?” Angel asked, when he couldn’t take the stifling silence anymore.
“Have you met with Zachary West in person?”
If there was any doubt in Angel’s mind that this was in fact El Guapo, his voice eradicated it. Those words held such an air of authority that Angel wanted to bow his head and beg forgiveness for anything he’d ever done to wrong this man.
What was he supposed to say?
“Si,” Angel said in a shaky voice.
Javier shifted his weight. “Do you know where he lives? Where he operates from?”
“Si.”
“Can you show my men?”
Angel shifted uneasily. “Si, but Zachary has a lot of—”
“Then you will show me.” Javier turned to the jailers. “Tomas, search the stables and bring me Cora’s bags. Miguel, keep watch. In an hour you bring this…” Javier looked down at Angel like a pile of shit he’d almost stepped in. “Bring him to me.”
45
No place for a lady
Finn had been gone for what felt like hours when Cora’s legs began twitching and aching like she’d been running the whole day. She swung her legs out of bed and hobbled to a stand, testing if she could put weight on her injured leg. There was still no pain, just a dull ache every now and then. Probably meant it was good enough for her to walk around a little, if only to get rid of the irritating tension in her muscles.
She got up, splashed water on her face, and lost herself
looking in the mirror and wondering why she looked so pale and strange. Then she went looking for gum, or Finn; whichever came first.
The villa looked enormous, like she’d been shrunk. She tottered down the hallway, heading for the stairs. Everything pitched and wheeled around her because she had to lurch from side to side to keep her leg from bending too much.
Luckily, the staircase leading down had a railing. She gripped it desperately and held on for dear life as she worked her way downstairs.
She concentrated so much on moving downward that when the stairs ended and she looked up, she didn’t see sky. Her brain—reminiscent right then of a plate of spaghetti—refused to try and work out why. Instead of the sprawling, manicured gardens of the villa, she faced another hallway, gloomy and cold. The air smelled stale down here too. She looked up the staircase. It turned in a gentle spiral so all she could see was the smooth underside of the stairs she’d just descended.
Cora faced forward again. Tottered hesitantly for a few steps and then swooned against the wall.
God, she was thirsty. It felt like a dentist was working on her mouth and had one of those air-sucking things between her gums. She shivered at the thought and then soldiered on, a hand against the wall for balance.
A shape came out of the darkness. A familiar face, even wreathed in shadows as it was.
“Miguel,” she tried to say, but it came out as “Mi-gu.”
“¿Señorita?” Miguel suddenly looked nervous “What are you doing here?”
“Water.” That, at least, came out all right.
Miguel’s chin moved back, and he nodded hurriedly. He scanned her, seeming alarmed at the state of her. “Si.” He waved a hand, saw she was struggling to walk, and came to her side so she could prop herself against him.
“You fall hard, yes?” Miguel said. “What are you doing down here?”
“Chicle. Por favor.” She mimed putting gum into her mouth, which made her teeth chatter against each other.
But he didn’t seem to understand her. Miguel let out an uneasy laugh, and ushered her forward. “We get water,” he said, as if that would solve everything.
Perhaps it would. Her mouth was a goddamn desert.
The water was so good, Cora couldn’t stop until the glass was empty. She was sitting at a small metal table pushed up against a wall. The chair under her was metal too, rickety, and slightly concave. But not by design—it was as if it had been sat on by someone over its weight limit. Or had been bashed over someone’s head like at one of those wrestling matches. She laughed at this, and lost herself in one of those pseudo-dreams again. Finn, beating Javier over the head with a metal chair. But it didn’t seem to be damaging anything except the chair.
“Señorita?”
Cora swarmed back to reality, and gave Miguel a wide smile. He gave her one it return and helped her set the glass back on the table. He dry-washed his hands, eyebrows lifting in silent question.
“Muchos gracias,” she said, dragging the back of her hand over her mouth. The water seemed to have brought some kind of clarity to her mind. She glanced around, noticing for the first time the complete lack of natural light down here. There were a few bare bulbs strung down the center of an endless hallway that eventually ended in a brick wall, but that was it.
“Where are we?” she asked quietly.
Miguel clapped his hands to his chest. “The cells.”
“The…” she trailed off. Cells? As in…prison cells? She pushed herself up, hopping awkwardly until she found her balance. “I should go.”
“Si, si.” Miguel waved her back the way she came.
An alien noise echoed down the hallway. It made every hair on her body stand up, and forced a rough shiver through her. Miguel’s smile became stiff. “You go now,” he said, shooing her away.
“What was that?” she asked, not in the least surprised that her voice shook as much as her hands did.
It had sounded like an animal in pain. Or a demon.
“No, no. You go now.” Miguel tried shooing her again, but she slapped her hand away. That did surprise her, especially when she started toward the noise instead of away from it like someone with a full set of brains in their head.
Miguel was beside her in an instant. “Please, señorita. We must go back.”
Why did everyone here insist on speaking English. Didn’t Miguel know she could speak Spanish? She had a feeling Javier insisted on it. He seemed to pride himself more on how well he fit into America than his ancestry.
The idle thought swam around her mind for the long seconds it took her to reach the end of the hall. It didn’t end in a blank wall like she’d thought; to the right was a metal grate with even more gloom beyond.
Gloom, and the suggestion of more grates.
Like a block of prison cells.
“Open this,” she said, wrapping her hand around one of the grates.
“Señorita, please, I cannot—”
“Now.” Her voice was leaden how she tried to stop it from shaking. This time, it wasn’t fear though. She’d known Javier wasn’t the gentleman he made himself out to be. There was a little dark in everyone. This was his.
“They’re all empty?” Cora asked, peeking her head to each cell door so she could squint into the darkness ahead.
“Not all,” Miguel said unhappily. “But please, señorita, this is no place for a lady.”
“Of course not,” she said, giving him a sour look. “And neither is this a place for a man. Or any human.” Her bare feet stood in a puddle, and her face contorted in disgust. From the smell down here, she was pretty sure it wasn’t just some rain water that had found its way down here.
She recoiled when a man flung himself at the next cell she poked her head toward. Her leg ached in complaint as her back slammed into the brick wall opposite the cell. She cut off her cry with a hand, clawing air into her lungs with a desperate breath.
Arms reached for her, streaked with dirt. “Usted viene aquí, coño.”
Miguel surged forward and cracked a baton over the man’s arm. He fell away from the bars with a scream that echoed through the hallway.
The same scream that had led her here. Miguel stuck his arm through the grate and slashed out with the baton again, hard enough that she could hear it connecting with the prisoner’s flesh. The man screamed, cursed, and Miguel hit him again.
On the third blow, the man fell silent. Dead, or unconscious.
Cora realized she’d crowded against the wall, but it was near impossible to peel herself away. Miguel was breathing hard and, when he turned to face her, the vicious snarl that had been on his mouth was quickly replaced with that same uneasy smile as before.
“Señorita,” he murmured, as though chastising her for still being down here to witness what he’d had to do. “Please. We go upstairs now.”
She sidled away from him, her brain too clouded to understand she was going the wrong way. “What did he do?” she asked, having to swallow before she could produce the words. “What did he do, Miguel?”
“This is no place for a lady,” Miguel said again, as if that was his only defense for the atrocities that took place down here.
“Tell me!”
“He…” Miguel put his baton away and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “He ratero. Informant.”
“So you lock him up here? Why?” Abruptly, the bricks behind her vanished. She fell an inch back.
Against another grate.
“¡Señorita!” Miguel darted forward, but he was too slow.
A hand grabbed Cora’s throat as an arm pinned her waist. She choked, grappled, and then tried to kick through the grate. Her heel slammed into metal, and she gurgled in pain—all that was possible with those determined fingers cutting off her airflow.
A voice spoke slowly in Spanish. “Open, or I strangle her.” A second later, a strip of cloth replaced that hand. It whipped over her throat so hard it chafed her skin.
She reached desperately behind her, trying to f
ind purchase on her attacker’s body, but he must have been curving away because there was nothing to grab onto.
Perhaps he was a spirit. Perhaps his demonic cry had been the one that lured her here.
Miguel didn’t bother with his baton this time. There was a pistol in his hands. Hands that didn’t shake or even hesitate as he aimed into the darkness behind her.
“You’ll hit her before you hit me,” the voice said, still speaking in Spanish. “Open the cell.”
Miguel must have realized it was a fight he couldn’t win, not without possibly injuring Cora and bringing down the wrath of El Guapo and perhaps the entire El Calacas Vivo cartel. So he fished around his waist for a bunch of keys that jangled too cheerily down here in the stinking dark. They rattled against the lock as Miguel opened the cell, and then he stepped back, the pistol still aimed inside the cell. Cora tried peeling that arm from around her waist. Sank her nails into the man’s flesh. Tore at him—but if he felt it, he didn’t seem to care. But there was a bandage on his hand, and blood had seeped through whatever wound it hid and had saturated the surface. She ground the tip of her thumb into that wound. Behind her, the man yelled in pain. The grip around her waist loosened enough that it took only one violent kick to push herself away.
But then that twisted cloth around her neck yanked her back again. She gasped, flailing as tiny, bright lights studded her vision. The gloomy shadows swarmed toward her, black as a moonless night. She scrabbled furiously as the man twisted his hand, and the cloth cut even deeper into her throat.
Bandage. Young Mexican. Angel? Was this the same sad, defeated man she’d shared the backseat with earlier today? She tried saying his name, but there wasn’t enough breath in her lungs.
“Throw away your gun, or this girl dies.” Angel twisted harder still, and Cora’s hands no longer had the strength to fight him.
Her lungs burned for air. She could feel her face heating up with trapped blood, and then growing cold. Her eyes felt too big for her face, and she couldn’t have closed them if she tried. Icy tingles spread from her fingers and toes, traveling to the center of her being as the last flicker of life slowly leeched from her body.
