by Lisa Cardiff
“Think about it, Hattie. You’re not meant for that kind of life. You need to find someone who’s willing to choose you over everything.”
Spots dotted my vision and anger gnawed at my heart. I wouldn’t leave him, not even if it meant a lifetime as part of the Vargas Cartel. I wasn’t stupid. I understood what kind of things he’d have to do if he succeeded. He’d kill and torture people, but none of that would stop me from loving him. When I looked at Ryker, I’d always see who he was deep down in his heart.
“Ryker is that person,” I hissed. “Stop this.” I sliced my hand through the air. “Whatever it is. I know what I’m doing. I understand the risks. I don’t expect everything to be perfect, but I do expect you to keep your opinion to yourself unless I ask you for it.”
He raked his hands through his hair. Disapproval etched deep grooves into his forehead. “You’re right. I should keep my opinions to myself. I shouldn’t ask all the questions that come to mind.” He smiled, but he looked pained. “But if you need help getting away or you realize you’re in over your head, I’ll help you. All you have to do is call. You know that, right?”
I nodded, my insides coiling from the sincerity in his eyes. “Thanks, Noah. I appreciate the offer. I really do, but I knew when I chose Ryker that everything wouldn’t be sunshine and rainbows. I’m not going to back out now.” He opened his mouth to respond, and I shook my head. “I don’t want to back out.”
He sighed and walked toward the door. “All right, Hattie. I won’t say anything else. Just know the option is always there whether it’s two months or two years from now.”
My heart constricted at his protective words. “Why do you want to help me?”
He lifted one shoulder, a faint smile on his lips. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”
“Do you want to elaborate?”
“Maybe some other time.”
I nodded. “How long are you sticking around here?”
“Actually, I’m leaving this afternoon. I have a new assignment overseas.”
His gaze lingered on me for a moment and then he closed the door softly. I sat on the edge of the bed and bowed my head. I hoped Ryker made good on his promises because I had successfully alienated everyone who had ever cared about me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ryker
Rever finished tying Emanuel’s legs and arms to the chair and then he rolled his sleeves to his elbows.
“Point the camera over here,” Rever said as he pulled the pillowcase off Emanuel’s head. “And make sure you get his entire body on the screen.”
After we arrived at the compound yesterday, we did a half-assed job at patching up Emanuel’s wounds, and left him shackled to the wall in the same shack where I’d housed Hattie months ago. Today, we needed to do everything possible to get Emanuel to confess on tape. We wouldn’t kill him, though. We’d save that decision for Ignacio.
I angled the tripod to capture Emanuel’s entire body on the video and peeked through the lens. “I think I’ve got it.”
“Good.” Rever twirled his knife through his fingers like a baton. “I think I’ll spare you the explanation of what’s going to happen now,” Rever said as he circled Emanuel’s chair. “We all have intimate knowledge of how these types of interrogations work.”
Emanuel spit on the floor in front of him, narrowly missing Rever’s shoes. “Chinga tu madre.”
Rever chuckled. “You’re lucky I’m not very fond of my mother either or I might be tempted to cut off your cock for talking about her like that.”
Emanuel’s eyes narrowed into slits. “You can do whatever you want. I won’t tell you anything.”
“How do you think we should start?” Rever ran the knife along the tips of his fingers, testing the sharpness of the blade. “I’ve always been a fan of starting small.” He shrugged. “You know…fingers, toes, ears. I don’t want him to lose consciousness too soon.”
I pointed to the small water buckets lining the wall. “I’ve always wanted to see waterboarding in action. I’d like to know what all the fuss is about.”
Rever sucked his lips into his mouth as he angled his head to the side. “Good idea. I think you’re right. It’s an efficient method of breaking someone without causing a mortal injury. Most of the time, anyway.”
I lifted the bucket of water. “Do you want to tip the chair back or pour the water?”
“I’ll hold the chair,” Rever said. He tipped chair backward, lifting the front legs off the ground so that Emanuel’s lungs were higher than his mouth to avoid total suffocation.
I pulled a thin white rag from my back pocket and draped it over his eyes. I lifted the bucket and poured water on the rag. With one hand, Rever slowly lowered the saturated rag until it covered Emanuel’s mouth and his upturned nose. He put his hand over the wet rag, suffocating him for thirty seconds to increase the carbon dioxide level in Emanuel’s bloodstream. When Rever lifted his hand, I dumped water over the rag for sixty seconds. Then, Rever ripped the rag off his face. Emanuel gagged, sucking in three giant mouthfuls of air. He slapped the rag over his face and started the process again. We repeated the entire thing a half dozen times until Emanuel’s lips were blue, and his entire body trembled.
Rever slammed all four legs of Emanuel’s chair on the ground. “Are you working with Juan Alvarez?”
“Fuck you,” Emanuel said, his voice hoarse.
Rever crouched on the floor and plunged his knife under Emanuel big toenail. He twisted the knife in a seesawing motion until the toenail peeled off Emanuel’s foot.
A scream echoed through the room, and Emanuel jerked against his restraints. Blood pooled on the cement floor beneath his foot.
“Do you want to answer me now?” Rever barked.
Emanuel glared, his entire body vibrating with anger and hatred. He clenched his jaw, his eyes blinking rapidly. “Go to hell! You can do this for days, and I won’t tell you a damn thing.”
“My pleasure. I was just getting started,” Rever said, thrusting his knife under the next toenail. Bile rolled in my stomach as another bloody nail skittered across the floor, brushing the tip of my shoe. Emanuel sagged in his chair.
It didn’t look like Rever minded the violence. In fact, he seemed to be in his element. Inhaling through my mouth, I suppressed the urge to vomit on the floor. Emanuel had to believe Rever and I were united in everything in order for this to work. Likewise, I’d be dumb to expose any weaknesses to Rever. We were brothers, but loyalty only stretched so far in our world. Loyalties shifted like the wind. Money and power spoke louder than blood ties.
“Do you have anything to tell me now?” Rever yelled.
“I paid the Alvarez whore to ride your dick. Did she tell you that? She fucks any guy who shows interest, but I had to pay her to fuck you,” Emanuel sneered. “How does that make you feel?”
Rever lurched forward, slamming his fist into Emanuel’s jaw. His head pitched backward, and blood mixed with spittle showered the front of Rever’s shirt.
“You’re pathetic,” Emanuel growled. Blood dripped down his chin from the corner of his mouth. “No wonder Ignacio begged Ryker to help him. You’re so easy to manipulate.”
Rever jabbed the tip of his knife into Emanuel’s neck. “I should kill you right now.”
Emanuel lifted his chin, his dark eyes sizzling with undisguised anger. “Do it. I dare you.”
I clamped my hand around Rever’s wrist. His muscles coiled under my fingers and his eyes glittered. The coppery scent of blood settled in the air like a heavy mist, clogging my throat and clinging to my skin.
“Don’t let him get to you,” I hissed. “He’s trying to rattle you. He wants you to kill him quickly because he knows it’s better than the alternative.”
Rever closed his eyes and inhaled, his nostrils flaring. His right eyelid twitched and the muscles in his forearms corded. The seconds ticked like hours. Then, he nodded and yanked his wrist from my hold.
“What do you think,
Ryker? Another toenail or should I start cutting off fingers?” He waved his knife back and forth between Emanuel’s hands and feet like a music conductor.
I shifted my weight as I pretended to consider the question. “Finish the toenails on that foot, then move to his hand on the opposite of his body,” I said.
Rever laughed. “I like how you think, Ryker.”
I’d roughed people up in the past, but I’d never crossed the line into the world of torture. I should’ve been revolted and horrified, but the longer I watched Rever, the more immune I became to Emanuel’s pain. With every toenail that flicked across the room, the pain lining Emanuel’s face bothered me less and less. Black and white no longer existed. Everything was colored in shades of gray.
Maybe I’d regret this later, but for now, I felt vindicated and refreshed. Emanuel had manipulated Ignacio, Rever, Juan Alvarez, and me to some extent. This was the price of his arrogance. My stomach clenched at the thought. How much longer until I embraced Ignacio’s philosophy of killing and torturing traitors to the fullest extent? How much longer until I was a mirror image of my father?
“Okay. Okay. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” Emanuel yelled, interrupting my train of thought. His entire body shivered and red lines mapped the whites of his eyes. “Just stop. I can’t take any more.”
Rever had removed five toenails and one fingernail. Blood seeped out of Emanuel’s foot in a slow trickle. Cuts and bruises covered his face. He’d lost consciousness once, but I had dumped a bucket of ice water on his head and Rever kept going.
“Start talking,” I said as I paced back on forth, my hands shoved deep into my pockets.
“Can you take off the handcuffs?”
“No,” I said.
Emanuel closed his eyes and for a minute I thought I’d need to pour ice water on him again. “It started two years ago. I had a gambling debt, and I needed extra money.”
“Why didn’t you ask Ignacio for the money?”
“I did. I didn’t tell him why I wanted it. I said I wanted to invest in a condominium project south of Playa del Carmen. Ignacio refused to advance me the money. Juan Alvarez was happy to. I tried to pay him back, but he didn’t want money. He wanted information.”
“What kind of information?” Rever asked, scratching a few specks of dry blood off his neck.
Emanuel’s gaze drifted to the ceiling, and he cleared his throat. “Different stuff. Some of it was inconsequential. Some of it wasn’t.”
I tunneled my hands into my hair. “We need to know the details. Dates. Times. The information exchanged.”
Emanuel dropped his chin to his chest. “I don’t remember everything.”
Rever slapped him across his cheek. “Stop procrastinating. Tell us what you remember.”
“It started small. He wanted names of government officials who were open to bribes. Next, he wanted names of people within the Vargas Cartel who had issues with Ignacio.”
“Wait.” I sliced my hand through the air. “You were working with Dario, weren’t you?” I asked, referring to the man I killed when Hattie escaped from the Vargas Compound. Dario and three other men had surrounded us in the jungle. We killed them all and Ignacio killed Dario’s son as payback. Then, the war between the Alvarez and Vargas Cartels exploded, making news throughout Mexico and the US.
Emanuel licked his lower lip. “I facilitated the introduction. I wasn’t working with him.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “What else?”
He shrugged. “I persuaded Juan Alvarez to use Anna to manipulate Rever.”
“How the fuck would that help you?” Rever yelled.
“She got you out of the picture.”
“So?” Rever spat.
“When Ignacio’s successor abandoned him, it made him look incompetent. People were nervous about the future, which made it easy to find someone to kill Ignacio, but he survived.”
“You were behind Ignacio’s assassination attempt,” I confirmed.
“Yes, but the whole thing backfired. Juan blackmailed me for the name of Hattie’s hotel. I thought Ryker would rescue Hattie and flee the country, but Ignacio used the situation to solidify his hold on Ryker and find a new successor.”
“So you were working for Juan Alvarez all along?” Rever asked.
“No,” Emanuel scoffed, shaking his head. “I was working for myself. I wanted to weaken both cartels so I could unite everyone under me.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I paid my dues, but no matter how hard I worked Ignacio refused to change his mind. He didn’t think I was worthy of taking the reins.”
“You’re not. You’re a piece of shit,” Rever roared as his fist smashed into Emanuel’s face. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, and his head lolled to the side like a rag doll.
“What the hell?” I said, eyeing Rever.
“I couldn’t stand listening to him for one more second.”
“Didn’t you want to know anything else?”
“No.” He dipped his bloodied hands into a bucket of water. “We have everything we need. Get the camera. Let’s find Ignacio. He can finish this. I can’t stand to breathe the same air as him for one more second. I can’t believe I ever trusted him.”
A choked laugh tumbled from my mouth as I turned off the camera.
“What’s so funny?” Rever asked.
“All of Ignacio’s paranoia was pointless.”
“What do you mean?”
“He focused on everyone else while Emanuel snaked his way into every part of the cartel and betrayed him over and over.”
Rever laughed then too. “You’re right, and Ignacio accused me of being a dumbass.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hattie
“I’m surprised to see you here,” I said as I cracked open the door to Ryker’s apartment.
“You haven’t answered my calls for two days,” my dad said as he shifted on his feet. Dark purplish circles stained the skin under his eyes. He wore a wrinkled t-shirt and jeans instead of a dark suit. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him dress casually.
I glanced to the side, unable to maintain eye contact with him. It hurt too much. I had begged him to come over and discuss everything that happened with Senator Deveron after the story broke, but he rejected my invitation.
“I don’t have anything to say to you or Mom.” My voice trembled, and I choked back a sob.
His nostrils flared. “Can I come in?”
“Is Mom with you?”
“No,” he answered, shaking his head. “I thought it’d be better if I came alone.”
“You can come in.” I opened the door wider and closed it behind him. “Do you want anything to drink?” I asked as we moved through the apartment.
“No. I’m good.” He settled onto the sofa in the living room.
I sat on the chair across from him. “What did you want to talk about?”
He ran his hands along the tops of his thighs. “Mostly, I want to apologize for not coming over after the story about Senator Deveron came to light.”
I raised one eyebrow, already feeling drained by this conversation. “An apology. That’s it?”
He pursed his lips. “This is hard for me, Hattie.”
I leaned back in the chair and folded my arms across my chest. “Yeah, I can imagine how hard it is for parents to support their child and believe them. I’d always thought it was something that came naturally, but apparently not,” I said, my voice laced with sarcasm.
My dad held up his hand. “To be fair, your mom didn’t tell me anything about your suspicions of Senator Deveron.”
“Really? I find that hard to believe.” I’d told my mom Senator Deveron had orchestrated my abduction by the Vargas Cartel, but she believed Evan over me and dismissed my accusation as a sign of Stockholm syndrome.
He exhaled and squared his shoulders, staring out the window. “She didn’t say anything right away. She mentioned it during your road trip when
we couldn’t get in touch with you for a few weeks.”
“And you didn’t bother to talk to me about it.” The words tasted like ash on my tongue.
“For the most part.”
My brows scrunched together. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I did some digging into a possible connection between the Vargas Cartel and Senator Deveron.”
I unfolded my arms, and tapped my fingers on the armrests. “Did you find anything?”
“Nothing concrete. I found curious coincidences, though.”
“But you didn’t do anything about it.”
“I didn’t have the chance to decide one way or another before the whole story landed on the front page of a trashy grocery store tabloid. Did you have anything to do with that? The identity of the source is protected.”
My gaze darted to the side as I contemplated how much to tell him. “Yes.” I sighed. “I gave them the story along with the backup documentation.”
“Where’d you get the information?”
I rubbed my hands over my lips. “I lied. I didn’t go on a road trip a few weeks ago. I went to Mexico. I ended up at the Vargas compound. I got the information when I was there, and a friend helped me shop the information around. That trashy grocery store tabloid was the only place with enough guts to print the story.”
He opened, then closed his mouth in quick succession. “Jesus, Hattie. I don’t know what to say.”
I rolled back my shoulders. “I did what I had to do. I couldn’t let him get away with what he did to me.”
“Do you have any idea what the Vargas Cartel will do to you if they realize you are the source behind that article?” He tugged on the ends of his hair. “They will come after you and they will kill you.”
I smiled condescendingly. “You’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about. They aren’t going to do anything to me.”
