by Karina Halle
I knew how he felt. I couldn’t really believe it either. I was so lucky to have this man. My heart couldn’t have been more full. I couldn’t have been more high.
God, I don’t think I could have loved him more.
When we both calmed down, I went to get off of him but he quickly grabbed me and brought me down to his chest. “No,” he grunted into my ear. “Stay where I can see you. Where I can feel you.”
I nodded and nuzzled my face into the crook of his neck. He smelled like musk and damp earth, fresh and manly. “I love you,” he whispered. “I was never meant to love anyone else. No matter what. Ellie Watt, you own me. And I’ll keep you safe.”
My throat felt thick and I blinked back tears. Above us, the rain was tapering off a little. I ran my hands over his face, my finger over his perfectly straight nose, over his dark, arched eyebrows, over his square jaw, the spots on his cheeks where I knew his dimples appeared when he smiled. I owned him. And he would keep me safe.
I kissed him softly, sweetly then lay my head back on his chest. We lay like that for a while, until the rain stopped and we finally realized we were lying naked in the middle of the Honduras jungle. As much as I wanted to keep lying there, keep feeling his heart beat against mine, his strong arms around me, protecting me, loving me, there was reality to face. A job to be done. A mission we were both committed to. It was heart-wrenching when I finally got off of him and slipped my clothes back on. The moment would be forever committed to my memory, keeping me going when everything else got scary, dangerous, hopeless. I would return to that moment when it was just him and I and for a brief time, nothing in the world mattered. No one could hurt us. It was just love and it was all we needed.
When we were both dressed – and still partly splattered with mud – we resumed our duty. We brought out the compasses and started walking again, heading northeast. I felt like I left something behind on that forest floor. The us I hoped we could return to.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was dusk when we saw the first lights in the jungle. At first I was certain that it was a pair of animal eyes, maybe a panther, watching our every move. But the eyes turned into several eyes and the forest began to open up and suddenly the lights belonged to a walled fence and a pathway and the roof of a sprawling mansion.
We had found it.
This was Travis’s compound.
“Now what?” I asked Camden as we stopped a football field’s length away, sticking close to the trees for cover. We couldn’t really see anything because of the high stone wall that went on forever, hiding the mansion and who knows what else behind it.
“You don’t happen to have a pair of binoculars in there?” he asked, gently taking the backpack off my shoulders and opening it. “Maybe night vision goggles?”
“No. Javier had them.”
“Of course he did,” he said. He sighed and rubbed his hand on his face. He looked up at the trees. “Well, we won’t have any idea of what we’re dealing with if we can’t see it. You good at climbing trees?”
I smiled. “World’s best date palm climber right here.”
A weird flash came across his face, as if something dawned on him. “I had a dream about you and I last week. We were in high school and climbed to the top of one of your uncle’s date palms. There was a fire coming across the valley.”
“Did we get burned?” I asked, reaching for his hand and pulling him toward me.
He smiled sadly. “We did. But at least we were together.” He cupped my face in his hands and my eyes closed at his touch. “My Ellie. My beautiful girl. I will burn for you. I will die for you.”
My heart skipped and burst, overflowing until my chest was radiating with heat, love, peace. I turned my face and kissed his palm. “You give me life, Camden. Death doesn’t seem so scary after that.”
He pulled me close and kissed my forehead. “How about we climb this tree, see if we can get a good look before it gets dark?”
I squeezed his hand and looked up at the tree closest to us. Sure, on the date farm I had a ladder to help me but the way this tree’s branches were spaced out it was like a ladder anyway.
Camden gave me a boost up to the lowest branches but after that it was easy to climb. The only problem was the ants I saw crawling on the trunk. I hoped they weren’t the really poisonous ones that Dom had warned us about.
We paused about half way up, at a part where the branches separated a bit and we could see out.
Jesus.
Travis’s compound was a lot bigger than I had thought – it was like a palace. On the other side of the wall there was the main building, the mansion that seemed to go on forever, wings and levels and sections. There was a courtyard in the front with fountains, a huge pool among landscaped gardens, as well as a few other houses that were scattered about. Golf carts littered the manicured lawns, lit pathways snaked their way through outdoor sculptures and statues. There was also a helicopter pad with a helicopter resting on it.
“I can’t really see that far,” Camden said, squinting at the distance. “What does it look like?”
“It looks like he’s trying to recreate Versailles,” I said honestly. Off with her head.
“What about people? Are there guards?”
There had to be. I tried to take it all in, paying attention to the details. There was a man driving a golf cart down a path, heavily armed of course. It looked like two guards were stationed by the front door, talking to someone I didn’t recognize.
“There are some,” I told him, relaying what I saw.
“Could be more, too. How about getting over the fence?”
My eyes followed it, searching for an opening. “It’s too tall to scale, I think. And I don’t have my grappling hook. There are a bunch of trees in the left corner though … if we kept walking straight we’d hit them. I think we could maybe climb over the fence that way, so long as the branches can hold us up.”
“You’d at least be able to go over,” he said.
I eyed him fearfully. “I can’t do this alone.”
“You won’t,” he said. “I promise. We’ll do it together. We’ll find a way.”
“So when we get in, then what?”
He shrugged. “Get Gus and your mother. They are there. We will find them. You can break in. I have faith in your B and E skills.” He smiled for a second. How far away that seemed now, how insane I was to break into Camden’s house and rob him. That seemed like a lifetime ago.
My cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “I can get us in. Then I guess we case the joint and see who we can find.”
“I wish it’s going to be that simple. The odds are against us, you know.”
“I think the odds have always been against us, Camden. Don’t you?”
He grinned. “You’re right about that. Okay. If that’s the plan, then that’s the plan. Let’s go get Gus and your mother.”
I nodded and was about to head back down the tree when I remembered something.
“You said something about a big picture the other day,” I noted. “What did you mean?”
“When did I say that?”
“In the hotel room. You said the bigger picture is bigger than we know.”
“You don’t know?”
I worried about the look in Camden’s eyes. His brow was pinched together, eyes sullen, almost sad. I shook my head.
“Ben,” he said gently. “I need my son.”
A heavy brick was placed on my heart. Of course, Ben. His son. He’d barely mentioned what happened to him with Sophia. It must have been killing him to not have him. I’d been so wrapped up in Gus and my mother, in Javier and in Travis, that I’d forgotten all about his little boy. Camden had been suffering in silence all this time, knowing we were being pulled one way when his son was the other.
“We’ll get him back,” I told him.
He nodded grimly. “I hope so. I can’t … I can’t let him stay with her. Not after what happened. You don’t know how hard it was for me to leav
e him.”
I smiled sadly, feeling pinched with guilt. “I can imagine. I’m sorry you had to come for me.”
His face fell. “Oh, Ellie. No.” He reached over and kissed me. “I don’t regret coming to get you. I had to. I didn’t have a choice. I was wanted … I couldn’t have gone to get Ben without being caught. I would have been put away. And then what would have happened? I never would have seen him again. Never would have seen you again. I had to come for you. And then, I promised myself that when I had you safe, we’d come back for him.” He swallowed hard, his blue eyes watering. “We are getting out of this alive. We are getting my son back. I don’t care what it takes.”
His pain was breaking my heart. “I will help you do everything and anything. You’ll get Ben. You’ll be the father you weren’t allowed to be before.”
He nodded. I hope he believed me. Camden McQueen deserved to have all his wrongs righted.
He exhaled loudly, blinking hard, then said, “Come on. We better hurry while we have some light left. We better stay quiet too, we don’t know if they’ve got people listening at the wall.”
We went back down the tree and I could hear him sniffing. More of my heart fell to pieces. But I had to be strong for him. To do this job. And get him home.
Once on the ground, we walked along as silently as we could, mindful of every single leaf we were treading on. I was actually glad that we still had the mud from our sexual romp all over us still, it darkened my white tank top and arms and made us blend in a bit more with the vegetation. We were a few coats shy of looking like we’d rolled out of Apocalypse Now.
It wasn’t long before we came to the group of trees that went dipping over the top of the wall. On closer inspection it looked like the branches were firm enough to support Camden’s weight. I guess we had no choice but to find out.
I stopped and pointed up, motioning for us to climb. I quickly checked the gun in my boot and my knife in the other, making sure they were secure. I was nervous as hell. Like, heart-racing, lungs seizing, pins and needles shooting up and down my spine and massaging my head kind of nervous. Panic attack nervous.
Camden placed his hand on my shoulder and held it there until I felt like I could push through it and go on. There was no choice. We committed to being heroes – we couldn’t back out because I felt like a coward at the last minute.
Heroes. I liked the sound of that.
I gave him a smile that probably looked depressing as hell. Then, with another boost from him, I climbed up the tree until we were at the right set of branches. I lay down on it, straddling it with my arms and legs, and shimmied my way across the branch. It dipped a bit with my weight but not by much. I moved as slowly as possible, not wanting anyone to notice a tree with leaves shaking for no reason and hoped it would be passed off as an animal or something.
I looked down. I had cleared the wall but it was a fifteen foot drop to the ground, thankfully in an area behind a set of flowering bushes. I hoped my ankles would forgive me.
I glanced over my shoulder at Camden who was waiting at the end of the branch, barely visible against the tree. I nodded at him, then quickly swung under the branch and let go. I landed on the ground with a soft thud and then rolled once I realized my legs weren’t reliable. I lay on my back and looked up at the tree, staying low and waiting until Camden had joined me.
I could barely see him go across the branch but I did see the branch start to sag dramatically under his weight. Fuck, him being 6′2″ and all muscle, he had to be at least 60 pounds heavier than me. He paused, probably unsure of whether he should continue or not.
Suddenly a light lit up the wall in front of me and I could hear the whir of a golf cart’s engine in the distance. I froze and prayed they wouldn’t come any closer, that they wouldn’t shine up in the tree. Camden stayed completely still. So did my heart.
After a few nerve-bursting moments, the light finally moved along the wall and the golf cart continued on its way. I slowly turned over and poked my head around the bushes. It looked like this was part of their nightly patrol.
“Camden, hurry,” I whispered as softly as I could. He heard me. The branch started moving again, the leaves shaking. I winced.
Then the branch broke with the loudest snap.
I gasped as Camden and the branch came crashing down to the ground. I quickly scampered over to him and looked around in a panic, hoping no one heard anything. Camden got up, staying low and put out his hand to let me know he was okay. We stayed huddled next to each other, frozen in fear, waiting for time to pass, for our passage to go unnoticed.
When no lights came back on us and we didn’t hear anyone approaching, we exhaled in unison. I patted him on the back, to let him know we were okay so far. He nodded to the row of hedges that lined the lit path nearby. If we stayed behind them, there was a chance we wouldn’t be seen and it would lead us all the way to the back of the mansion.
We got down on our stomachs and started crawling on the stiff grass, sticking as close to the hedge as possible. I almost found it amusing that we were doing moves that belonged in a Mission Impossible movie but considering this was an actual life and death situation and Tom Cruise wasn’t going to start sprinting out of the bushes to save us, it wasn’t very funny. Maybe one day I’d look back on the impossibility of this all, what we had to go through, the things we had to do. One day, if I was lucky.
We crawled until my limbs were thoroughly scratched up and I added grass stains to the things I was currently covered with, but we eventually came to the house. Camden stopped and I crawled up around the side of him. He brought his mouth to my ear and whispered. “There are lights on at the farthest end of the house and upstairs. There are no lights here and there’s a door. Do you think you can tell if it’s alarmed?”
I nodded. I knew when security systems were up and running and with luck I could defeat them. That is if Travis had your regular home alarm system. If this place was wired like Fort Knox, I had no chance in hell. Only problem was, it would be noisy.
I whispered back. “Smash and crash. I can use my gun. But if there’s anyone around where the alarm panel is, they’ll hear it.”
“Let’s hope it’s not alarmed then.”
“Let’s hope there’s no one on the other side of that door, period.”
He quickly kissed me. “If anything goes wrong, you get out. You run like hell. Don’t worry about me.”
Like hell I would run away. But I nodded to placate him and took in a deep breath. We looked around to make sure the coast was clear and ran across the path for the door, flattening ourselves against the wall. We waited a few moments and then I quickly reached into my pocket where I had stuck with lock-picking tools from earlier. Same ones I used to break into Camden’s house.
It didn’t take me long to pick the lock. That was the easy part. The hard part was having the courage to open the door. Though Travis’s house wouldn’t have a system connected to the police in any way, it would be connected to some monitoring station in the house or even outside of it. If the door was alarmed, I had 30–60 seconds to find the alarm panel and smash it with the butt of my gun. If we were lucky, the beeps wouldn’t be too loud and no one would hear me destroy the panel before it had a chance to signal that some had broken in.
If we were unlucky … well …
I readied myself, getting my head into game mode, finding the confidence I had somewhere inside me and opened the door.
I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until we were both inside. It was dark where we were, with tile floors. Maybe a laundry room. I heard the beeps being set off, sounding like sirens in the night even though in reality they weren’t too loud. I followed the sounds, walking as quietly as possible with Camden right behind me then found the alarm in a closet. I took out my gun and with a quick jab smashed the panel, Camden’s hands catching the falling plastic and glass before it clattered to the floor.
The alarm was disabled. Now we had to stand there and wait fo
r our fate, for the guns that would be inevitably drawn on us if we’d be heard. We listened, hearing only the crickets outside the door that was still open and the sound of each other breathing. It must have been the longest couple of minutes of my life and yet I was terrified to move, to open the door and explore the rest of the house. I felt safe in the darkness of that room with Camden at my side.
Finally his hand grasped mine. It was wet with sweat and somehow knowing he felt as scared as I did made me feel better, that I wasn’t alone.
He brought out his cell phone from his pocket and shone it around us briefly. We were in fact in a large laundry room, two washers, two dryers and a linen closet where the alarm had been. He aimed the light at the closed door that led into the rest of the house and then put his phone away. I heard him reach into my backpack and withdraw his gun. I gripped mine tightly in my hands and he went for the door, opening it as slowly as possible.
We poked our heads out into a long hallway, the only illumination coming from a green-glass lamp on a table at the end of it. The walls were done up with stoic portraits of Mexican men, posing gallantly like royalty. I had to wonder if Travis actually built this place or if he just took it over from someone else in the cartel. The thought of him, his cold inhuman eyes, made me shiver but I had to let the feeling go. This was far from over.
I wondered where we could go next. Though there were a few doors and rooms coming off of the hallway, it wasn’t exactly smart to start opening each one and asking if Gus was there. We’d have to spy, observe, hunker down somewhere until we knew what was what and who was where.
I placed my hand on Camden’s arm as a way of telling him to stay put then quickly crept back into the laundry room. I gently closed the door to the outside, closed the door to the linen closet, hiding the pieces of the broken panel underneath some towels, and then closed the laundry room door. If we were going to be spending a few hours in the house, then everything had to look exactly like it was. We had to go undetected.
