Caged: The Complete Trilogy

by Francesca Baez

  In a second, she’ll discover I’m the one responsible for the worst thing that ever happened to her.

  There’s absolutely no way to stop it, but I’m still sprinting out of the Café Palacios headquarters, literally shoving past a few employees in the halls.

  “Sir—” my newest assistant—Edgar? Edward?—begins in confusion as I storm past the front desk, but the glass doors are already swinging shut behind me. The Hummer is conveniently parked out front, and I rev the engine and jerk into the road without even checking the mirrors, causing a symphony of angry car horns around me. It’s not difficult to ignore the chaos, as I snap a voice command at my phone to call Miel, my oldest friend and partner in crime.

  She finally picks up the phone as I turn onto the highway.

  “Find Selina,” I bark, cutting off her greeting. “She should be in the study. Find her and… just find her. Get her out of there. Now.”

  If I stay on the line any longer I’ll just be keeping Miel from carrying out my orders, so I hang up, knowing that the urgency of the matter has been duly expressed.

  With some nearly suicidal driving stunts, I pull up to the Palacios estate in record time.

  “Where is she?” I snap at Miel as soon as I walk through the door. The panicked look in her eye tells me the answer before her mouth does.

  “I don’t know,” my right-hand woman says, running to keep up with me as I march down the hall with purpose. “She wasn’t in the study, and we can’t find her anywhere. We searched every room—”

  “Keep looking,” I say, and slam the study door shut behind me. The room is empty, like Miel said, but the bottom drawer is still open, the safe’s heavy door ajar. I kneel and riffle through the contents quickly, but I already know that the necklace will be missing. The necklace I yanked off Selina’s delicate neck, a moment before pulling the trigger on her brother.

  She knows.

  My heart, which had been pounding in my chest since I left the office, stops. I knew this day would come eventually, though I hoped somehow it wouldn’t. I hoped I could keep this secret until the day I died. And I could have, maybe, if I hadn’t held on to the damn necklace. But I couldn’t let it go. Even when I finally possessed the girl herself, I needed the necklace to remind me. To remind me of the spark of hope I felt that night five years ago, the first moment I laid eyes on Selina Palacios.

  To remind me that, no matter how warm I feel when she’s curled up against me, or how many times she says that she loves me, I still am, and will always be, a monster.

  Selina is here, somewhere. She couldn’t have left the estate, not without one of the guards noticing. So where is she hiding? I pace around my study for a few minutes, focusing all my mental energy on finding her, and trying very hard not to think of what will happen once I actually do.

  But all I can see is the way my wife’s fragile body shuddered with sobs, bending over her brother’s grave almost a year ago. The conviction in her voice as she begged a dead man for forgiveness, claiming responsibility for a crime I committed. The steel in her spine when she stood again, wiped away smeared mascara, and turned to me with the composure of a woman who hadn’t been shattered to pieces just a moment before.

  That was the first time I saw the real Selina. It was just a glimpse, the morsel of truth she offered me over sangria later that day. I had been obsessed with the idea of Selina Palacios for half a decade, but I’d never realized that the person buried under that thick shell of poise and Prada could be just as enticing. Splitting that shell open and carving out every last, painfully real, piece of my princesa over the past year had been so much more satisfying than I could have anticipated. And that day, after the cemetery, had been the first taste.

  And then I know.

  I know where Selina is.

  The closet in the guest suite isn’t as roomy as it was when I was a kid, and the floor isn’t as comfortable, but it’s not like I give a shit, after the shattering truth I just discovered.

  It was Javier.

  My captor, my husband, my lover.

  He’s the one who killed my brother.

  I always knew Javier Vega was a killer, had come to terms with that, but…

  My insides twist, and I think I’m going to throw up again, but I close my eyes and fight the urge.

  The man I share my life and my bed with, the man I fell in love with, the man I’m tethered to for life, killed my brother.

  Is that why he took me captive, forced me to marry him? Is this all some horrible, twisted, sick game to him? I don’t understand.

  I’ll never fucking understand.

  I hear the bedroom door open, and heavy, familiar footsteps pad toward me. I jerk upright and press my back against the wall in the dark. When he pulls the closet door open, I scream and kick out blindly, feeling my bare feet connect with a shin, maybe a knee.

  “Fuck,” Javier grunts, but still tries to come closer.

  “Get away from me,” I shriek. I can’t see him clearly; my eyes are still adjusting to the light from the bedroom, or maybe they’re just blurred with emotion. It doesn’t matter. My body acts on instinct, trying desperately both to fight and flee from the enemy that’s been under my nose this whole time.

  I’ve hated Javier from the start, but not like this.

  This goes beyond hate, beyond anything I’ve ever felt before. I don’t know how to feel, how to cope with this horrible new paradigm I’m living in. Everything in me burns red, everything in me aches for this man to be punished somehow, but at the same time, all I want is to fall into him. He’s the one whose arms I feel safe in, the only person that’s ever felt like a home. I need him, and I loathe him. I love him, and I want him dead.

  “Okay, okay,” he’s murmuring gently, stepping back from me, lowering to a crouch so he can look me in the face.

  I won’t look him in the face.

  I’m afraid of what will happen to my already fragile heart if I do.

  He sinks back into a seated position, leaning against the wall across from the open closet, holding his hands up as if to show he’s not going to hurt me. It’s a useless gesture. We both know that if he wanted to, he could kill me right here, with his bare hands. As always, I’m powerless in his presence, and any semblance of control he gives me is just a hollow pretense.

  There was a time when he couldn’t truly hurt me, couldn’t break me, but then I gave him my heart. I set my beating, bleeding heart in his hands, asked him to protect it, and then he crushed it anyway.

  I should have seen this coming.

  I never could have seen this coming.

  I still don’t quite believe it.

  “It was you,” I say quietly, though I know that he already knows I know. He wouldn’t be here otherwise. “You killed Max. You were the guy in the mask, the one who pulled the trigger.”

  “Selina,” he begins, trying to move toward me again, reaching out to touch me, and I shrink back. I can see the pain flash across his face, a vulnerability I’ve never seen before, but I don’t care.

  I don’t fucking care.

  “Princesa, I had to do it,” he says, his voice pleading and genuine in the way I’ve always wanted him to be, but not at this cost. “El Sombrerón—”

  “I don’t care if you were just following orders. You still did it, you killed the last person I loved and… And you never even told me.”

  My voice breaks at the end, but I swallow back the sob that threatens to escape. Crying won’t help. Nothing will help. Nothing will ever help again.

  “I did it to save you,” Javier tries again, eyes desperate, hands shaking as he holds them back from reaching to me. “I was— I was supposed to kill you, Selina. But I… I couldn’t do it. That’s why I killed him. It was to save your life.”

  “You should have just killed me,” I say, emotionless. I don’t even have to think about it.

  “You didn’t deserve to die for your brother’s mistakes,” Javier says.

  “And he didn’t deserve
to die for our parents’” I counter. I’m crying now, I realize. Silent, cold tears trail down my cheeks, drip off my chin. I let them flow unhindered. “The only person who deserved to die that night was you. You’re a killer, a monster, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”

  That, that shuts him up. He flinches back from my words as if I’d physically slapped him, and his eyes… I don’t even recognize the man sitting across from me. The Javier I know always has his guard up, is always playing the part of who he wants the world to see. This man, he’s raw, stripped bare. I did that. I broke Javier Vega, if only a little bit. It should make me feel better. It doesn’t. Not at all.

  He moves toward me again, and this time I let him. I’m too tired to fight. The gunshot wound in my side is killing me, throbbing more than it has in days. My body had finally stitched itself back together, and now it’s tearing itself apart all over again. But that pain is nothing compared to the crushing agony that pulses through me. My entire body is a raw nerve, my soul an open wound. Javier’s mere presence exacerbates the ache, but I still have to fight the urge to sag into him when he touches me, cups my face in his palms.

  “Selina, I—” he begins, and I know what he’s trying to say. It’s what he knows I’ve been dying to hear, the one thing that could bridge this cavernous gap of pain between us. The one thing that, even now, could still break me completely. The lie I’m desperate to believe. “I…”

  Even now, he can’t say it. He can’t force it, can’t pretend to feel anything but animalistic possession over me. I watch him struggle to form the words, words I know he’s never said to anyone before, and I can’t help it. I begin to laugh. Hysterical, unhinged, completely humorless giggles pour out of me, and Javier just watches, brows furrowed in confusion.

  I thought I’d been through the worst of it, time and time again. When I lost my parents, when I lost my brother, when I lost my freedom to Javier. Every damn time, I thought, this is it. It can’t get any worse than this. And every time, I was wrong. But this time, it really can’t get worse than this. I wouldn’t survive it.

  What didn’t kill me never made me stronger. It just sank deep into my bones, soaked into my marrow, spliced into my DNA. I’m made of suffering, born of the darkness, and all I’ll ever be is broken. There is no happy ending for me. I don’t fade into the sunset holding the hand of the man I love. I go through hell and back again, over and over, a lost soul walking in circles and waiting for the devil to take pity.

  I sag into the floor, the weight of my hopelessness pressing down on my shoulders. My eyes are dry now, the laughter over, my head pounding.

  “I need to get out of here,” I say, half to myself. “I just want to go to bed.”

  “Here, I’ll help you upstairs,” Javier says, moving to stand, eager to have something to do other than sit here in this hellish moment.

  “No,” I say, meeting his eyes. “You don’t understand. I need to get out of this house, away from you.”

  There it is again, that flash of pain in his eyes, but it’s gone faster this time. He’s pulling his mask back on, pulling away from me even as he begs me to stay.

  “You know I can’t let you go,” he says. Not a threat, just a statement of fact. “And we both know that you couldn’t leave even if I let you.”

  Fuck. I flash back to the night in Paris, me sobbing in his arms on the hotel floor. He’s right, but I can’t deal with that right now.

  “Not forever, then,” I say. “But I need some space, at least for now. I don’t know what happens next, but I know I just… can’t be here tonight. Not with you. Please, you owe me that much.”

  My chest feels hollow.

  No, fuck that.

  My entire body, soul, being feels hollow. Dead.

  I don’t know why I did it, opened my mouth and tried to say those three little words she wants to hear so badly. I wouldn’t have meant them, and she would have seen them for what they were. A desperate lie. Still, I wonder if they would have fixed everything nonetheless.

  All I know is that yesterday I was happy, somehow, despite the enemies out to kill us, and now I just feel…

  Hollow.

  I haven’t cried since I was a child, and I don’t feel the need to now. The only instinct running through my veins at the moment is to force Selina to stay with me, chain her to my bed, and lavish her with kisses until she forgets all the darkness between us and can only remember that we belong together, that our horrific history binds us together even when it should tear us apart.

  But under that primitive urge lies the knowledge that pushing Selina too far would only make things worse. In time, she’ll come to terms with the sins of our past and the promises of our future. I can give her time. Not forever, but enough to keep her from hating me even more. And eventually, she’ll come back to me. One way or another.

  She has to.

  She can’t survive without me, and I…

  I don’t need anyone but myself to survive. I’ve suffered worse losses, and come out swinging.

  That’s what I tell myself, because that’s the way it’s always been.

  So why doesn’t that fact comfort me this time? Why does the idea of even one night without my princesa wrapped safely in my arms make me feel like punching a wall? It’s hard to believe I survived decades without Selina, when now just the thought of her absence leaves me breathless. The things she does to me, this woman. If I had known the way she’d sink her teeth into me, poison me with those big eyes and secret edges, maybe I wouldn’t have taken her at all. Or maybe I would have taken her sooner.

  Selina walks stiffly down the stairs with a leather tote over her shoulder, the meager size of which loosens my lungs just a touch. She didn’t pack enough for more than a few days, maybe a week if she deigns to repeat outfits. That has to mean something, right? Or is she just so eager to get away from me that she threw supplies together as fast as she could?

  We walk out of the mansion in silence, Selina sliding delicately into the backseat of the BMW while I hop into the passenger seat. Miel grips the wheel tighter as she eyes us both, brows furrowed deeply, but wisely keeps her mouth shut. Selina’s washed the smudged mascara off her cheeks, but her eyes are still red and swollen. Not to mention, me acquiescing to her leaving the estate at all while she’s still recovering from her wounds, let alone with our enemies still at large, is an obvious sign that something huge has happened. I’ll never tell Miel the truth, though she’s the closest thing I have to a friend. If I told her, she’d say that what I’ve done is unforgivable, like any sane person would. But I refuse to feel guilty for the decision I made that night, whatever kind of monster that makes me. One way or another, that deadly night led me here, gave me Selina Palacios—my wife, my damnation, my salvation.

  My everything.

  She’s the only thing that’s ever been mine, and I refuse to lose her.

  I’ll make her see eventually, no matter what it takes.

  The path here may have been twisted and bloody, but it was the only way.

  She’s the key to my freedom, just as I am hers.

  The only way we survive is together.

  Brock meets us at the St. Regis hotel, key cards in hand. As we walk up the empty staff staircase, Javier lets me know in a stiff, measured tone that he checked us in under the del Reys’ name, and paid in cash, so as long as I don’t leave my suite and don’t do anything stupid, my presence should go undetected. What he doesn’t have to say, of course, is that just by leaving the estate I’m jeopardizing my safety. Not that my safety was guaranteed back home. El Sombrerón already tried to kill me once—twice if Javier is to be believed—and I’m guessing he’s the kind of guy who won’t be dissuaded by my stubborn refusal to die the first few times around. Somehow, though, I can’t quite make myself care that a bloodthirsty psychopath wants me dead. The mythical villain I’ve never even seen seems like a distant threat compared to the dangers immediately before me.

  I’ve been sharing a bed with a monster
for months. Hell, I’ve felt myself becoming a monster, faster than I would have thought possible. I can’t tell what’s normal anymore, let alone feel it.

  Javier is still going on about how his people will be taking shifts guarding me, but I can barely hear him over the dull buzzing of blood in my ears. My emotions are a tangled mess on repeat, each horrifying realization and spiteful thought resurfacing with the same cutting clarity time and time again. All I want is to sleep. I desperately need those hours of unconsciousness, when I won’t even know who I am. I crave that split second in the morning, when I’ll wake up thinking that everything is still some kind of normal, not remembering that my life is over.

  Again.

  We finally reach the penthouse suite, the burning in my thighs confirming that I won’t be trying to leave—and thus have to return up this infinite staircase—anytime soon. Brock does a sweep of the hallway, then raps on the door in a rhythmic pattern. Three short, one long. Just like Javier’s tattoo. I wonder if my husband chose that code on purpose, or if the mark is carved so deep into his bones that he’s barely aware of it anymore.

  Javier has belonged to El Sombrerón since he was a child. Though he may hate it, there isn’t a cell of him that wasn’t shaped by that man. I wonder, deep in the pit of my stomach, if this pursuit of freedom is a temporary lapse. Is Javier even capable of allegiance to me, or in the end, will he finally pull the trigger, just as the man who raised him ordered?

  One of the hired men opens the door for us, his face as strained as Brock’s and Miel’s are. Javier’s face is stone, though, as unreadable as ever. A constant reminder that though I may think I love this man, I’ll never, ever know him. I follow him blankly into the suite, then continue on into the bedroom as the three thugs pause in the foyer. They let me go. I can hear their hushed tones fade as I crawl onto the bed, not even bothering to kick my Gucci tennis shoes off.

  I’m fading to black before my cheek even hits the silk pillowcase.