“Welcome home, ladies,” says the assailant next to me as he looks up at the mansion. He turns back in my direction, a devious smile crawling up his swollen, bruised face. “Fernando will be happy his Christmas presents have arrived.”
“Let’s go,” Mateo says before my tongue can strike back with a harsh comment or scream out of fear. Right now, I want to do both.
Harper’s eyes widen and stay anchored to mine as Mateo grabs her by the arm and guides her out of the car.
Help me, her face calls out to me. I nod at her, trying to keep my own expression calm despite the storm at my core, threatening to unravel me at any moment.
“Move,” the assailant snaps. I hadn’t realized he’d opened the car door. He points at me with his gun, motioning for me to get my ass in gear and slide out of the SUV already. I awkwardly scoot my butt along the leather seat and slide onto the pebble driveway.
“Nice, yes?” the assailant says, looking up at the mansion beside me. The delight on his face is borderline prideful. Like he built this place. Like he’s responsible for the billions in dirty income it took to create this compound and the dozen others spread around South America. But he’s just a small piece of this illegal machine, a pawn in Fernando and Santino’s fruitful enterprise. They’re smart for making a man like this feel proud. For making him feel like he’s part of something bigger when in reality, he’s replaceable. He means nothing to them. Without him, the product will still get processed. Drug mules will get them out of the country and into the hands of dealers. And other men with a good shot and a desire to play God will kill for the Torres family. Or at least, what’s left of them.
I look up at the stone estate, pretending to admire it but, really, I’m counting and recording every door (just one at the front) and every window (eight downstairs, ten on the second floor) I can see. Two guards anchor either side of the stately dark wood and iron door, but there are no others I can see at the sides of the house. Perhaps there are more guards out at night. But for now, there are only two lone guards … carrying guns that can fire six shots in a single second.
“Shall we?” the assailant asks me, his arms waving toward the house, as if he’s inquiring whether I’m ready to take my seat at a dinner party.
Like I have a choice in the matter, you dick. But I swallow the sour rhetoric on my tongue and resist the urge to roll my eyes.
The guards open the front door and stand at attention as Harper and I are forced through, our personal and assigned assailants holding on tight to our restrained arms. I step into the two-story foyer and my eyes are immediately drawn up to a titanic crystal chandelier. A long second-story bridge leads to a curved staircase, its steps sweeping elegantly down to the first floor.
My eyes glance to my right and catch my reflection in a large oval mirror. I shudder at my image, somehow surprised by the red welt on my cheek, my blood-crusted lip, and the deep bruises on my face. I guess my fear and anxiety have been overriding the blistering pain. I try to remember how many times I’ve been struck in the past twelve hours but begin to lose count after eight. I stare back at a blond girl I barely recognize. My short tresses are covered in dirt, my sweatshirt torn and speckled with blood and mud and leaves. I look like I’ve been to hell and back.
But I know the worst is yet to come.
TWENTY
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The pipe next to me has been dripping with a rhythmic beat for the past twenty minutes. The sound has gone from mildly annoying to edging me toward lunacy. Harper and I sit side by side on the cement basement floor, our hands still tied, the cinder-block wall digging into our shoulder blades and spines. There’s a single light bulb, hanging precariously from the low ceiling, illuminating our wretched little space. It’s hard to see much in here, but from what I can tell, there’s a furnace and water heater in the back corner and rows of shelves to our right, each one lined with brown cardboard boxes. I can see pieces of yellow fabric sticking out of one. Colorful plastic flowers in the other. A ratty teddy bear and doll missing an eye in a third. It’s a storage room. For both unwanted people and possessions.
“I’m having some serious déjà vu,” I say to Harper, who has been surprisingly quiet during our time in this damp, ominous space.
“Why?” she asks, slowly turning her head toward mine.
“I just … am,” I say, my voice tight in my throat. What I really want to say is, It reminds me of the room where I watched my mother die. But I don’t. I need to keep Harper calm. I don’t want to spark her hysteria. As soon as they left us alone, I was expecting Harper to break down into tears and beg me to get us out of this. But she’s been so calm for the last half hour, she’s bordering on comatose.
Harper’s head swivels sluggishly away from me. Her face cringes as she gingerly pulls her legs toward her chest and cradles her knees in her tied-up arms. I want to ask her what she’s thinking. Why she’s so quiet. If she’s okay. But all of these questions seem like they have horrifying answers. So instead, I simply say, “Love you, Harper.”
“Love you, Reagan,” she answers after a beat. I never told a friend I loved her until Harper. But we said it to each other all the time. When we’d split off in the hallway, on our way to different classes. When we’d get off the phone at night. When we’d end long text conversations. It almost always came from her first. “I love you” flowed off her tongue with such ease. But she didn’t say it to so many people that it lost its meaning. Just me and Malika. It became almost habitual. I told her I loved her more often than I told my parents. But I meant it every single time.
“Do you remember that time we made a list of all the people we’d take a bullet for?” Harper asks, her eyes empty, staring straight ahead but looking at nothing.
“What?” I ask, trying to wipe the dust off my mental scrapbook and pull up the memory.
“In study hall,” Harper responds, her voice monotone. “We were talking about true love and Malika said her idea of true love was taking a bullet for someone, no questions asked. Do you remember that? And then we made a list of all the people we’d die for?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Your list was long,” Harper says, nodding her head. “It was much longer than ours. I think I even faked my list. But you. You meant yours. Didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I guess so,” I answer, trying to remember who was on my list. I close my eyes, dragging up the memory buried in my brain. I see the names, scrawled in the corner of my notebook. My parents. My Nana. Sam. Harper. Malika. Luke.
“I’m too scared to die,” Harper says and I can hear her swallow. “I don’t think there’s anyone I’d truly die for. Not like you.”
“I’ve been trained my entire life to maybe die one day for someone else,” I answer. “You can’t really compare yourself to me.”
“Yeah,” Harper says, still nodding so slowly, I wonder if she even feels her chin bouncing up and down. “But I think you still would. Even without your training.”
“I don’t know,” I say and shake my head, staring down at a crack in the basement’s cement foundation. “I don’t know how much of it is nature and how much is nurture.”
Harper bounces her knees up and down, still staring straight ahead and then suddenly stops. She shakes her head, her wavy hair falling into her face. She sniffs and says, “I shouldn’t have called out for you. I should have just let them take me.”
“Harper, if they took you, I’d have figured out a way to come after you,” I reply, wishing my hands were free so I could touch her, comfort her in some small way.
“I know,” she says, listlessly rotating her face toward mine. She raises her eyebrows over her sleepy hazel eyes and adds, “See. Nature prevails.”
The deadbolt on the door to the storage room clacks loudly back into its holder, announcing the arrival of a guard like a thunderbolt. Every nerve in my spine ignites and I feel like the skin along my back is on fire. The door swings open, slamming against the unfinished wall and m
y second assailant is standing there, an M4 carbine in his hand.
“Stand up,” he commands gruffly, and we both struggle to our feet. “Fernando wants to see you.”
Every curse word in every language I’ve been taught echoes in my brain as the second assailant grabs my arm and Mateo grabs on to Harper. Together they march us through the finished basement, complete with a twenty-seat theater and a fifties-style diner (no, seriously. Think red booths, chrome everything, a neon jukebox, and a sparkly Formica countertop. Someone wishes they were a teenager in America … or just really likes reruns of Happy Days). Then they take us up the basement steps and through a long hallway. The floors are a dark wood. The black-and-white photographs that hang on cool gray walls look extremely familiar. It takes me a moment to realize they’re almost exact replicas of the photos that hung in Santino’s ranch in Tumaco. Or were at least taken by the same photographer with a similar aesthetic. Delicate open flowers and a white chapel against a cloudless sky. Fields of tall wildflowers at sunset and green-covered mountains surrounded by low, foggy clouds. Each photo captures the same gentle subjects and emotes the same surprising softness.
I hear Victoria Browning’s voice in my head. Pay attention to the details, she used to tell us during our class on surveillance and targets. Sometimes it’s the little things that pull it all together. My pace has slowed as I look up at the photographs and study the angles and lighting and landscapes. The guard is finally forced to pull me along.
“Walk,” he grunts, tightening his grip on my arm as he yanks me down the illuminated hallway, lights strategically positioned to highlight each piece of amateur artwork.
I turn my head away from the walls and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. My hands begin to tingle and I cannot tell if it’s my nerves absorbing the panic I’m attempting to stifle or the fact that my arms have been permanently tied behind my back for over twelve hours. The buzz radiates up my forearms, lighting up my biceps with unwanted electricity. I gently shake my arms, trying to prevent the million pinpricks from reaching my shoulders, my neck, and my already throbbing skull.
The guards turn us down another hallway, past an enormous library with shelves and shelves of antique books and a sunken living room with matching light-gray linen couches, a dark-blue marble coffee table, and an elaborately decorated Christmas tree in the corner. There are boxes and wrapping paper and bows littered around the tree. Toy bulldozers and miniature cars and a tiny tea set are still under the evergreen. It’s difficult to wrap my head around the fact that it’s Christmas. And even more difficult to comprehend that there are children somewhere in this mansion. That’s why we’re here and not at some warehouse or underground bunker. Fernando wanted to be with his children on Christmas Day, hostages be damned.
My feet have slowed again and my guard sighs loudly, tightening his grip on my arm and dragging me down the hall, away from the remnants of a beautiful holiday morning. As we pass the dining room, with its enormous driftwood table and twelve matching chairs, I hear chatter. Then a round of laughter. Pot lids clanging shut and the sound of a food processor slicing or dicing or mincing. The guard turns me down one more hallway and pushes my body through a white wood-paneled arch. And there I stand in Fernando’s kitchen.
Five men (including some of the men from our trip … I mean kidnapping) are seated at a massive white and gray marble island watching a man slice tomatoes. He’s dressed in dark jeans and a black polo shirt, a red-and-green Christmas-themed apron tied around his body. His salt-and-pepper hair sweeps across his deeply wrinkled forehead while he concentrates on slicing. A well-maintained mustache hugs a wide smile, a crooked upper tooth catching his lip.
Is it … could that be him?
The man looks up, his gray eyes meeting mine, and despite his smile, my warm blood chills. I know those eyes. His brothers had those same cold, wicked eyes. He needs no introduction. I know he’s a Torres.
Fernando Torres.
“So glad you ladies could join us,” Fernando says, pointing his knife down into the cutting board and waving his free hand around the room, inviting us to step closer (which we only do because we have guns pointed at our sides). I can hear Harper’s shaky breath next to me as we’re pushed farther and farther into the massive kitchen.
Fernando carries his cutting board, full of finely chopped tomatoes, toward a pot on the stove behind him, scraping the butcher knife across the grooved wood and dumping the pieces into the steaming liquid. He picks up a wooden spoon from its resting place on a small blue plate next to the six-burner stove, and stirs the tomatoes into his sauce. He opens the drawer beside him, pulling out a tasting spoon, and dips it into the pot. He scrapes it along the side and pulls out a tablespoon of dark red sauce.
“Now, who wants a taste?” Fernando asks, turning toward Harper and me. He carefully cradles his hand beneath the spoon as he carries it to our side of the island. Harper and I must have twin looks of shock on our faces as he brings the spoon closer to us, because he laughs and says, “What? Think Colombians don’t know how to make spaghetti and meatballs? It’s delicious.”
I imagined my first interaction with Fernando quite differently on the plane. I pictured him in an office, sitting behind an enormous mahogany desk, his feet up, gray smoke circling his face. The curtains would be drawn and dark woodwork would cover every square inch of the walls. In my head, he’d be counting stacks and stacks of money, puffing on a cigar, and stroking his mustache. A true stereotype, I know, influenced by movies and pop culture imagery. I never dared to imagine I’d meet one of the most dangerous men in the world wearing a Christmas apron and trying to feed me with the same enthusiasm as my Sicilian grandmother.
Fernando blows gently on the still-steaming tomato sauce (so nice of him to be concerned about burning my tongue before he kills me, right?) before shoving the spoon near my mouth.
“Go on, now,” he says, bringing the spoon centimeters away from my lips. “Taste.”
“No, thank you,” I reply, staring down at the dark red color. I press my lips together and hold them between my teeth, hoping he’ll take the spoon away.
“What? Do you think I’m trying to poison you?” Fernando says with a throaty laugh. He pulls the spoon away from my mouth and opens his own. The spoon disappears around his full lips and he smiles as he pulls it out. “Think it needs a little bit more salt.”
He shakes the spoon near his head with a smile, congratulating himself on his fine cooking, and turns back toward the stove. He pinches salt from a small dish between his fingers, sprinkling it into the sauce and throwing what remains over his left shoulder. For good luck, I guess.
Fernando turns back to the kitchen island, picking up his butcher knife and chopping up pale pink, raw chicken breasts.
“Some people hate cutting up raw chicken,” Fernando says, slicing his knife cleanly through the slimy meat carcass. “I’ve never minded it though.”
“I imagine you’ve dug your knife through much worse,” I speak before my brain can stop my sharp tongue. Fernando stops, staring down at the raw meat, a small, nauseating smile on his face as he begins slicing again.
“You could say that,” Fernando replies, slicing each breast into eight uniform pieces. “Some are easier than others.” He looks up at me, waving the butcher knife in the air, its glint catching my eye and making me sick. “You would be difficult. Muscle is harder to slice through than fat.”
A scream swells in my throat. I trap it, trying to swallow it down, but it only grows and grows and grows, like a jagged stone, piercing deeper into the fragile flesh with each purposeful blink from Fernando’s provoking eyes.
I stare at Fernando as he jabs at me with silence and a growing smile. Out of my peripheral vision, I can see every face turn toward mine to watch my reaction.
I pull a quivering breath through my lips and roll my shoulders back, trying to suppress the tremble in my hands. “Is that what you’re planning to do to us?” My voice is stronge
r than I expected it to be.
Fernando’s gray eyes look my body up and down, his fingertips grip the handle of the butcher knife as he spins it, its tip puncturing the cutting board.
“I haven’t decided,” he replies informally before turning back to his chopping.
“Well, why don’t you just do it now?” I ask and turn toward the assailant behind me. I nod toward the gun at my side. “Seriously, have him put a bullet in my skull. What are you waiting for?”
“Well, what would the fun be in that?” Fernando replies, the right corner of his mouth turned up as he changes knives and begins dicing an onion. “Besides, I’m a big-picture person. Santino was impulsive. He thought something should be done, he did it. He thought someone should be killed, he killed them. But I’m the more thoughtful brother. And honestly, I may not even kill you at all.”
“Oh really? And why is that?” I say, not believing him for a second. “What are you going to do to me? Torture me for Black Angel secrets?”
“There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t know already,” Fernando answers, glancing up at me and then back down at his finely sliced onion. “I probably know more about the Black Angels than you do. How do you think we found you? Luck?”
Holy shit.
My muscles seize up and the little breath I was holding on to is immediately dragged from my fatigued body. It wasn’t Harper’s call to her parents that tipped Fernando off to our location. It was the mole. It was the fucking mole.
Who? Who?
My mind pulses with that question, the single word cracking against my skull over and over again. Who is feeding them information? Who is selling out the agency? Who wants me dead? I can feel the blood drain from my face as I struggle to contain my shock and focus on getting us back downstairs to our little dungeon. I’m desperate for silence. For time to think about just who the traitor might be and how I can keep the two of us alive.
You Won't See Me Coming Page 14