My pulse quickened as I realized that I hadn’t actually talked to Jade since earlier last night, before I’d even turned myself in to Harrison. She didn’t know—unless one of the Hell's Ransom boys had told her—that I was loose again, or that Connor the psychopath had attempted to drown me in a vat of old abattoir water. She didn’t know that the false identification she’d set up for us had worked, and she didn’t know that we were on our way to her apartment right now.
Party foul, I guess.
I could only hope she was ready for us to show up without any warning, but something told me she was used to such things. She was, after all, one of my oldest friends.
The sun was so high and the roadside foliage so warm and inviting, it didn’t seem as if Juarez could possibly be as bad as everyone said it was. Still, as we approached the city, I couldn’t help but notice how it looked almost like a dingy pock on the horizon. There we were, enshrouded by rolling dunes and exotic wildlife, everything cast in sandy shades of peach, and yet—in the distance, like the mirror opposite of the emerald city—there was Juarez, grimy, gray, and industrial. I hollered back to Isabelle, “Hold on tight to me, okay? Don’t let go!”
She didn’t say anything…but I felt her arms grip me tighter. I winced, as my midsection was still tender from the pummeling it had received from Harrison, but it was worth it to feel that she was secure with me.
The city reminded me of some urban version of the ubiqiutous “gates” of the Underworld, through which departed souls and brave heroes, on quests of valor, would need to pass. Except the living and the dead weren’t passing into Hades, or Hel, or Irkalla, or what have you. The living (and possibly soon-to-be dead, from what I had heard about this city) were just trying to get into, or out of, Mexico.
On either side of us, up cropped industrial buildings, so heavily tagged in graffiti that no individual icon or message could be deciphered. The GPS dispassionately directed us onward, having no notion of the squalor which surrounded her clinical directions. The robotic voice did not realize just how scary being commanded to turn “left” could be, when turning left would cause you to descend into a poorly lit parking garage where literally anything could be happening.
“Uh, this place is…terrifying,” Isabelle informed me, as if I didn’t know.
“You think I haven’t noticed that?” I replied, unnecessarily sharp. I felt like a single parent with a beloved toddler merely holding on to my hand in a crowded emporium. Edgy. Defensive. “I instantly regret bringing a white woman to Juarez with me, believe me.”
“What?” Isabelle shrilled. “Do you think I’m going to get sold into slavery or something?”
“Shh,” I hissed. “No. Of course not. Just…relax. It’s not like we’re tourists who’ve gotten lost. We know exactly where we’re going.” I parked the motorcycle as close to the building elevator as I could get, and we climbed off. I basically said my goodbyes to the new bike right then and there, fully anticipating that she would have vanished into thin air by the time we returned. “Come with me,” I said, taking Isabelle’s hand. “It’ll just be a minute, okay? Just one more minute of your life, and then, you’re free to do whatever you want.”
I took a step forward, toward the elevator—God only knew the horrors which awaited us on that staircase—but Izz tugged me back and peered seriously into my eyes. How was it possible that she could look completely different, and yet, as I peered into her eyes, nothing had changed? The same soft, thoughtful hazel blinked up at me, fringed by unpainted lashes. The hair was still wild, loose, and uneven, though it had been transformed into some bloodless platinum blonde.
“Just so we’re clear?” she said, placing one smooth palm against the side of my face. “The only thing I want to do with my life right now is you.”
I grinned, blushed, and averted my eyes. The Carter men generally don’t like to put all their weight down on both feet when they’re stepping into dream worlds. It just seems unsafe. I didn’t want to believe in Isabelle Turner, even after everything we’d been through. If I believed that this could all be over…that the evidence would acquit me, that I could be a free man, and that I could even have the love of the woman before me…then I believed in too much. I had too much to lose, and after starting out with nothing, that felt awfully uncomfortable.
The elevator creaked open for us, and we held hands as it shuddered up four flights and spat us into a narrow corridor. I hoped Jade wasn’t living in a total shit hole. I wouldn’t be able to take the guilt.
When we reached her door—420—I froze, and my mouth went dry. Jade Rodriguez was the type of hacker who got off on outfitting every door in her house with eight different types of locks, each of varying complexity. Hell, if you visited the Jade I knew, you might have had a hard time letting yourself back out of the bathroom.
But her apartment door was hanging open.
Busted open.
One of the hinges gapped, crooked, in the frame of the door.
“Oh my god,” Isabelle whispered off at my side, taking her hand out of mine to touch her open mouth.
I grabbed the hand back, my sense of alert on a screaming red, and darted to the open door, holding Isabelle close, but also behind me. I glared into the wide crack. Okay. Okay. It might have been a break-in. If so, it must have occurred at some point over the past twelve hours, or else she would’ve mentioned it.
“Should we go inside?” Isabelle hissed.
I shook my head. “Not yet,” I hissed back.
Staying behind the door as a partial shield, I listened closely to the sounds of the apartment. After a minute of total silence, I shoved through the door, pulling Izz along behind me, and surveyed the total wreck Jade’s place had become. Sofa ripped open, guts spilling out. Broken electronics, their nuts and bolts spraying the floor. Chairs on their sides, legs twisted and buckled. I swallowed. Whoever had been here had not only been looking for something; they’d been mad, too. Furious.
“Jade?” I called into the apartment, striding from one ruined room to the next, terrified of what I might find around each corner. “JADE? JADE??”
When we had scoured the entire eight hundred square feet, I turned back to Isabelle, still holding on to my hand, and bit my lower lip. I had a feeling that the tortured expression in Izzy’s eyes matched my own.
Jade Rodriguez, one of my best and oldest friends—and the only person who could free me from max security prison in the States—was…gone.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Ashton
“Jade?!” I cried through the apartment, stalking from room to room.
“D-did Jade have many…enemies?” Izzy piped meekly from behind me, apprehensive in broaching the possibility aloud.
“She had a fucking ton of enemies,” I snapped, running a hand through my newly blackened hair without looking back at her. “But no one knew where she was except for Hell's Ransom—God dammit!” I let a kick fly loose against an overturned table, sending it rocketing across the room. Isabelle jumped at my frustrated display of violence, although it wasn’t like I was wrecking the place, was I? “I tried to tell Dom that I thought there was a bad egg in Hell's Ransom, and he said he’d look into it! And he didn’t do jack! Shit! About! It!” With each word, I sent my knuckles into the wall, or my heel against the destroyed sofa.
I whirled from Isabelle—who was staring after me with such trepidation, I actually did feel bad for her; even I didn’t know how to handle myself when I was reacting to the world falling apart—and snatched up Jade’s cordless, storming into the hallway and leaving Isabelle to stare after me in shock.
I punched Dom’s number into the keypad with blazing intensity. I let it ring eleven times—I would have let it ring eleven hundred, all the while clenching my jaw and reciting the litany of curse words I would spew when he answered—until finally, my damn brother picked up the damn phone. “Hello?” he sounded drowsy. Or tipsy.
“Dom,” I rapped out. “Jade is gone.”
“W
hat?” Dom snapped.
“The place is wrecked. I mean, the couch got gutted, her electronics are busted to bits on the goddamn floor, I have no idea what happened—”
“Jesus Christ, kid, slow down. Start from the beginning.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and opened my eyes again.
“We just got to Juarez. Her door was…hanging open. Someone was definitely here. But—man—no one was supposed to know where she was. No one but us.”
“And Arlo,” Dom supplied. “I mean, he knew you needed to get to Juarez. He knew you were going to see her.”
“Well, yeah,” I agreed, frowning. I didn’t quite understand what the two factors had to do with each other. “You think Arlo is cool, don’t you?” I asked, becoming increasingly worried about whatever Dom was implying. “I mean, he’s a Hell's Ransom member. He’s—”
“Eh,” Dom answered, fickle. “He’s a Hell's Ransom member with a lot of problems, man. You’ve met him. Everyone knows about his back room at Three Tequila Floor. I mean, it’s acid, it’s hookers, it’s guns, it’s coke… Mostly guns and coke, ever since he first hooked up with Mickey, some—what—two years ago? Anyway, that boy runs everything under the sun down there. He’s a Hell's Ransom member, yeah; he’s a lot of things. That’s what I mean. We’ve talked about taking his patch before, but…he hasn’t gotten us in trouble. Yet.”
“Still, man. Still. Even—even being friends with some gutter waste like fingerless old Mickey—that doesn’t mean he’d… You think he might have taken Jade?”
“Fuck no,” Dom answered easily. “Arlo’s a fat piece of shit seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. He’s not going to travel out of Albuquerque for anybody’s ass but his own. But he’s not the most trustworthy in our ranks, either. Somebody with their fingers in a lot of pies is easy to talk business with. They’ve got a lot of business to talk.”
“He could’ve been bought off,” I translated.
“Or something,” Dom agreed. “I mean, it wasn’t me, or you, and fuck knows it wasn’t Xander. So, who does that leave? Arlo, up in Albuquerque. He’s got nothing to do with Jade—likes her just fine, as much as a man like Arlo can like anybody—but he has a fuck ton of friends. One of them might’ve had a use for her.”
“Yeah, but who would take Jade? It’s just so random; she doesn’t mean anything to anybody but me.”
“Yeah, man,” Dom replied. “And you don’t have any enemies, right?”
“Not in fucking Mexico, man! The only person in Mexico I even know, other than Jade, is…” A grim light gleamed in my eyes. “…Mickey.” Fingerless old Mickey. The coked-out Hell's Ransom member I’d mangled during my initiation.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Isabelle
Ash walked back into the room with a dazed kind of expression, and I pursed my lips and tried to pretend like I hadn’t been eavesdropping with my ear pressed against the apartment door the entire time. “Hey,” I said, quiet. His eyes flashed to me. Now that his hair was coal black, the intensity of his emerald gaze was all the sharper. “So, what do we do now?”
“We aren’t doing shit,” he snapped, running his fingers through his hair. His eyes averted from mine and did not return. “You’re going to stay here, with the door locked all eight times, and not move a muscle for anyone unless they’re me.” I opened my mouth to protest, but Ash forged over me. “And Jade…you know…she’s a smart girl…she might be back, and someone will have to be here to let her know—and to let me know—”
“That’s bullshit!” I cried, drawing his eyes finally back to me. “Ash, you can’t just abandon me here in this apartment like some—like some damn puppy in a box! I’m not—Ash—I’m not some little girl with no brain, no muscles, no nothing, okay? And you need to start having a little faith in me.”
Ash’s brow furrowed. “I have faith in you!”
“Oh yeah? Then why did I have to prove myself to you at La Casa de Pistolas, when you had already seen me point a fucking hunting rifle at your chest?” Though it was likely that neighbors could hear us through these walls, neither of us could manage to stop yelling. “And, Ash, do you know how fucking insulting it is, that you think I will just stay here, while you go off to do God knows what, like some kind of bonnet-wearing cowboy housewife? While you go off and rescue your friend? Do you know how fucking insulting it is that you thought, when Alex kidnapped me, that I’d just bailed on you without a word and gone all the way back to Boulder? Why did you even bring me along if you thought I was that kind of person?”
“This has nothing to do with you being some...lazy, selfish ‘cowboy housewife,’” Ash defended himself, pitchy with confusion and exhaustion. “This is serious, Izz. It’s not—it’s not just riding on the bike while the sun sets, and it’s not just dying our hair together and exploring abandoned houses. This shit is about to get real, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Was the shit, um, not real when I was pointing my Gat at a federal agent’s head?” I demanded. “Was the shit not real when I was duct-taped to a cot in some old factory? I got myself out of that!”
“Yeah!” Ash cried, stalking forward. His skin was drawn tight over his face, his eyes manic and wild with emotion. “You got yourself out of it, but I got you into it! Did you ever think that maybe I’m tired of pulling you into my bullshit? Maybe I don’t want to be the reason you end up in the hospital?” For a moment, we stared back and forth, only a few inches separating our faces. My heart pounded, and my breath came fast, but the pause allowed the tension between us to slacken a crucial inch. Ash’s eyes softened. His voice softened. “We’re in fucking Juarez, Izz…”
I glared at him thoughtfully. The emotions were unwinding, but I still wasn’t going to let him win. “You think I’m so innocent,” I told him. “But I’m not. And I know that’s what you love about me…” I took a deep breath and considered revealing everything I’d been keeping pinned up inside. My past was always a secret for me to keep, not just from Ash, but from the world. That had been the way I’d lived for over two years now. But I couldn’t keep hiding from him. I couldn’t keep secrets from him. Not if he was only in love with me because he believed my lies. “…but the woman you love? The innocent, doting farmhand from Colorado?” My eyes clouded with a tremulous layer of hot tears. “She doesn’t exist, Ash.” I exhaled shakily and let them drop down my cheeks.
Ash reached out and cupped my face in his hands, brushing either thumb over the wet marks. “What are you talking about?” he whispered tenderly.
“Isabelle Turner,” I answered, my voice clotted with grief. “She’s not the daughter of two sweet old ranchers in Boulder. Isabelle Turner is originally from—well—all over. Isabelle Turner was born to an unwed teenager in Chicago. I don’t remember my mom. I got taken by the state pretty quickly, because she wasn’t taking care of me, and I was put into the system. You know. Foster care. I bounced around from house to house for the next ten years…and I got into running drugs when I was fourteen. I don’t just mean that I got into running drugs—I mean, you know that a lot more goes with ‘running drugs’ than just running drugs; it’s a lifestyle. I was using, I was having sex, I’d disappear for days, I was holding bags for people, driving guns over the state line for people, and on, and on, and on… I mean, damn, Ash. I’ve been shot before. And it had nothing to do with you. I was sixteen at the time.” I smiled up at him sadly. It was nice while it lasted, I thought. “And I was taken in by the Turner family when I was seventeen. I had to get relocated after I testified in court for a murder trial. They helped me sober up. They helped me find something to do that wasn’t drugs. I took their name. And then, you met me. Isabelle Turner.”
I looked down, breaking the loving hold his palms had on my jaw. “The woman you thought I was—sweet, and old-fashioned, and country, and virginal—she never existed. I—I’ve never been sweet. I’ve never been old-fashioned. Haven’t been a virgin in six years. Ash…you’d be surprised how well I can han
dle myself in a big, ugly city. Because that’s where I came from.” I shrugged and stepped away from him, smiling softly. He probably wouldn’t leave me right away. But the magic would fizzle for him, now that he wasn’t roleplaying some bad-boy-good-girl fantasy in his head anymore. He wouldn’t leave today or tonight, but he would start to leave, little by little, very soon.
“You don’t really know me at all, Ash,” I whispered. I wanted to cry more, but I held the tears inside. “It’s been less than a month since we met. Everything you thought you knew was part-lie…and part-daydream.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Ashton
I stared at Isabelle sideways, unsure of how exactly to proceed in this conversation. It was clear that she felt very passionately that she was a liar up till now, and that I wouldn’t want the real Izz, but—how, exactly, to break this to her?
“Ahem. Okay. Isabelle?” I called to her. She raised her bleak hazel eyes, glassy with tears, to mine. “I’ve known you weren’t some brainless Pollyanna since the moment we met. Do you even remember how we met?”
Isabelle peered back at me blankly, as if her mind simply couldn’t accept the words. I couldn’t blame her. I’d had a good childhood…and I couldn’t imagine how it felt to go from family to family in foster care, or how it felt to be taken from your birth mother for negligence or abuse. How that kind of thing might impact someone formatively. “You were pointing a gun at me,” I reminded her warmly. “I’ve been figuring you out ever since I first laid eyes on you, Izz, because—” I came up short and cleared my throat, suddenly dizzy with the impact of the words. “I’ve been figuring out you ever since I first laid eyes on you because I’ve been falling in love with you.”
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