The Pagan's Prize (Captive Brides Collection)

by Miriam Minger

  “I’m here now, Maria. Sleep.” Eduardo touched his wife’s tear-stained cheek and this time she didn’t jerk away. The sedative had finally taken effect. As the nurse checked Maria’s pulse, Eduardo waved away the two men who held her. They got off the bed and resumed their posts on opposite sides of the cabin. Eduardo stood, too, and helped the nurse cover his wife with a light blanket.

  He should have left Maria in Monterrey but she had insisted on accompanying him to Texas. No, screamed and ranted was more accurate and given the circumstances, he hadn’t refused her.

  He’d been in Rio de Janeiro with Luisa when Daniel’s bodyguards had reached him. He’d flown through the night and stopped in Monterrey only long enough to pick up Maria. He imagined she’d need a lot more sedation before their trip was done.

  “We’ll be in San Antonio within the hour,” he said to the nurse. “Let me know if she wakes.”

  The stout, middle-aged woman nodded and took a seat by the bed while Eduardo left the cabin and strode to the front of the plane. He sank heavily into a leather chair and stared out the window at a thin layer of clouds. Maria’s tormented cries echoed in his mind, blaming him, haunting him. His face grew hot. His sweating hands clenched into fists.

  Why, Eduardo? Why did you let him go to that camp?

  Rage surged through him as he asked himself the same terrible question. He blamed himself, yes, and he would until the day he died. He blamed his pride in his eleven-year-old son’s genius IQ and how one day Eduardo might use it to suit his ambition. He blamed his arrogance that he could so easily send Daniel under an assumed last name to the United States where they’d like nothing more than to see Eduardo behind bars at a Federal prison, or better yet, dead.

  He blamed others, too, including the incompetent pair of bodyguards he’d sent with Daniel to protect him, and the private tutor who had suggested the exclusive computer camp as the perfect place for his gifted son to spend part of the summer.

  The tutor had already paid in blood for that suggestion, and the bodyguards would pay, too, no matter they had claimed it was an accident and couldn’t have been prevented. The two men had told him over the phone that the back of Daniel’s bus had been hit by one of those huge American semi-trucks. He’d been hurled with another boy out onto the highway while several other children had died in their seats. Yet Daniel hadn’t died, not right away.

  Eduardo groaned under his breath. His gut twisted at the description one of the bodyguards had given him of his injured son.

  Daniel had been unrecognizable, the flesh of his face torn away. He’d been taken to a nearby hospital with internal bleeding and rushed into surgery, where he had died minutes later on the operating table.

  “Mr. Ruiz, may I get you something to drink?” a male flight attendant asked.

  Wrenched from his thoughts, Eduardo lunged out of his seat with an enraged roar. He knocked the startled attendant to the floor where he kicked him until the man was bleeding at the mouth and near senseless.

  Eduardo was sweating profusely and breathing hard when he returned to his seat. He stared out the window again and rubbed his heavily muscled forearm while his personal bodyguard, Carlos, pulled the attendant to his feet and half-carried the man back down the aisle.

  “Did you forget Mr. Ruiz’s orders, fool?” Carlos demanded. “No one was to speak to him. You’re fortunate that you still live.”

  Eduardo didn’t hear a response from the injured flight attendant except moans, and he didn’t expect one. If he heard a word, he was likely to kill the man.

  As the cabin grew quiet but for the dull drone of the jet engines, he focused on the terrain below and wished to hell they were already in San Antonio.

  His son’s body was waiting for him at the Universal Hospital morgue.

  * * *

  “Rebecca, the funeral home just called.”

  Rebecca Garza remained silent as her husband Victor walked further into their son Ramon’s room. She doubted he was surprised that she didn’t answer him.

  She’d spoken little since they had returned home from Universal Hospital the afternoon before. She hadn’t changed her clothes, she hadn’t eaten, and God knows, neither of them had slept. Victor moved up quietly behind her to where she sat at Ramon’s computer desk by the window. He laid his hand on her shoulder and kept his voice low and gentle.

  “Sweetheart, they’ve taken Ramon’s body…they have Ramon at the McAlister-Lorenzo Funeral Home. Remember? I authorized them this morning to go pick him up at the hospital. It’s time we make some arrangements.”

  “I can’t go to that place, Victor.” She glanced down at the Harley-Davidson watch in her hand, her thumb caressing Ramon’s engraved name on the back. The watch face still bore a streak of blood, but she hadn’t the heart to clean it. Victor squeezed her shoulder, but she shook her head.

  “No, I can’t see him again, not like that. His face—you saw it, Victor. There was nothing left that looked like Ramon. And now with what else they’ve done to him…”

  She swallowed hard against the memory of Ramon’s battered body hooked up to life support, his spinal cord severed, his crushed and lacerated facial features unrecognizable. She couldn’t bear to imagine that he could look any worse after the surgery to remove his organs.

  Instead she glanced around the spacious bedroom that had once held so much life and so many boyish interests. Shelves were crammed with brightly painted motorcycle models, computer books, and Little League trophies. A burnt orange and white Texas Longhorn blanket was spread across the bed.

  At eleven years old, Ramon had already known he wanted to attend the University of Texas in Austin, her alma mater. Now that dream was shattered, the finality of his death a crushing reality. Their handsome family was gone along with the perfect life where nothing bad had ever touched them before.

  She and Victor had given Ramon everything two corporate law careers could provide, but no amount of money could have saved his life and spared them from this suffocating grief.

  “He’s our son, Rebecca, our only child.” Victor said, drawing her back from her thoughts. “We must go to him.”

  Rebecca felt her husband stroking the nape of her neck to soothe her, but a thick rush of tears came anyway. “Please, Victor. I don’t want anyone else to see him. Promise me! I want everyone to remember how Ramon was, happy and laughing, not…”

  She jumped up from the chair and buried herself in her husband’s arms, and he held her tight.

  “No one has to see him,” Victor whispered into her hair. “We’ll have a closed casket.“

  “And a picture on top of us at Christmas…when we were all together.”

  “Of course, sweetheart, anything you want.”

  Rebecca pulled away to stare into Victor’s brimming eyes while fresh tears tumbled down her face. Her husband looked older to her, his face haggard, the gray along his temples more pronounced. She could only imagine how haggard she must look, too.

  “I want him back, Victor. I want our son back the way he was!” Her husband couldn’t speak for a long moment and when he finally managed to, his voice was hoarse.

  “I want him back, too. I would have died in his place. But we did the right thing at the hospital. There are kids who’ll get better now and have a healthy life because of Ramon—maybe even some in San Antonio. The doctor said there was a very sick boy on the waiting list for a heart transplant at Universal. I think Ramon would be happy about helping so many—”

  Rebecca pressed her fingertips to his lips and he didn’t say any more. He knew that she agreed with him. They hadn’t hesitated to sign the papers for organ donation, and to honor Ramon they planned to carry cards to designate themselves as organ donors. The gesture was the least they could do in his memory.

  Especially since she’d been such a terrible mother to him at the end.

  She hadn’t wanted to look at him in the ER or even touch his hand. His injuries had turned him into a hideous monster and she had hated he
rself at that moment for even thinking such a thing. When she’d heard there was no hope, she had insisted that Victor take her home at once where they’d awaited the call that the transplant surgery had begun.

  “Forgive me, Ramon,” she whispered. She set the watch on the desk and lifted her eyes to Victor’s.

  “You don’t want Ramon to wear—”

  “No. I want to keep it.”

  Victor said nothing more as Rebecca brushed her fingers across the silver watchband, then she gripped his hand as they left their son’s bedroom.

  She hoped God would forgive her, too.

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