Promises to Keep

by Maegan Beaumont

  She paused for a moment. “The journey the king sent the boy on was to another kingdom, this one ruled by an evil tyrant. This tyrant saw what the princess’s father had built and wanted it for himself, and he was willing to start a war to get it. It was the boy’s job to persuade him otherwise.” She shook her head. “But the evil tyrant would not be persuaded. He took the boy and did terrible things to him until the princess was certain she’d never see him again. The princess begged her father to rescue the boy, and so he in turn begged for the boy’s return. The evil king agreed. The father sent two of his knights into the wicked kingdom to bring the boy home … but while the evil king had agreed to return the boy, he never said he would return him alive.”

  Michael could still hear the thick plastic beneath his boots, the way it crinkled when he shifted. Could feel the wet weight of the knife in his hand, blood dripping off his wrist while he worked it through the thick meat of the boy’s neck—hating himself for what he was doing but unable to stop. Unable to change the path he’d set himself upon.

  “The evil tyrant kept a pet—a fierce dragon whose taste for blood was only rivaled by its love for his master’s wife and child … ” Pia tilted her head, a beatific smile, tinged black, playing across her lips. “Can you guess what happens next, Cartero?”

  “I killed your boyfriend.” Michael leaned forward, closing his hands around the pen he’d placed on the table. “Me. Not Sabrina and sure as hell not the hundreds of kids you’ve kidnapped and sold to pedophiles over the past three years. Where’s your fucked-up fairy tale excuse for that one?”

  “If the princess doesn’t get her happily ever after, then neither does the dragon.” She flicked her gaze upward, casting it past him. “I’m finished here.”

  Without warning, something thick and unyielding was dropped in front of him and tightened quickly around his neck. Michael’s counter-moves, born from instinct and muscle memory, were fast. His right hand shot up, grabbing the belt before it tightened around his throat even as his left hand swept across his chest, twisting in his seat to drive the Montblanc into the meat of the guard’s outer thigh. Michael rocketed out of the chair before the guard had a chance to scream. He shot straight up, crashing the top of his skull into the underside of the man’s jaw, breaking teeth and cutting off his only chance to cry for help.

  The blow loosened the guard’s grip on the belt, allowing him to pull it free. Stepping behind him, Michael slipped the belt around the guard’s throat, drawing it taut as he fell to the ground. Planting his polished dress shoe in the center of the guard’s chest, he gave the belt a vicious yank, snapping his neck in two.

  The entire episode took less than ten seconds.

  Pia sat staring at him, her smug look cooling into one of defiance and disbelief. She watched as he rolled the guard over to retrieve what he knew had to be there. A .22 with an attached suppressor was tucked into the small of his back, hidden by his gun belt. “Should have just had him shoot me.” He pulled the gun and held it up.

  She glared at him. “But then I wouldn’t have been able to look you in the eyes while you died.”

  “Best laid plans, right?” He shook his head, pulling the guard’s keys off his belt. “What was the plan—kill me, plant the gun? Make it look like I was hired to kill you?”

  She licked her lips, a nervous gesture that told him that this was it. The entire sum of her botched revenge fantasy lay crumpled at his feet. “People know you’re here. If you kill me—”

  “Let me guess … Estefan Reyes?” He smiled. “Trust me when I tell you he doesn’t care about you.” He stood slowly, the extended barrel of the .22 pointed at her chest. “Matter of fact, I’d be willing to bet he’s hoping I kill you.”

  She must’ve heard the truth in his words because she held up her hands, the cuffs that secured her to the table sliding along her slender wrists. “I’m a defenseless woman, Michael. You couldn’t kill me three days ago, and you won’t kill me now.”

  “You forget, I’m not the knight in shining armor in your story,” he said, thumbing the safety off. “I’m the dragon, and there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do—no one I wouldn’t kill—to keep what I love safe.”

  Seventy-Four

  Cofre del Tesoro, Colombia

  September 2012

  Michael looked at his watch and swore under his breath. Estefan was late.

  Again.

  “You shouldn’t curse,” Christina chirped at him from the high stool she perched on, legs swinging in haphazard circles. They’d been waiting in the ballroom that Reyes had turned into an indoor training facility for nearly an hour now, and he was seconds away from walking out.

  Without warning, one of the floor-to-ceiling doors swung open and Estefan sauntered in.

  Michael watched him stroll across the parquet floor to the center of the room where he stood. “And your brother should be more respectful of other people’s time,” he said, barely able to hide his contempt.

  Estefan smirked, making a point of reaching down to close his zipper before wiping at the corner of his mouth. “Sorry. I was busy.”

  Like father, like son. There were nearly two dozen household staff members on the island—all of them women and none of them over the age of twenty. They wore uniforms and performed the basic functions of housekeepers, laundresses, and cooks, but to live and work for Alberto Reyes meant you were his for the taking or giving as he saw fit. In the years since Estefan had become a permanent fixture on the island, he’d followed in his father’s footsteps in more ways than one.

  Late-afternoon rain slashed against the wide windows, the sound of it a ceaseless drumming. “Go to your room and wait for me there, Christina,” he said quietly.

  The little girl jumped down from her stool. “But—”

  He shot her a look over his shoulder that killed her budding protest. “No buts, just do what I say,” he told her before turning around to look at her brother. “This isn’t gonna take long.”

  Christina nodded, moving toward the door at a snail’s pace, casting looks over her shoulder at him as she went. As soon as she was gone and the door was closed behind her, Michael pulled his tactical knife from the sheath strapped to his thigh. He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to five. “Your hour’s almost up,” he said, cocking his chin at the knife Estefan kept in a holster at his hip. “But I think I can still squeeze in a lesson.”

  “Three years we’ve been doing this, Cartero,” Estefan said, pulling his knife while he circled slowly to the left. “I think I’ve learned just about all I can from you.”

  Michael followed suit, the hilt of his blade held casually. “Oh, I can think of a few things I can still teach you. Common decency, for starters.”

  Estefan laughed. “El Cartero wants to teach me decency?” His blade whipped out, slicing an arc through the space between them. He was fast, but Michael was faster; the kid caught nothing but air.

  “Someone should.” He sidestepped another attack, countering with a downward strike with the tip of his knife, a shallow cut at Estefan’s wrist.

  The kid hissed, yanking his wrist back, face twisted with hatred. “And that someone is you? When did you become a hero, Cartero?” He lunged again, and Michael stepped into it, taking the wound—a deep slice across his shoulder—as if he’d asked for it. The pain cleared his mind and allowed him to focus.

  “Refraining from strong-arming the help into giving me a blowjob in the laundry room doesn’t make me a hero,” he said, sidestepping another attack. “It makes me a man who doesn’t have to force women to have sex with me.” Using Estefan’s own momentum against him, Michael jerked his knee upward, crashing it into the kid’s face with enough force to drop him like a sack of dirt.

  Estefan rolled onto his back, his face painted with blood, contorted by rage and humiliation. “Whoever said it was the maid I’ve been fucking?” He looked at him, sittin
g up to mop the back of his hand across his face.

  The implication of his words rang clear. There was only one woman on the island who was not a part of the household staff.

  Lydia.

  He thought of her face the last time he’d seen her. It had been less than a month ago, but it seemed longer than that. How scared she was, hopeless, her hands pressed against her protruding belly. He understood now. It wasn’t Alberto she was afraid of. Not entirely.

  “What did you do?” he said quietly, staring down at the young man on the floor beneath him, a sick feeling slithering around in his belly, so cold he was surprised he couldn’t see his breath.

  Estefan looked up at him. “It’s not what I did, Cartero. It’s what I’ve been doing. With her.”

  Something shifted inside him. That cold slithering thing wrapping itself tight. Heating up. Settling in. “Get up.” Michael circled him slowly, shifting his grip on the blade from defensive to an offensive position. “Your lesson’s not over.”

  “Sometimes she cries.” Estefan stood, tracking his movements with small flat eyes. “She thinks I don’t notice, but I do,” he said, his tone edged in something ugly. “I know it’s not my father she cries for, so it must be you.” He grinned, blood smeared across his bright-white teeth. “I’ve had her many times, Cartero. I wonder … how many times has my stepmother spread her legs for you?”

  A strange sound came out of him, a strangled growl that propelled him forward, directly into the path of Estefan’s attack. The blade slipped into the meat of his left shoulder, scraping bone, slicing muscle.

  He didn’t even feel it. He just kept coming.

  Michael dropped his shoulder before twisting it away, forcing Estefan to relinquish his hold on the knife still embedded in his flesh. His right hand rocketed past Estefan’s defenses, latching around his throat, thumb pressed into the pocket of nerves nestled behind his ear so hard his eyelids began to flutter.

  Dropping his own knife into its sheath, Michael reached over and pulled Estefan’s knife from his shoulder and showed it to him before pressing its tip into the corner of his eye. “I believe,” he said, drawing the razor-sharp edge down the length of his face, the thick, heavy blade exposing the muscle beneath the river of blood that coursed down his cheek, “I made you a promise. Something about laying you open and watching you bleed.”

  It took everything Michael had not to angle the blade across his throat. Instead he dropped Estefan onto the hard floor, taking a step back to watch him wail and writhe.

  “Class dismissed,” he said, stepping over him on his way out the door.

  Seventy-Five

  Sabrina cast a glance over Reyes’s shoulder at his son, trying to decide if this had been his plan all along. Trying to formulate a plan of her own if shit went south.

  “Why is she bleeding?” Reyes said, casting his glance along with hers. Looking to his son for an explanation.

  For a moment she thought he was referring to the bruise and busted lip he’d given her earlier, but then she felt the wet trickle against her neck and she swiped at it. The bullet graze from the hospital. It must’ve reopened when she and the guard had gone a round in the hallway.

  Estefan stood, his insolent manner instantly replaced by one of respect that bordered on reverence. “When I happened upon her, she was in the hallway with Eduardo. They were … fighting.”

  “And you thought to bring her into my office?” Reyes spoke to his son while continuing to scrutinize her, looking for cracks he could dig his fingers into.

  “She was visibly upset. I thought a quick drink would calm her,” Estefan said, the lie so smooth she almost believed it herself.

  Reyes reached out, cupping her neck to angle her jaw so that he could get a better look. She had to fight to stop herself from jerking out from under his grasp. “Was it Eduardo who injured you, Sabrina?”

  He was close—too close. She wasn’t ready. She still had no idea where they were holding Leo. Even if she managed, by some miracle, to kill both Reyes and his son, she’d never find the boy. Not before she was killed.

  Now ain’t the time, darlin’. Be cool.

  She wiped at her neck again, angling herself away from Reyes. The blood had gone thick, tacky under her fingers. “It’s just a wound that’s reopened. No big deal.”

  “But he touched you, yes?” He smiled at her reluctance to point fingers. “It’s okay. The truth is all that’s required.”

  Looking past him, she found the clock perched on his desk. It was 8:55. “I’d like to go back to my room now.”

  Reyes chuckled, letting go of her chin to take a step back. “Of course. It’s getting late.” He looked at his son. “You know what to do.”

  Estefan nodded. “Yes, father,” he said, his gaze passing over her before he left.

  Reyes swept his arm in a grand gesture. “Please, allow me to escort you,” he said, playing the part of perfect gentleman instead of sadistic murderer.

  Swallowing the shitty remark that bubbled in her throat, Sabrina forced her mouth into a cool smile. “Thank you.”

  They walked side by side, quiet, while she fought the urge to look at him.

  “I spoke with Cartero last evening,” he told her. “It won’t be long until he comes for you.”

  “You mean it won’t be long before you kill me, don’t you?” she said, careful to keep her tone conversational.

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t behave in a civilized manner until then, does it?” He smiled at her, glancing at his watch. “We have a few minutes left. Come to the window, there is something I wish you to see,” he said, turning the knob beneath his hand to usher her inside.

  The room was as she’d left it save for the fact that the heavy velvet drapes were drawn away from the windows, the carefully manicured lawn brightly lit beyond it.

  Eduardo knelt in the grass facing the window, no more than ten yards away. He was close enough that the terror written on his face was stark and visible through the glass between them. When he saw her, his mouth began to move rapidly, but the windowpane was too thick to allow the passing of sound.

  Estefan stood behind him, the 9mm in his hand pressed into the base of the man’s skull.

  “Let’s play a game,” Reyes said beside her, and for just a moment, it was Wade who stood beside her. Wade who wanted to play.

  Don’t go there, darlin’. Stay sharp now.

  “I don’t like games,” she said quietly. “They usually prove too complicated for my tastes.”

  “Yes … you are a simple creature, aren’t you?” He brushed his fingertips along her collarbone, smearing her own blood across her skin. “This game is as simple as they come. It has only one rule: when I ask you a question, you tell the truth,” he said, settling his gaze on her face. “My son said that when he happened upon you and Eduardo in the hall, you were fighting. Is that true?”

  She looked up at Estefan. He was watching her.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  She flicked her gaze toward the man kneeling on the lawn. “I wanted to use the bathroom before returning to my room. He wanted me to wait.”

  “And so you fought?” He all but purred the words into her ear.

  Don’t look at him, darlin’.

  “Yes.”

  “Was it he who put his hands on you first, Sabrina?”

  “No,” she said, turning to look him in the eye, despite Wade’s warning echoing inside her head. “You were when you bitch-slapped me earlier. Technically, he’s the second.”

  He smiled widely as if the memory of it bonded them together. “Let me rephrase. During your altercation with Eduardo, was it he who decided to use his hands first?”

  She remembered how he’d grabbed her arm to try to move her along. “Yes.”

  “And you warned him not to touch you, but he didn’t listen
.” There was an excited edge to his voice. One that unsettled her.

  “Yes.” She looked away from him then, unable to stomach another second of eye contact between them.

  “And you struck back.” He touched her again, trailed his fingers along the length of her arm until he found her hand, caressing the back of it. “You hit him. Injured him.”

  She fought the urge to yank her hand away from his. “Yes.”

  “If I were to put my hands on you … if I were to hurt you, would you try to kill me?”

  A howling wind took up inside her head, one that rattled her bones and clouded her vision. She curled her free hand into a fist but kept her head turned straight ahead, staring into the middle space between her and the man who knelt before her on the lawn. “Yes.”

  “Even if it meant the death of both you and little Leo?”

  God help her … “Yes.”

  Reyes laughed, the sound of it obscene as it slithered into her ear. “I believe you.”

  Some unseen signal passed through the window between father and son, and the trigger was pulled. The 9mm round rocketed through Eduardo’s skull to burst through his eye socket, spraying blood and brain across the bright green of the grass.

  “The only thing I tolerate less than disobedience is lies.” He tightened his grip on her hand until it almost hurt. “What were you doing in my office, Sabrina?”

  She kept her eyes trained on some fixed point beyond the window. The LCP tucked into her boot bit hard into her ankle. Reyes’s thumb brushed against the inside of her wrist, the bracelet Michael had given her shifting against her skin, and for a moment she was sure he knew what it really was.

  “Your son took me into your office and offered me a drink like he said. I accepted and after I used the toilet, I flushed and then washed my hands.” She forced herself to look at him again, allowing herself to be caught in the flat, emotionless dark of his eyes. “I was just finishing up when you knocked.”

  He smiled. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Reyes leaned into her, pressing his mouth against hers. His tongue snaked out to run itself along the cut his earlier blow had drawn across her lip, the pressure of it igniting a hissing sting against her mouth. Before she had time to react, Reyes had pulled away and was moving toward the door. “Good night, Sabrina,” he said as he pulled it closed.