Chapter 10
Was she too late?
The thought crept into her mind as she slowed around the bend that led to the mansion she shared with Bobby. On the road ahead, a caravan of dark SUVs with black-tinted windows turned into their driveway. She sucked in a breath as she counted the vehicles. Four of them.
“Think Remi. Think.” As the last SUV disappeared behind the gates, she drove past the house.
It was impossible to see who was getting out of the cars.
The house was perched on one of the highest cliffs in the neighborhood, with long rows of manicured hedges behind the stone and wrought iron gate that blocked every view of the property on the other side.
A privacy hedge to beat all others. For all his work in security, Bobby refused to install surveillance cameras.
Their security system consisted of motion sensors, but there was no way to see who was breaching the perimeter.
Right about now, she was grateful for that decision.
She didn’t know who was visiting her husband this late at night, but she knew better than to walk in unannounced. If she had any chance of saving Bobby from the death list, she had to find out who he was meeting first. Better that they didn’t know she was here to warn him of his fate.
Gripping the steering wheel tighter, she steered the half mile along their property and turned into the servants’ entrance. She knew where to park to get to the closest trail back to the house.
She pulled up next to a copse of sea grape trees and cut the engine.
She stayed still, both hands wrapped tight around the steering wheel. She could hear her father’s voice in her head, telling her to go to the farm and stay there. Let other people handle Bobby. Let Bobby live with whatever choices had put his name on the death list.
But she couldn’t do that.
Bobby was her husband. One of her oldest and dearest friends. Her rock during so many of the roughest times of her life. Whatever fractures were inside their imperfect marriage, it didn’t change the fact that she couldn’t imagine living in a world that didn’t include him.
Getting out, she shut the door as quietly as she could. The quickest path to the back terrace cut through a stretch of half-cleared landscaping where the grounds crew had been hacking away at the overgrowth before she’d left this morning.
The baby goat she’d delivered felt like a lifetime ago.
She moved instinctively through the humid darkness of the jungle.
A testament to working on her family’s farm in the Basil Mountains for over a decade.
Nature felt as home to her as breathing.
She ducked beneath a low-hanging branch without breaking stride and navigated the packed earth between root systems by feel alone.
Predawn rounds herding goats through the mountain pastures had trained her to read the trees and ground the way other people read faces.
She rushed along the narrow trail. Elephant ear leaves and overgrown ginger stalks pressed against her bare arms. The air was dense with the smell of cut green and damp soil.
Her heart pounded in her chest, partly from the physical exertion and partly from fear of what she’d find when she got to the house.
She prayed Bobby was okay. He was savvy and resourceful.
Maybe he’d requested a meeting to negotiate his way off the death list. He wouldn’t be the first.
Remi inhaled as slivers of the house came into view.
Two machetes lay discarded at the base of a breadfruit tree where the crew had left them at the end of their shift, the wide blades dull with sap and flecked with soil.
The rear of the house was dark except for a warm amber glow from the living room.
Two of the four massive glass panels had been pushed back into their wall pockets, leaving a wide gap between the terrace and the interior.
She gazed at the familiar setting. A cream sectional flanked by low teak tables.
The abstract painting by the renowned artist Quark took up an entire wall.
It was the kind of home designed to blur boundaries.
Indoors gave way to outdoors. Comfort masqueraded as luxury.
Everything sleek and expensive, yet appearing effortless.
Bobby stood with one hand braced against the back of the sofa.
She could only see his profile, but that was enough to know he was a wreck.
His shirt was wrinkled, the buttons forced into the wrong holes.
There was no cocky swagger. The dry irreverence and amused, don’t-give-a-fuck edge was missing.
His jaw was tight, face tense in a way she’d never seen.
He was an animal pushed into a corner, searching for a way not to become the prey.
Keeping to the shadows, she moved off the path and into the cover of a broad limestone column where the terrace met the house.
Its polished flagstone deck stretched before her, decorated with massive stone planter boxes filled with white frangipani that perfumed the air.
Pressing near the open glass doors, she held her breath as the low murmur of voices grew louder.
“Sorry? You’re sorry?” Bobby laughed once. A raw and ugly sound. “You came to my house to tell me I’m a dead man, and you want me to what? Forgive you in the last hours I’m alive before a legion of assassins hunts me down on your family’s behalf. Fuck you!”
On your family’s behalf.
Whoever was inside was definitely part of the PC-5 cartel.
Remi stilled her breath and listened closer.
“You’ve always been like family to us.” A deep voice responded calmly, unfazed by Bobby’s outburst. “Simeon and I have always done everything we could to help you stay in good standing within the organization.”
“And you didn’t make it easy,” another male voice responded, similar to the first, but smoother. “Ever.”
Like family to us … Simeon …
Could it be?
Remi moved closer toward the opening, peeking around the edge into the living room.
Two men stood across from Bobby. They occupied the room with the practiced ease of men who controlled whatever space they entered.
Dressed in tailored trousers and crisp white shirts buttoned at the collar and the wrists, despite the evening Caribbean humidity.
The men had to be the Marengo brothers.
Remi had never met them before, but like most men in the direct bloodline of the PC-5 founders, their reputations preceded them.
Simeon and Ronnie Marengo were senior partners at Terranova & Associates, a prestigious law firm that also served as the legal infrastructure for the island cartel.
They drafted the contracts that made PC-5 business look legitimate, defended arrested members with ferocity, and structured the shell companies that kept PC-5 operations invisible to the island feds.
And Bobby had known the brothers since they were all toddlers. His mother worked for the Marengos for decades as a house manager, supervising the housekeeping staff. He’d practically grown up with Simeon and Ronnie, but had cut ties with them a long time ago.
Or so he’d told her.
“Come on, Sim! Like the two of you made it easy for me?” Bobby spat back, his face flushing bright red.
“Every request you made, I delivered what you asked for. I stole files before they got into the wrong hands. I kept your family from knowing what the two of you were up to, and this is how you repay me? Letting my name get on the death list! That’s bullshit, and both of you know it. ”
The realization settled slowly into her.
The Marengos were in her living room, and her husband was talking to them like he was one of them.
Because he was.
Bobby had never left the PC-5.
He’d lied to her all this time.
All the careful reassurances that she was safe with him because he was no longer the man he’d been. Every insistence that the PC-5 was behind him, that the money was clean, that the life they had now was real. They were free of their gang-connected pasts. Done with that world.
It had all been … lies.
Remi pressed her back against the stone and closed her eyes.
Her pulse hammered in her throat. She needed to breathe.
She needed to think. Insiders only made it to the death list if they’d betrayed the cartel.
Is that what Bobby had done? Maybe he was trying to get free of them.
Trying to get intel to hand over to the PIIB and get out for good …
but the PC-5 caught him before he could?
“What’s bullshit is your selective memory,” Ronnie said, closing the distance between him and Bobby. “You were always brilliant, but your arrogance made you reckless and sloppy.”
“And who was right there to get you out of trouble every single time?” Simeon asked.
“You haven’t begun to repay us. Let’s compare who owes who the most, shall we?
” Simeon paced in front of the sectional as if he were preparing opening arguments for a court case.
“You couldn’t possibly have forgotten the Jamaican Operation, could you? ”
Remi’s fingernails scraped the stone beneath her as her knees buckled.
The Jamaican Operation.
She knew those words all too well. They lived in her body.
In the scars that covered her abdomen and back, wrapping around her hips in deep gashes and ridges that no surgery had been able to smooth.
In the empty space where her child had been growing before the Jamaican cartel enforcers found her and took everything.
They couldn’t be talking about the same thing.
Bobby was the one who found her in the house, lying in pools of her blood. Dying. He’d saved her.
But how had he known to come? Had she ever asked him? Or had she been too grateful to focus on the unlikely rescue?
Bobby’s face blanched as he turned away from them. He pressed his hands against the back of his skull as he expelled heavy breaths.
Simeon said, “You went rogue and disobeyed direct orders?—”
“I did what you told me to do!” Bobby spun around and faced the two men. “I found out who the mole was and handed the name over.”
“To the Jamaicans,” Ronnie said, as if he were speaking to someone who had trouble comprehending a simple point. “Not us.”
“Don’t pretend that move was for our benefit. Handing over that undercover agent was too hard to resist, wasn’t it?” Simeon asked. “You broke protocol for your own selfish reasons. We all know that and we all know why.”
Remi slid to the concrete, pressing her trembling hands against her mouth.
Found out who the mole was …
Handing over the undercover agent …
Everett.
They were talking about Everett’s last undercover op with the DEA.
The one where his cover got blown.
Bobby did that?
He was the one who found out about Everett’s undercover assignment in the Jamaican cartel.
He had given the Jamaican cartel Everett’s identity.
She clenched her eyes shut, trying to organize what she’d heard into a shape her mind could manage, process, and understand.
Why would he do that? They’d all been the closest of friends.
Maybe Everett and Bobby were the least close, but they'd all run in the same tight circle since they were pre-teens.
Same poker nights. Same beach cookouts. Same arguments about nothing that stretched past midnight.
Bobby and Everett had shared all those moments because the friends they both loved kept pulling them into the same orbit.
How could he have betrayed Everett that way? Knowing what that would do to the operation. Knowing that it could get him killed?—
“And because you did, the Jamaicans went after the wrong person to get their revenge,” Ronnie said.
The wrong person …
The words banged in her brain, triggering intense pain.
Bobby staggered backward, sinking down onto the couch. His hands dropped between his knees, fingers interlocked, knuckles white.
“They weren’t supposed to go after … her.”