20. Eve
20
EVE
T here’s a voice trying to reach me. It’s urgent and scared. Something blunt and persistent is tapping on my shoulder, but I don’t want to open my eyes just yet. There’s a dream waiting for me down here, and it might be the best one ever. He’s smiling. I’ve never seen him do that before, and it’s a good smile—an easy smile. There’s no dark, only light. It’s just him and me, together.
“Se?orita Eve… Please, oh please wake up, my princesa. They’re coming, they’re coming!”
The voice is growing ever more insistent. It’s impossible to ignore, and the pressure on my arm is starting to hurt.
With a moan of frustration, I force my eyelids open. I can tell something’s wrong right away. It’s nighttime. My room should be shrouded in darkness and fringed with moonlight. Instead, the walls are flickering with red and amber shadows, and my nostrils are filled with a sharp and pungent odor.
Fire! The compound is burning!
I sit bolt upright as the noise of gunfire shatters the stillness. The silhouette of a small figure flings herself onto my chest and smothers my face in a glossy river of hair. She smells of lavender, and her cheeks are damp with tears. I can feel the wetness against my skin.
“Oh, se?orita. Oh, thank the Lord!”
“Sofía? Stop… I can’t breathe,” I wheeze, pushing at her shoulders. She releases her hold on me and crouches down on the floor next to the bed. My mouth is dry, and my head is thick with sleep. I smack my hand against the nightstand, searching blindly for my water and the lamp switch. “Let me just—”
“No!” she hisses, pulling my hand away. I can feel her body trembling beneath her grip. “They’ll see us. We must stay hidden in the dark.”
The next thing I know, she’s thrusting my glass at me—the water spilling over the sides and soaking the bedsheet.
“Shit! Who will? What’s happening?” I can’t see her expression, but I can smell the acridity of her fear beneath the lavender. She’s clutching what looks like a rosary in her right hand, and she keeps twisting the beads around her fingers.
“We have to hide. Terrible men are coming to hurt us.” Fear grips at me tighter than her embrace. “They’re evil men, se?orita. You must get up.”
I jerk my legs out of bed, spilling even more water. I can feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins as strong and intense as any drug. What bad men? Does she mean Dante’s enemies?
The roar of an explosion sounds somewhere in the distance. There’s angry shouting and another round of gunfire. This time it’s coming from the beach close to my balcony. Moments later, there’s a loud crash against my bedroom door and we both scream in fright.
“It’s me, Manuel,” hisses a voice as the young guard bursts into the room with a machine gun slung over his left shoulder and another weapon strapped to his hip. His dark eyes are glittering in the dark, soaking up the fiery colors from outside. “We go now,” he urges. “We have minutes.”
He takes another step closer, and I let out a cry of horror. The light is casting a low glow over the rest of his face. I can see the heavy bruising around both eye sockets and all the way down one side of his jaw.
Please tell me that wasn’t Dante’s doing. Oh God, where is he? Where is he?
Manuel glances down at my naked body, and then looks away in haste. Embarrassed, I grab the loose sheet. Dante’s definitely going to murder him for that.
“Please hurry, se?oritas,” he repeats, keeping his head turned. “They are nearly at the house.”
“Who are, Manuel?”
“I tell you later…when you are safe.” He’s losing his patience. Now isn’t the time for my tenaciousness.
“Sofía—I need a T-shirt and skirt…pants…anything you can find.”
She springs to her feet and dashes across the bedroom to the closet. I promised Dante I’d keep safe for him. But is he keeping safe for me?
She returns with the items and Manuel spins around again to let me dress. I snap my bra into place and yank the T-shirt over my head as my thoughts scatter like atoms. I have no stream of collective consciousness, just broken fragments of phrases and words: Must hide…Dante…this is just a bad dream…I want to go home…
At the last minute, I grab his flick knife from the nightstand and tuck it into the front of my bra like he showed me.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’ll never know what I’m truly capable of until someone tries to steal my life from me.
“Come,” says Manuel, jogging towards the door. “There is a place where we can hide.” He touches Sofía’s arm as he passes. “Ramirez told me about it. We need to go straight there. It is Se?or Dante’s underground bunker.”
“Dante has an underground bunker?” I say, pouncing on his words.
He nods slowly. “The entrance is downstairs through the library.”
“But I know every inch of this place, Manuel. I’ve been locked inside this goddamn prison for days. There is no entrance to a bunker there.”
He frowns at the uncertainty in my voice. “Only Se?or Dante and Se?or Grayson knew about it. Se?or Dante told Rodrigo yesterday before he boarded his aircraft.”
I grind to a halt again, and the soft bulk of Sofía smacks into my left shoulder. “Sorry, se?orita,” she mutters.
Is this where Dante’s been hiding his clothes and possessions from me? How could I have lain so close to his secrets and not known?
All of a sudden, my thirst for knowledge is superseding everything. I need to unmask my enigma for who and what he really is .
“Take us there,” I say, rushing over to him.
“We go now.” He steps out into the hallway, unslinging his gun from his shoulder and clicking off the safety. Another explosion rocks the foundations of the house. Sofía lets out a muffled sob and Manuel curses. “Get down,” he orders, and we fall to our knees in unison.
“Who’s doing this?” I plead again. “Who’s attacking Dante’s compound?”
He doesn’t answer, but in the gloom of the hallway I catch a look between him and Sofía.
My eyes are beginning to adjust to the lack of light as we make our way downstairs, keeping our bodies low and discreet, like creatures slithering against the wall in the darkness.
Crossing the lobby, we take the second of four doors—the entrance to Dante’s library. Here, I have a clear view of sector six from the windows. What I see opens me up to the danger of our situation. There are flames licking at the roof of the nearest barrack, darkening the corrugated metal ridges with their scorching intensity.
Dante’s enemies will show me no mercy.
Like Dante will show no mercy to them.
I hurry over to join Manuel and Sofia by a bookcase covering the length of one wall. He’s whispering instructions in Spanish as they run their fingers along the lip of each shelf.
“What are you looking for?”
“A button, a lever…some sort of mechanism.”
“Here, let me help you.”
Manuel pulls out a flashlight from his back pocket and hands it to me. “Keep it low,” he mutters.
“And you’re sure it’s in this room?” There’s doubt in my voice again as I run my own fingers along the wood. There are no indentations, no telltale fissure. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that a door is concealed here.
Has Manuel been given the wrong information? Sofía seems to be thinking along the same lines. She starts gibbering away at him in panicked Spanish. The gunfire is right outside the front door.
“How many men did Dante leave behind?”
“Twenty,” comes the bleak response.
Only twenty?
Someone knew our situation.
Someone’s taking advantage.
Just then my fingers encounter a smooth, metal disc set deep within the wood of the third shelf. Holding my breath, I press down and a low mechanical hum sounds from behind the bookcase.
“Watch out,” Manuel yelps, grabbing my arm and pulling me backward as a narrow door flies open in my direction. It’s metal-plated and at least ten inches thick, and he manages to grab hold of it right before it smacks me in the face.
There’s no time to lose. Unfamiliar voices are inside the house, and I can hear their heavy footsteps on the stairs. Outside, the gunfire is waning. It’s sporadic and unfocused, like the dying embers of a flame. Dante’s men are losing this battle. Our only hope of staying alive is in this bunker.
I feel a hand on my shoulder guiding me into the yawning black. My flashlight jerks and steadies to reveal three stone steps leading down to a passageway and an elevator. Behind us, Manuel swings the concealed door back into place. I feel another frisson of panic as the locking mechanism connects with a soft clunk, and the damp walls start closing in on me.
“Quickly,” he says, bounding down the steps and ushering us toward the elevator. He smacks his hand against a button set into the wall and the doors spring open. Bright strobes flicker on over our heads, and then we’re plunging down into the great unknown.
I glance at my fellow passengers on this strange, wild ride. Manuel is standing tall with his machine gun, his finger held lightly on the trigger. His battered face looks even worse in this light. Sofía is still wearing her nightdress and is shivering like a leaf left out in the storm. Her pretty face is streaked with mascara, and her eyes are glassy with unshed tears. No one says a word. I know they’re both avoiding my gaze.
“Okay guys, start talking,” I say, snapping the silence in half. My voice is weirdly steady, considering what the hell is going down right now.
Sofía stares at the floor. Manuel tries to grit his jaw and winces.
“Tell me!” I cry, as fear and exhaustion collide in a raw mess of emotion. This isn’t my war, but Dante’s chosen to put me frontline of it anyway. “I need to know what’s going on. I need to know everything.”
“Se?or Dante’s brother,” mumbles Manuel earning himself a sharp look from Sofía. “We need to tell her…”
She shakes her head. “You heard what Se?or Dante said. He’ll kill you this time, Manuel.” I watch her pleading with him with wide, scared eyes.
“What did Dante say?” I focus on Manuel, who’s clearly the looser-lipped of the two.
“That we were to never speak about what this place is. Not around you.”
I digest this with more than a trickle of apprehension. “Tell me about his brother.”
“Se?or Emilio—”
“Emilio? The guy in Colombia?”
Manuel shrugs.
“Okay,” I say, trying to hold onto the last semblance of my patience as the elevator slows its descent. “Why does Emilio want to destroy Dante’s compound?”
“He’s a bad man, se?orita,” squeaks Sofía. “ All bad. Not just a little bad like Se?or Dante.”
A ghost of a smile touches my lips. “But isn’t he meant to be halfway to Colombia to meet with him…” I trail off as a terrible realization dawns.
Holy shit.
“Emilio’s double-crossing Dante, isn’t he?”
Manuel nods and I see the rage flaring in his eyes on behalf of his betrayed boss. By the time Dante lands in Colombia and realizes what’s happening, his compound will be decimated.
“What does Emilio want? His weapons?”
He gazes at me steadily. “No, se?orita. Se?or Emilio is here for the one thing that Se?or Dante prizes most of all. He is here for you .”
An icy shiver ripples through me. “ Me? But how could he possibly know about… Valentina,” I say with a wail. “She was working for him.”
“Se?or Dante and Se?or Emilio are… were …business partners.” The elevator jerks to a stop.
Business Partners? For some reason these words scare me more than anything else this evening .
Another silence fills the small space, choking and suffocating me as I fight to quell the fresh bubble of panic rising up inside.
“Manuel,” I say, rounding on him again as the doors slide open. “I need to know what business they partnered in. Was it anything to do with mercenary contracts?”
He shakes his head, and my icy shivers increase, tenfold. “They are big bosses, Se?orita Eve. Cartel bosses from South America.”
“What did you say?” My voice sounds little more than a rasp, a fading cry from a bird with a broken wing.
“Narcotics, se?orita. Cocaine.”
I reel sideways, slapping my hand against the side of the elevator to stop myself from falling. The blood is rushing in my ears. “No that’s impossible, he’s a mercenary,” I counter weakly. “He told me he was a mercenary.”
Did he?
I can’t bring myself to ask it. I can’t bring myself to put forth the one question I’ll do anything to escape the answer to, but my lips start moving of their own accord.
“Tell me Dante’s surname.”
I know what they’re going to say. The truth has been there all along, but I chose to tuck it away in the darkest recesses of my mind and allow myself to be swept up in all his Machiavellian beauty. It’s been staring at me from the beginning—the money, the hired guards, the compound, the Colombian connections.
“Santiago, se?orita,” Sofía mutters, dropping her eyes to the floor again. She can’t bear to witness the utter devastation in mine for a second longer. “His name is Dante Santiago.”