Chapter Three
She should’ve stayed in Albuquerque.
Maggie tried to crane her neck to one side, but something hard and itchy kept her in place. A groan escaped up her throat as a deep ache drilled through her. She was back in her cell. The one that leaked from the exposed pipe overhead. Coming around from another round of interrogation. El Capitan hadn’t killed her yet. Which meant she hadn’t given him what he wanted. Good. She’d hold out as long as she could.
A lightness took hold in her legs, in her back and hips. There wasn’t really any pain there. She just felt...immobile. Maggie tried to curl her fingers into her palms. Pressure, not pinching. A tear burned in her left eye. She could still feel sensation. Not a spinal injury. Strapped to a chair? No. That wasn’t it, either. Her hands were free. Though letting her captors know she was conscious hadn’t worked out for her before, she cracked her eyelids.
Not darkness as she expected. Dim lighting—calming, warm, with a slight airy feeling—highlighted some kind of hospital room. Blackout curtains framed an entire wall of tinted glass to one side. It was dark on the other side. Though middle of the night or engineered that way, she didn’t know. Maggie memorized what she could of the room in the glass’s reflection.
Including the man seated on the opposite side of her bed.
Familiarity seeped into the tension that came so automatically these days. That face. She knew that face. Worn, battle-hardened in a way she’d seen in so many soldiers, but at the same time handsome. Thick, groomed facial hair tried to hide the shape of his jaw. She’d felt it. When he’d held her against his chest. Her forehead had brushed against it. Soft. Softer than she’d expected. It’d been that single second of sensory input that’d kept her from spiraling through the fear. Which, now, seemed ridiculous. She’d been abducted, questioned and tortured for days that had now blurred together. And this man’s facial hair was the only thing that kept her from falling apart at the very end. “Do you know how beautiful you are?”
The operative at her bedside leaned into her peripheral vision. The lines around his eyes had shallowed, and suddenly he seemed years younger. His mouth quirked to one side and accentuated the slight hood over his light eyes. “Doc said she gave you something for the pain. Though it seems she might’ve dosed you a bit too much.”
Embarrassment heated through her. The lightness in her legs and hips. No wonder she couldn’t make sense of her own thoughts. “Where am I?”
“Socorro. Try to take it easy. You’ve been through a lot, but you’re safe here.” A transformation took place in a matter of milliseconds. Where there’d been almost a kind of relief in his expression, there was a guardedness now. As though he’d already said too much. “You remember me?”
“You locked me in your SUV.” Her throat burned with a dryness she’d become used to, but it felt so overwhelming now. Out of place.
His laugh rumbled deep through him. Not of its own accord but dampened. Controlled. The way he ducked his head down to avoid exposure for that break in composure said a lot, too. This was a man constantly on the defense. Always looking for the next threat and calculating how to neutralize it. “Yeah. I might be a little protective of my stuff.”
Splinters of memory returned. Not all at once, but almost like an out-of-order slideshow she’d never want to sit through. Her being dragged from the interrogation room. Him catching her as she ran through every scenario of escape in the middle of the desert. And...a dog. Her neck itched. Maggie raised one hand to her throat, hitting something solid and plastic protecting her from collarbone to chin. Air evaporated from her chest. This...this was a neck brace. She clawed at it. Bandages around her hands kept her from getting a good grip on the edge. “What... What is this? What happened?”
Jones shot to his feet, closing the distance between them. “It’s okay. Dr. Piel wanted to make sure you wouldn’t aggravate any swelling in your neck or head while she was going through your bloodwork and scans. It’s precautionary after what you’ve been through.”
“Swelling?” She tried to sit up.
“You took quite a beating, Maggie. You’re lucky to be alive.” Calloused hands slid around hers to pry her fingernails from between the hard plastic and her jawline. The contact was warm and slow, but her nervous system wasn’t convinced of his promise of safety.
“What did they do?” She couldn’t hide the desperation sliding into her voice. This wasn’t part of the plan. She’d started over. She’d made something of herself. On her own. Despite the lack of support from her family, friends and everyone else who’d turned their backs on her, she’d overcome it all. She couldn’t take a step back. Not now. “What’s wrong with me?”
A sadness that had no right to warp Jones’s face cut through her. “You lost a lot of blood. Luckily the doc keeps a few bags of every blood type on hand in case one of us does something stupid. You needed a transfusion, and you sustained quite of bit of bruising and cuts over your whole body. There are a couple of minor rib fractures, but the worst is in your back. Dr. Piel called it a spinal cord hemorrhage.”
“I don’t... I don’t understand.” Maggie closed her eyes against the onslaught of memories coming now. Every strike. Every question. Every slice of pain.
Jones moved into her full line of sight. Slowly, strategic. Like he was approaching some kind of wounded animal he didn’t want to frighten, but it was all done in vain. There wasn’t anything that was going to make this okay. “You started bleeding on the way here. I didn’t realize it until we were getting you out of the SUV. Dr. Piel found a puncture wound in your spinal column once we got you on the table. You’ve been losing small amounts of spinal fluid. Let me get her. She can explain it better than I can.”
Maggie clutched his hand, digging her broken fingernails in deeper than necessary.
“Are you saying...” She was trying to wrap her head around each and every one of his words. Trying to make them make sense, but a thickness of pain medication and sleeplessness and hunger and thirst seemed to be battling against her. There was only one that stood out among the others. One that would rip this new life she’d made for herself away. “Am I going to be paralyzed? Can I walk?”
“Yeah, Maggie. You can walk, but it’s going to take time. It’s going to hurt, and you’re going to need a lot of help with recovery over the next few weeks.” His voice softened. The sound of pity. “Dr. Piel has already called in the best physician who has experience with this type of injury. You’ll be back on your feet before you know it.”
This type of injury. A downward pull started in her gut and pinned her to the bed. Time. Pain. Help. No. She’d already suffered through what she’d hoped had been the biggest hill in her life. She couldn’t do this again. She couldn’t let herself be that victim all over again. Maggie tried to kick at the too-soft sheets and heavy comforter to get free of the cage they’d created, but the prickling in her feet intensified to the point of hot coals. “No. I can’t. I can’t stay here.”
“I know what you’re going through.” Jones backed up to give her space, but it wasn’t enough. “I know you feel trapped, Maggie. I know this feels impossible, but if you try to leave, you’re just going to hurt yourself more.”
The walls were closing in, and Maggie didn’t have the discipline not to let her brain’s mind games get to her this time. Exhaustion broke barriers faster than anything else she’d gone through. If it hadn’t been for Jones pulling her out of that interrogation room, she would’ve given in to El Capitan. She would’ve told that son of a bitch anything he’d wanted to know if he’d promised to just let her sleep. She clutched the bedrail to heft herself up. The neck brace cut into the underside of her jaw. The added sensation gave her mind something tangible to grab onto, and she wasn’t letting go. She pulled her legs over the side of the bed with her free hand. Hell, she’d been turned into a mummy. So many bandages. So many injuries. How had she survived? “You don’t know. You don’t know...what I’ve been through, and I hope you never will.”
He was suddenly there, right in her line of escape. Massive hands locked onto the bed on either side of her. A blockade of muscle and determination and authority, but Maggie’s gut said he hadn’t gone through the trouble of pulling her out of the cartel’s lair to keep her captive. He’d move if pushed. Because that was the kind of man he was. Loyal but not dominating. “Yes, I do, and I give you my word it will get better, but you’ve got to put in the work, and you’ve got to let me help you.”
Something hot stabbed through her. A sincerity in his words that made her want to believe he actually understood her mindset. That he understood her body wanted nothing but to die, but her spirit refused to give up and that she couldn’t just sit here. No judgment in his voice. No room for excuses. This man—whoever he was and wherever he’d come from—believed she was safe. She could practically feel the heat coming off of him. Something she thought she’d never feel again, and Maggie wanted nothing more than to lean into that heat. To feel support from someone else so she could just take a couple minutes to breathe. “You don’t understand. I can’t stay here. They’ll never stop. He’ll never stop, and the longer I stay here, the more danger everyone is in.”
Jones pried his hands from the mattress on either side of her, and she found herself missing the clarity of soap and man in an instant. “The men who took you.” It was as though he could see right through her. That he knew her. “ Sangre por Sangre doesn’t take prisoners. Not unless you have something they want. So what do they want with you, Maggie Caddel?”
The pressure of holding back these past few days—or however long it’d been since that night in the desert —crushed her from the inside. “I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I saw everything. The man who interrogated me. He killed them all. And I have the proof.”
H ER HANDS SHOOK , drawing Jones closer.
A simple flick of her tongue across those busted lips was enough to get his full attention. He should’ve gone after Sosimo Toledano. Given the bastard a taste of his own medicine for doing what he’d done to Maggie. But the choice to save her life or complete his mission hadn’t been easy in the moment. Dredging those memories up wasn’t going to do her a damn bit of good either. Her recovery. Her healing. That was all Jones could focus on right now. The cracks in his hands caught on the cuts and scrapes in hers against the mattress. “Tell me what happened, Maggie.”
“It was stupid.” Her voice lost the command he’d admired in the desert. Right after she’d pumped a round of shotgun shells into his back window and threatened to shoot him, and he couldn’t help but hold her hand tighter. “I’ve been following Sangre por Sangre members for just under a year to try to get my first story. Low-level dealers to start with, but every once in a while, they’d break off from their routines and lead me to someone higher up the chain. I thought if I waited long enough, if I could uncover the man at the top, that would give me something to secure my future.”
“You’ve been following drug cartel members, alone.” The words almost didn’t seem real. Socorro had people like him—trained in reconnaissance and combat, soldiers who knew what to look for and how to respond to a threat—to cover organizations like Sangre por Sangre and report back to the Pentagon. And she’d walked into the hornet’s nest without so much as a second thought?
“You don’t understand. I’m the newest war correspondent at the magazine. I don’t have as much experience as the others.” Maggie swiped at her face. The exhaustion wasn’t hollowing her eyes as much now, but the bruising around her temples and cheeks had darkened significantly. “This job... I need it to work, and all the big stories were going to the veteran journalists. Bodhi—my editor—hasn’t liked any of my submissions so far. He was going to let me go if I didn’t produce a story worth printing. I needed something.”
A suction of gravity triggered in his chest. Jones retracted his hand as that invisible force threatened to rip him into a million pieces. Shoving himself upright, he circled the room to try to walk it off, but there was no point. She’d risked this one precious life for the chance of landing a story. “And you really believe a job is more important than your life?”
“You don’t know me.” Her accusation didn’t come with anger. Mere observation pulled him up short from raging around the hospital room, trying to make her see the absolute ridiculousness of her motives. “You pulled me out of that interrogation room, or whatever it was, and I appreciate it. You saved my life, but that doesn’t give you the right to berate me for my choices.”
Hell. She was right. They weren’t friends. They were barely acquaintances. Jones scrubbed his hand down his face, hoping to take the heat burning in his veins with it. Didn’t help. The best thing he could do was focus on the facts. On how she’d ended up in Sangre por Sangre ’s grasp and why they hadn’t killed her. “All right. So you started following low-level members. How does that get you under the fist of one of the most wanted lieutenants on our radar?”
“Two weeks ago, one of the soldiers I’d been following was pulled off his corner. Then I noticed others. Sangre por Sangre ’s income depends on those corners in Albuquerque and other cities like it. I thought something had happened, but the longer I watched, the more I realized they were being recruited within the cartel. Under a single lieutenant.”
“Sosimo Toledano,” he said.
“I only knew him as El Capitan. That’s what the others called him between...” She gestured to the length of her body. “I got the impression Toledano was organizing a coup against the old leadership. A story like that would blow my editor’s mind and shoot me to the top of the roster for my next assignment. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so I started watching him. The more I watched, the more I learned. Turns out your Sosimo Toledano is the son of the man at the top of Sangre por Sangre . The Pentagon has been looking for him for months in connection with a series of attacks throughout New Mexico. Executions, even raids going on in the smaller towns. One as recent as last week.”
“Socorro is well versed in Toledano’s profile.” Because of him. Because Jones had been assigned to put the pieces together. Though he hadn’t expected Maggie to be one of the missing pieces.
“A few days ago—I couldn’t tell you how many—I followed him and the members he’d recruited. They drove out to the middle of the desert. I stayed back as far as I could with my headlights off. Then I heard the first gunshot. It was hard to see, so I got out and jogged to get a better view. I had my camera.” She shook her head in some kind of attempt to undo the past. “And I walked... I walked right into an ambush.”
Every cell in Jones’s body hiked to attention. There hadn’t been reports of an ambush against the cartel. It certainly hadn’t come from Socorro. “What kind of ambush?”
“The kind where a cartel lieutenant kills ten American soldiers and buries the evidence without anybody knowing,” she said.
Jones lost the air in his lungs. That...wasn’t possible. There were any number of contingencies built into an operation like this. Backup teams, strategy, superiors who’d left the fieldwork to guys like him. If she was telling the truth, someone had to know what the hell had happened out there in the middle of that desert. The weight couldn’t just fall to Maggie. “You got photos.”
“I hid as soon as I realized what was happening, turned off the flash on my camera and just started shooting. They had no idea I was there.” A shudder ran through her from neck to hips. “But once the bodies were buried, I knew I had to get out of there. I started running for my car, but it was so dark, I tripped over a rock. My camera broke, but I managed to save the SD card. I shoved it into a crack in the dirt where I fell. One of the cartel’s soldiers must’ve heard me fall. He found me. I fought him off as long as I could.”
The adrenaline rush of realizing she’d risked her life for the chance of writing the next military headline waned. “But the SD card with all the photos you took is still out there.”
“That’s what El Capitan wanted. My camera, but the SD card was gone. He knows I hid it.” Tears glittered in her eyes. Knuckles tight around the hem of her sheets, Maggie refused to look at him. “He was going to kill me. The things he did...” She shut her eyes against the abhorrent images Jones had no doubt would haunt her for the rest of her life. “Nobody should be able to live through that.”
“But you did.” Pressure stuck behind his sternum. He’d been here before. At the side of a hospital bed just like this one, trying to come up with something significant and comforting to say. Holding another hand that’d been broken during the course of interrogation. Jones memorized the damage done to the smooth skin along the back of Maggie’s hand. Just as he’d done all those years ago while he’d given consent to have his brother taken off life support. Only this time was different. This time, he could fix it. He could do something. “You survived. Despite the odds. That means something.”
“That I’m too stubborn for my own good?” A scoff escaped her limited control. The break in her composure was only temporary, because behind the sarcasm was a wounded and badly beaten soul. “My parents always warned me my pigheadedness would get me into trouble. I thought they’d just meant what would happen if I left my ex. I didn’t think it’d land me in the center of the cartel’s cross hairs.”
Jones didn’t really know what that felt like. The whole parent thing. Not in any stable sense of the word, at least. That was what happened when you were moved from foster home to foster home. Some good, some bad. No attachment to any given place or the people in it. Attachment led to emotion. Emotion led to weakness. Weakness led to mistakes. And he wasn’t about to make the same mistake as he had with his brother. “All you have to worry about is getting better, Maggie. The photos, Sosimo Toledano, your job. None of that matters. Understand?”
“He won’t stop. You know that, right? Toledano isn’t going to stop hunting me. He’ll come here.” Maggie’s eyes fluttered with exhaustion, casting dark eyelashes across the tops of her cheeks. They fanned out in a way that should only be possible through the gravity-defying technology of makeup, yet Jones couldn’t find a trace of it on her face. Her chin deviated from its center position over her chest as she seemed to relax into the bed against her will. “And he’ll hurt anyone who gets in his way.”
“I’m not going to let that happen. I give you my word.” He couldn’t seem to let go of her hand, even as she drifted into unconsciousness. The painkillers were doing their job, but it would take a whole lot more than a combination of drugs to put Maggie back on her feet.
And he was going to be there. Whatever it took. Because she didn’t deserve this. Sangre por Sangre had crossed a line, and Jones was going to be the one to make them pay for overstepping. Once and for all.
Convincing his nervous system he didn’t have to hold on to her took longer than it should have. He could still feel her hand in his as he extracted himself from her hospital room and headed down the black corridor toward Ivy Bardot’s office. Socorro Security had been contracted to dismantle the Sangre por Sangre cartel by any means necessary, but up until this point, everything he and the team had done had been reactionary.
Now was the time for them to make their move.