Chapter 10
Daleyza
Carefully, she looked through the gap in the curtains she’d left intentionally. There. The same black car she’d seen earlier today and over the past several days was parked a few houses down. She couldn’t see the license plate because it was too far away, but she knew she was correct.
Unease skittered down her spine. It wasn’t the same one that Esmerelda had driven to the house. She was being watched. But why?
Silence, like a graveyard at the witching hour, reigned in the house since Livia moved to the memory care facility.
For the first few days, panic set in periodically when she couldn’t hear the muted television sound traveling down the stairs as she roamed the house, much like a ghost herself.
She visited the woman each day, but still, there was no recognition of her presence.
Wracked with guilt and a need to do something, she continued to spend time with her.
Right now, the void of sound weighed on her, its completeness crushing her lungs as she stood behind the curtains, her hand clutching the neck of the sweater she wore, her eyes riveted on the street in front of the house.
There were cars parked up and down the street for blocks, not an open spot to be had.
There was no reason to believe it was any different from the other vehicles parked along the curbs, and yet…
She sensed danger lurking behind the wheel, and she refused to leave the house to walk to the bus stop, where she would be out in the open and defenseless.
A thought intruded. Hijo de puta! Why she hadn’t thought of it before was a mystery. There was only one possible answer. Livia’s family had found them.
Was this why Esmerelda had shown up last week?
Had witness protection known that Hector Colonel was coming after his mistress, prompting the move, more so than her rapid decline?
But if they had moved Livia because of the danger, why hadn’t they moved her as well?
Were her years of care and devotion not payment enough for protection?
Righteous anger rose within her. Why couldn’t they just leave them alone? Hadn’t they taken enough from them? She’d already lost so much, and now she had lost Livia as well. What more could be taken from her?
Turning on her heel, she moved quickly, yet meticulously. She made an entire sweep of the house, double-checking that all the doors were bolted and the windows were closed and locked, with the curtains pulled. She headed upstairs and entered her room.
Without hesitation, she dove into her closet, grabbed a backpack, and began to stuff it with necessities—a couple of shirts, a hoodie, some extra underwear and socks.
She traded her sandals for sneakers and her sweater for a quarter-zip jacket.
A trip into the bathroom had her securing a toothbrush, toothpaste, a brush, and deodorant.
Two extra hair ties went around her wrist.
Satisfied that she hadn’t forgotten anything, she went to her room and checked the bedside table.
Lifting the false bottom, she keyed in the code to get into the safe she’d installed there.
Once the door opened, she extracted her pistol, ammunition, her passport, and a bank bag filled with cash, which she shoved into the backpack.
Once she returned downstairs, she threw the bag on the dining room table, then entered the kitchen to fill her insulated water bottle and grab the remaining granola bars and cracker packages left over from the day-care snacks. She shoved them into her backpack and cinched it tight.
As she went to the coat closet to grab her denim jacket, a knock sounded at the front door.
She froze.
No one could see inside, so she stood still, afraid to breathe, hoping against hope whoever it was would go away.
After a minute, she let out her breath and took another step toward the back closet.
The knock came again, heavier this time.
Mierda! Now it wouldn’t be safe to leave for hours, perhaps even until tomorrow. She needed to see who it was so she knew how to handle her escape.
On silent feet, Daleyza went to the dining room, grabbed her bag, shoved it into the closet, then made her way to the door.
She peeked through the peephole and saw a man standing on her porch, a ballcap pulled down over his face and aviator sunglasses shielding his eyes.
He was dressed in the uniform of a local shipping company, and he had a package in his hand.
“Madre de Dios,” she murmured. It was Livia’s medication. Today was delivery day. She’d forgotten to cancel it.
Opening the door, she put on her best fake smile. “Good morning, Muhammed. Thank you for—”
She stared. Her eyes had to be playing tricks on her. The height. The jawline.
Lord, she was a mess. It wasn’t Muhammed, the regular driver, so he had a substitute today. “Sorry,” she apologized. “For a moment, I thought you were someone else.”
He stood there and stared at her from behind his sunglasses and ball cap. “Hola, Daleyza.”
The voice! Now she knew there was something wrong with her. She hadn’t heard that voice in what felt like centuries. Was her current danger pulling up memories better left buried?
“I’m sorry, I…”
“Let me in, belleza. We have very little time.”
Her feet were rooted to the spot, and she was fairly certain her mouth was hanging open in shock. “Ildefanso?” she whispered. “You’re dead.”
“For once in your life, please just do what I’m asking of you.
There will be time for explanations later.
We have about twenty minutes before your delivery driver wakes up, as well as that pendejo down the street who was watching you.
While I have help covering me, it won’t prevent a shoot-out on this quiet street. In fact, it will make it more likely.”
Her body moved out of the doorway even though her brain screamed to slam the door and purge this hallucination from her porch.
He quickly slid past her, then closed and locked the door behind him.
He pulled his sunglasses away from his face, staring at her with his snakelike silver eyes, his gaze giving her a once-over. “You look tired, belleza.”
Still stunned, she said, “And you look very alive for a dead man.” Rage bubbled up from the soles of her feet. “Seriously? All these years, and you decide to show up now?”
Going from believing him dead to processing he was alive took next to no time at all, which shouldn’t have been the case. But she’d never been one to think hard about something. It was either true or not true, and clearly, he was here now, so she accepted it without incredulity.
She launched into a hundred-mile-an-hour stream of Spanish, using every curse word she could come up with. And when she couldn’t come up with a translation, random English came out. Always her default setting whenever he pissed her off while they were together. It was like no time had passed.
Surprisingly, he let her run. Maybe thirty seconds of verbal vomit as she stormed around the living room, returning to him twice to poke him in the chest.
Apparently, that was all he was willing to allow her.
With a quickness she’d forgotten he possessed, a hand went over her mouth, and she found herself backed up against the foyer wall.
“You can yell and scream at me all you want once you’re safe.
Right now, I need you to do as I say, when I say, or we’re all going to be very dead, this time for real.
You’re being watched, and my family don’t play, Daleyza.
You know this.” He let go of her mouth. “Go pack a bag.”
Huffing, she barely refrained from stomping her foot.
Obviously, he thought her stupid, as well as unobservant, to not have noticed that people were watching her.
“It’s already packed. I saw the car down the street, so I knew I was in trouble.
” She glanced at the door. “What did you do to Muhammed?” she asked suspiciously.
“He’s fine. A little injection, but he’s going to wake up in about fifteen minutes, and we need to be gone.”
The muttering in Spanish began again as she went to the closet to grab the bag she’d packed. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t have time to go into it, but once we’re in a safe space, you can ask all the questions you want.”
“That doesn’t mean you’ll answer them,” she said. “You rarely did in the past. I was expected to trust you implicitly.”
“Clearly, that lesson went unlearned because you still don’t know how to do what’s best, which means listening to me. Now stop verbally flaying the skin off my back. We need to get out of here.”
She stared at him. For the first time, she noticed impatience in his eyes. Ildefanso had never lacked patience. Control was his middle name, as the saying went.
He brushed back the wisp of hair that had come loose from her ponytail during her rant. “Todavía tan hermosa,” he whispered.
She was pinned to the wall, but she still managed to recoil from his hand. “Don’t,” she hissed with pain, despite the fact that she wanted to lean into his touch. “You have no right to say that. To even think it.”
His face shuttered into an emotionless mask, then he backed away. As he did, he tapped on his watch and spoke into it. “We’re heading out. Be ready on my mark.” To her, he said, “If there’s anything else you can think of that you need, get it now. You won’t be coming back here.”
Ugh, this man was so infuriating! Was she being a total shrew? Yes. Did she care? No. He made her grieve for years, thinking he’d died. How was it possible that he was here? Somehow, the whole charade of him being dead was so Ildefanso.
That wasn’t fair. He’d never shied away from difficult things as long as she’d known him. So what had been the point of faking his death?
Was pretending to be dead his way of coping with the loss?
Had she not been enough for him to get through the agony of Tobias’ bloody body, his friend, Kent, bleeding out beside him after trying to save their child?
How dare he come back now after she’d successfully put him away in his grave in her mind and turned her back on it?
Okay. So she hadn’t been successful at that. But it made her feel better to lie to herself as if it were true.
Her brain railed against him. Her heart, not so much. It recognized that, despite everything, she’d never stopped loving him, even when things went bad between them. Watching him walk away, even just as far as the kitchen, it felt like her heart was breaking all over again.
No. He didn’t get to do this to her.
She dragged in a breath, ready to go at him a second time, knowing she was being a harpy.
But every single emotion she’d ever felt for this man was pouring out of her, lava hot, each one dragging her under and suffocating her with the depression of being abandoned to grieve alone for Tobias.
The heartache of watching Livia slip further and further into her illness with his departure.
And then the utter devastation when the Navy chaplain stood at her door and told her that her husband had died while imprisoned for crimes of domestic terrorism against the country he’d given everything for.
Literally. Crimes she knew in her heart that Ildefanso never committed.
How? From the moment she met him, he proved he was different from the men he worked for.