Chapter 45
forty-five
Matias
She floats a few feet away from me like an angel.
It’s difficult to see through my swollen eyes, but I manage. I hold on to the sight of her, even when my aching ribs make it almost impossible to stay focused. If this is the last thing I get to see, I’ll die happy. Satisfied.
I’ve been interrogated—beat to a bloody fucking pulp—enough times to know that this is the best part. When reality and subconsciousness blend into one, when I’m out of it just enough to almost be able to ignore the pain. When I’m visited by a shell of the thing I love the most. Of her.
The ringing in my ears start to clear, my surroundings sharpening with each breath.
I blink hard, wondering how a simple prison transport turned into this.
Getting ripped from the van, pushed right past the security detail, and dragged into this godforsaken warehouse.
I look up, inspecting the ceiling, wondering why it looks vaguely familiar.
All of this feels like a terrible nightmare I’ve visited before.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This is how Reynaldo died, in the middle of a prison transport.
The only thing I’m surprised of is the face of the FBI agent floating in front of me.
There was something about his eyes that set me on edge the afternoon of my arrest, but the way he thanked Natalia for helping him threw me.
Now that he stands before me, that he beat me several times from dusk to dawn asking about the fucking hard drive, it’s a lot easier to remember him.
Bryce. I remember bits and pieces of him now.
I’d seen him only a couple of times, walking alongside Reynaldo, but you only have to see someone that looks like him a couple of times for it to stick. After tonight, I’ll never forget the sight of his face.
Agent Bryce will be a hard picture to forget. Red-faced and seething, standing over me asking the same question like a broken record.
“Where is the drive?”
I answered the same way each time, taking a sick amount of pleasure in the way his eyes flash each time the words leave my mouth.
“What drive?” Each answer was punctuated with the strike of fists, kicks, and at one point, a really vicious beating with a tire iron Bryce found on the floor of the warehouse.
Fucker.
If I wasn’t handcuffed to this chair I’d kill him with my bare hands.
The vision of Natalia wavers in front of me.
I use all of my strength to sit up straight in the chair, clinging desperately to the sight as she ambles closer.
She’s wearing jeans and a baggy sweater, her hair thrown into a sloppy ponytail.
There’s a permanent crinkle on her forehead as she walks into the light of the warehouse, the big windows washing her in a glow of morning light.
“Took you long enough.” I jerk at the sound of Bryce’s voice, the crunch of glass giving his position away behind me. His presence fills me with renewed energy, my limbs tensing in place like someone’s just thrown a glass of water in my face.
After beating me unconscious a few times, I thought he’d finally gotten it through his thick head—I’m not giving up the fucking drive. He’s just going to kill me, anyway.
I watch the vision of Natalia get closer and closer, hating the way she looks when her gaze meets mine. Like she can really see me. Like she’s holding back tears at the sight of me. Why does she look like that? If this is my curtain call, I only want to see her happy. Smiling.
“I told you it was going to take a minute for me to get here. What did you do to him?” A female voice replies, harsh but sweet like a bell. I look around wildly, staring at Natalia as her lips move. “I asked for an exchange. Doesn’t really work if he dies before I get here, does it?”
“He’s alive, isn’t he?” Someone taps me on the shoulder, and I jerk, eyes tracking wildly as a horrifying realization curdles in my gut.
None of this is a figment of my imagination—Natalia really is here.
In this Godforsaken warehouse, with me chained up as she walks into the Devil’s lair.
The air suddenly feels thinner, my chest heaving as Natalia walks closer, clutching something small in her hands.
The words I thought I imagined a few moment ago come into terrifying clarity.
Exchange? For—for the hard drive in her hands?
“No.” My voice is garbled and thickened with blood. “No!” Bryce walks into my peripheral, a Cheshire-cat like grin on his face as he meets my gaze.
“He who laughs last, laughs best.” The fucker says, clapping me on the back of the neck like we’re friends.
I give Natalia a wild look, silently begging her to run. Run while she still can. There’s so many things I want to say I almost scream, but nothing comes out. Nothing but a pitiful gaze as she holds out the only scrap of evidence protecting her.
“Leave.” I command her, enraged when she gives me a saddened smile and drops the drive into Bryce’s hands. I look up at the ceiling, expecting a clap of thunder of a bolt of lightning to strike us, to mark the moment when someone so villainous won.
Bryce was so well concealed in the FBI, I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out even if I had a lifetime of searching.
Every cut he aimed at my direction, slowly bleeding me out, just seemed like run-of-the-mill bureaucratic warfare.
He set Natalia against me, put her back in my orbit when she was safely tucked away, worlds away from all of this.
“Did you decrypt it?”
Natalia takes a step closer to me. “No. I don’t have the key. The hacker said we’d need a basement full of computers to crack it, and you didn’t really give me much time, so…”
Bryce makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat. “We’ll need some time to check it, then.”
Natalia blinks. “You don’t have the key?”
“Search her.” Bryce tells his men, stepping into the bowels of the warehouse, drive in hand as armed men approach Natalia. She stands like a lamb amongst wolves, shifting her weight from one foot to another as they pat her down.
“Get…away…from her!” One of the men snorts at me, and I lunge against my constraints when he lingers too long on the curve of her ass.
“Matias, it’s okay.” She says gently, smiling weakly. Trying to make me feel better. “I have nothing to hide.”
Not even a gun, probably. Jesus Christ. I love the girl, but she’s going to get us killed. Finally, the assholes searching her feel up their fill and leave her alone. Natalia instantly eats up the ground between us, crouching before me with worried eyes.
“What did they do to you?” She says softly, and I want to yell. I want to shout and scold and ream into her for doing something this fucking dumb. But the only thing that comes out is the weakest, puniest insult I could think of.
“You little…fool.” Her hands come up, soft and warm, and I melt into her touch, not even a little bit embarrassed of the way I soak her in. “I could throttle you right now, Natalia. What the fuck are you doing?”
Natalia’s brows pinch together, her eyes taking on a saddened look that guts me. “I’m sorry, Matias. I’m sorry for all of this. I’m going to fix this.”
“You are out of…your depth.” I tell her, wildly searching the corners of the room for a familiar face. Santos, or Toledo—anyone—that is here to back her up. “It is too easy to die. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
She leans back, her eyes watering as she gives me a long look.
“It is too easy to die. And I’m not going to let it happen to you.
” My anger turns into something else. It loses its bluster, takes an edge of desperation.
I never knew I needed a champion until this moment.
Until my heart feels like bursting at the thought of someone so sweet risking her life to save mine. But I’m just…I’m not worth it.
“Don’t—don’t cry for me, baby. Don’t waste the tears on someone like me. I’m not innocent.” The urge to stroke her face hurts, handcuffs digging into my wrists. “You should leave while you still can. I’ll make a distraction. Just run. Get the fuck out of here.”
She shakes her head. “Not without you.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, lips moving against the shell of my ear. “I’m getting us both out of here.”
“Natalia…Get. Out.”
“No.” She shakes her head again with renewed strength, like she’s convincing herself as much as she is me. “Bryce will get what he wants, and we’ll leave. A deal is a deal.”
We’re going to fucking die here.
“I saw you before the church.” I blurt, thinking of the day that changed my life forever.
The afternoon that inevitably twined our lives together.
“They sent me…to kill you.” Years ago, when I was just a meaningless speck floating in the universe.
When the only thing that meant anything was money and power.
Natalia doesn’t even look surprised anymore. “Because of Papa?”
I nod weakly. “You used to volunteer at the soup…kitchen.” I followed her for weeks, looking for an opening, a weakness in security. That afternoon, it was so easy to slip in as a vagabond I almost laughed.
“I followed you one afternoon, found you in a back alley. And you were, sitting with this old…homeless man, coming down from his high. He stank of piss to high heaven and treated you like shit. But you didn’t even flinch.
You sat next to him and force-fed him soup and bread, I think you even held his nose shut at one point. ”
She gives me a watery laugh, and I smile at that, even though my split lip hurts like a motherfucker.
“Yeah, his name was Dwayne. He was really nice when he was sober. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
I’m a man of few words. I always have been. It’s never been instinctive of me to volunteer information, to talk about my feelings. It’s just a casualty of living a life where feeling meant a certain death. But now, with uncertainty looming in the distance. I have to get this out.
I have to tell her, in case we don’t make it.
“I went to the soup kitchen three times just to watch you. I was so…curious about you. And then I went to meet you, at the church. Just one time, I told myself.” I remember the afternoon like it was yesterday, the way the sun fell over her hair, the floral pattern on her dress.
“When I looked into your eyes, it was all over.”
Her face softens, welling up with tears, her gaze overflowing with a love so sweet it fills me from the inside out.
“It was like everything in the universe made sense. Like I was being seen for the first time. It felt like finding…a flower in the desert.” She cries at that, and my voice wavers.
“I went back and convinced them that it would be better to work with your dad, instead of against him. Anything but snuffing out your little light.” I never meant to fall for her—I just wanted her to be safe.
But I’ve always had an addictive personality.
“I never meant…to drag you into all of this.”
Natalia cradles my jaw, leaning up and placing the sweetest of kisses on my lips.
“I never felt like myself until I found you, you know that?” She sniffs.
“I was always living for other people, until you taught me I needed to live for myself. I’m not me without you, and you will always be worth everything to me.
Everything.” Natalia lets out a big breath, sighing when I lean down and kiss her.
I’m more in Natalia’s eyes. And it isn’t until now, that it dawns that maybe…
that was all the validation I’ve been seeking for.
I don’t need more power, or money or control. I just need her.
My love. My life. My heart.
She swipes at her face, and then mine, giving me a little grin. “We’re going to be alright.”
“Yeah.” I say slowly, and I almost believe it, until Bryce comes storming in. His boots smack on the ground, pebbles scattering around us with each stride.
“There’s nothing in here!” He shouts, waving the drive between us. Natalia stumbles backwards, struggling to catch her balance, giving Bryce a weary look.
“What are you talking about?”
“The files self-deleted. They’re gone!” Fuck! Fuck. Natalia’s brows arch, her eyes flying to mine.
She stares at the piece of equipment, taking a step away from the disgraced agent, who looks like he’s getting ready to beat me again.
“It…it can do that?”
“Of course it can.” He growls impatiently, raking a desperate hand through his hair. “The deal is off. No intel. No deal.”
“But…I gave it to you. I gave you everything you asked for!” She waves at him desperately, her eyes flashing to me. “Just let us go.”
“I don’t think so.” Bryce’s jaw works, staring at Natalia from head to toe. “You have nothing to stop me. Simple minded bitch. Think everything can be solved with a please and thank you, don’t you?” He reaches for the gun tucked into his pants, holding it loosely at his side.
I test my weight in the chair. I’ll take him out before he uses that thing on her. Even if we go down together.
“I used to.” Natalia says, looking carefully at the gun, shifting her weight from one foot to another. “You taught me quite a lesson, Agent Bryce.”
“What? Don’t trust law enforcement?” He asks mockingly, laughing with a fraying edge. The men in his kill squad laugh right along with him, like my little lamb is the entertainment before the big event. Like they’re taunting her for sport.
Natalia smiles briefly—and then the expression drops. Like a curtain falling from her eyes, they go from guileless to hardened, her smile tilting up on the side in a smirk.
Like a monster winking from the shadows. A game master that’s about to checkmate the man beside me.
“Actually, it’s: don’t let mediocre men mistake kindness for weakness.” She expels a breath, the words echoing in the room, before she shouts, “Now!”
The room explodes in a flurry of movement. Ear-splitting bangs rock the cavernous room, metal door screaming as they’re ripped clean off hinges. Bryce jumps, head on a swivel, body shuddering him like he’s not sure where to look first.
He’s trapped.
Natalia hits the deck as smoke fills the room, blinding us all as heavy boots pound the cement floor with a clear, deadly call.
“This is LAPD SWAT! Hands up where we can see them! Put the fucking guns down!”