Chapter Thirteen Teddy Bear
Henry
The clock in my head did as it had always done…
It pinged and I immediately opened my eyes.
Usually, I would be on alert, on a job somewhere as this had been my life for fifteen years.
I took in my surroundings and realized that I was not on a job.
Turning my head, I saw her and smiled. In fact, this was an entirely new but wonderful turn in my life.
I couldn’t really call her a turn either.
No, Maya was a new life for me. I never thought I would find her in the middle of the rescue Carlos had going.
I did pause as I realized I might already be in love with her.
No, I wasn’t hesitant because I doubted her.
She might just be the purest soul I had ever met.
Her actions showed this. It wasn’t that I only saw her beauty and lusted after her.
No, she was genuinely sweet and caring. I simply watched her sleep and I enjoyed that as well.
I intended to keep her with me. I just hoped she wanted to stay with me.
There also was no way she would go back to Mexico unprotected.
This group whomever they were had killed and were willing to kill in order to accomplish what they had set out to do.
I would stay with her through this then afterward, if she agreed.
I knew one thing… I would help her agreement along.
Like last night. If I needed to give her my all, I would do so and enjoy it.
This woman would be treated like a queen.
If any woman deserved that it would be Maya.
“That is creepy, you know?” she asked as she still had her eyes closed.
“You mean me watching you sleep?” I smiled at being caught out.
Her eyes popped open and she told me, “It is ma sei grullo, how they say very crazy.”
I chuckled. “Yes…it is mad. But I admit that I am insanely crazy over you. I could watch you all day. Even if all you did was sleep.”
She laughed. “I would be lazy or in a coma to do that, Henry.”
I reached out and caressed her cheek. “I don’t want to scare you away. So, I will try to behave.”
Smirking at me, she replied, “You could never scare me, Henry. You are perhaps the kindest man I have ever met.”
I gasped dramatically. “Oh, that is no bene. Do not spread that around, please. I am a bodyguard. Not a teddy bear.”
Laughing, she finally sat up. “I think you are a teddy bear. I slept so warmly while being up against you. But do not fear, I will keep it a secret.”
“Good, cause if this got out, how will I ever get onto Badass dot com?”
“You are funny too,” she added as she kept smiling.
“A man who is protective, funny and…” She paused and blushed.
“…has the best mouth in all the world. I never would have believed you existed. I have found that most men are just too selfish or are into their own pleasure to do the things you did last night.” She halted and seemed to realize she shared something very telling.
I took her hand and turned it over to kiss her palm. “No, I was one of those men. Selfish and only doing for me. Making money so I would be set for life. Sexing women just to get what I needed and to scratch that itch that most men have too often. I was one of those for sure.”
“I do not see that at all,” she argued.
“No, because he is not here in me anymore. I think when I met a woman who was so sweet, giving and caring? I realized that maybe good women do exist.”
“You mean me?”
I scoffed. “Yes, I mean you.”
“What about Miss Selena?” she asked. “She is those things as well, is she not?”
I slowly shook my head. “I don’t think any of us told you about her. First off, I would be too afraid to hit on her.”
She laughed. “Selena is a little abrasive, yes. But she is beautiful and a good person. Look at what she went through to find her brother’s children.”
“Yes, I know that.” I smiled at her. “But she is or was a hitwoman, Maya. Yes, she became that to eventually find the twins. But she is dangerous. Like I would be too afraid to date her. Get her angry and you might wake up with your throat cut.”
Gasping, Maya looked astonished by this claim.
“She is known in the underworld as The Blade.”
“I didn’t know this.”
I tapped her chin. “She is retiring from her line of work and so is Carlos.”
“Carlos? What job did he have?”
I slowly shook my head. “Look, I don’t want to ruin what you thought of them.
I assumed you knew this but really, how could you know?
They could not exactly say, ‘We are cartel members. In fact, we belong to the most notorious and dangerous organizations in the world.’ But I should add they both quit that and wish to disappear into a normal life together. ”
Staring at me, she asked, “And you, Henry? Are you…I mean do you…”
I chuckled and kissed her knuckles. “No…I am not. But I will be honest and tell you that at one time, I did work for a criminal organization. I found that they were more sinister than I realized. I then quit working for them. That was a few years ago. Ever since then I have been my own man so to speak. I take the security jobs that I choose. I have no boss but myself. I also turn down any job that involves the criminal world, period.”
“But you said yes to Carlos and Selena,” she countered.
I smiled as I answered this, “Carlos saved my ass. In fact, I was with that criminal organization when he did that. So, I vowed to him that when he needed me to help him get those kids, I would come right away.”
“But you, him and Mr. Rain all seem to be like best friends?”
I nodded. “We spent a few months together like we were just mates…you know, buds. Carlos had been injured so we went to where he was hiding out and healing up. We just did normal guy things as they call it. Playing poker, video games, pizza, and beer. Watching football then movies at night. We got to know each other pretty well. So that is how Rain and I knew of the horrible thing his father did years ago.”
“I do not know the whole story,” Maya said.
“Just what the old women told me and they were how you say…obnoxious. They said that Alex and Hope weren’t wanted by their mother and that she would rather party like a puta instead of being a mom.
That she was dirty and poor. She had kids all over the place that she carelessly abandoned.
The tías claimed to be angels of goodness as they selflessly took the babies in and raised them.
After I knew them for just a month, I knew they were not any kind of good and selfless?
” She scoffed. “They were the most selfish women I ever met. They made up whatever stories they wanted and called them the truth. They were practiced liars as I soon discovered. And they were murderers as well.”
“You mean they were about to commit murder, right?” I asked her.
Shaking her head, she replied, “Remember the man they hired to dig the graves? Bene, I did not tell you that I found his body in one of the open graves in that basement. They did not pay him, they ended him. It made me wonder about a few things that had happened over the years. People that went missing. Like the man that fixed a large plumbing problem we had in that house a couple of years back. The policía were at the house, looking for him. His familia had reported him as missing. They checked at the tías’s place because that had been his last job before he vanished.
The old witches said he had been drunk and they kicked him out but they did not know anything else.
But when the policía left, they burst into laughter.
Then they said something like that plumber charged too much, the ungrateful maggot. ”
“Wow, they were an actual menace, weren’t they? Sort of like if Lizzy Borden had a sister.”
Maya shrugged. “There were more missing people and I now believe those two may have killed more than a few unsuspecting people over the years they lived in Catemaco. I do know that they already had the plan in place to kill the twins.” She looked up at me with sadness in her dark eyes.
“But I do not know how they got those babies in the first place. What they said was obviously a lie as they truly lived on lies.”
“I only found out what happened to that family a few months ago, when Gabriela Mancini’s audio clip showed up on the net.”
“Her…Audio?”
“Yes, she had a reward with it and talk about a sad story…It even got to me.” I shook my head.
“The twins didn’t know anything about their parents except for the nasty name calling and the foul stories that those witches told…” She sighed. “The kids did not know why they were there.”
“I will just capsulize it for you. I don’t want you to hear her story told by her, it will make you cry. Because believe me, you would.”
“Ay, mio dio.”
I nodded. “Yes, it also is not a pretty story. Carlos’ little sister and his best friend fell in love when they were just teens I believe. Santiago, Gabby’s and Carlos’ father, forbade it, as he wanted her to marry someone that would further his cartel. An old man I believe?”
“Yes, there are arranged marriages in Italy as well.”
“I realize that.” I nodded my head. “Gabriela and Alex ran away together and they believed they could live free of her family. Santiago then tracked them down after only a week or so and he personally executed Alex in front of Gabriela.”
With a gasp, Maya covered her mouth with her hands as her eyes widened.
I nodded. “We are talking about a soulless monster. He did not even hesitate it seems and he did not care about her grief at all. Then he locked her up and had her watched around the clock. She wanted to die after that and he made sure she had not one moment to herself. He planned to make a lot of money by marrying her off. Then she found out she was to have Alex’s baby.
So, she stopped thinking about suicide and her father had her married as a business deal.
The only good luck she had was that the old man who became her husband was kind to her.
She then had twins and she only got to hold them for a few minutes, just long enough to name them.
Then her father busted in and took them from her. She never saw them again.”
“Sto sotto.” Maya raised her head and stared at me with tears in her eyes. “Such cruelty.”
“Yes, the kind most people never experience. This was her father! How could he do such a thing? Meanwhile, Carlos never knew any of this. His best friend murdered, his little sister losing those babies. Santiago had sent him to America months before this happened. Then when he did find out, he rebelled against Santiago and was locked up after a harsh beating by Santiago’s men.
After a few weeks in confinement, he was finally released.
Santiago had control of him however, as he told him those kids would die if Carlos ever attempted to find them. ”
“Santa Madre! How horrible, so the sisters weren’t the only monsters in that family.”
“They were evil and hideous, but their brother was as close to being the devil incarnate as you could get. I believe that man murdered hundreds, Maya. He either had them murdered or did it himself. I heard he often went out and like with Alex, he wanted to do the killing personally. He was truly a vile, soulless killer. And there were other monsters in the Castillo family. Such as the two men that the tías were afraid of. They were exactly like Santiago. Cutthroat and hungry for power, willing to trample anyone they needed to in order to get those things. To think they would have murdered those kids just so Carlos couldn’t take them back to their mother.
But the cousins who were loyal to Gabby took them down as you know.
I suppose they were done with that life. ”