26. Attila
26
ATTILA
L una has four brothers. She’s the youngest child, the only girl in a family of men. This is what The Jekyll tells me now. I don’t know why I never stopped to ask before, or maybe it was that I didn’t care. Or I wasn’t listening, which he accuses me of now before he launches into a full scale information dump.
“Enzo, Franco, Danielo and Coyin Junior.”
He rattles off the names of Coyin Castillo’s sons, then tells us that he lost sight of them a while back and that’s how he ended up watching Luna. She was the only Castillo he could get eyes on.
“You don’t think it’s strange that no one has seen nor heard from them in a while?” Dante asks. The Jekyll shrugs and tells us he doesn’t know what to make of it.
“My interest lays more in how you were able to find the girl if you can’t get a bead on any other family members,” I say, looking at him curiously.
The Jekyll sucks in a breath and bites the inside of his cheek. There’s something he’s not telling me. Something that could probably turn this whole thing on its head.
“I can’t tell you my source.”
“I don’t want a name,” I tell him. “I want what you’re not telling me.”
He pauses for the longest time, before Dante breaks the showdown between our eyes as he clears his throat. The look he sends The Jekyll tells him he needs to talk and he won’t settle for anything less.
“If we’re to work together, all our cards need to be on the table,” Dante says. “That means no secrets.” He turns to me. “That means you can’t touch anyone that led us to the girl or now to the father.”
“He had to have known something for him to go to the trouble of securing a tracking device. What are you not telling us?”
“I only got this far in my search by not telling anyone anything ,” The Jekyll explains. “Every little scrap of information I got I held securely until I verified it and the pieces fell into place.”
“I don’t want justifications for anything you’ve done. What do you know that we don’t ?”
The Jekyll wipes a hand down his face and shakes his head like he’d rather not be doing this. There is an internal battle going on when he pulls and pushes at the idea of revealing his source.
“I’ve got the Castillo maid,” he finally reveals.
“As in…”
“The maid who’s worked for the Castillo family for years; she’s also the one who led me to Luna.”
“Why would she give her up?”
“She didn’t. I fed her some half assed story about wanting to help the girl and she fell for it. Turned out the woman knew the girl needed all the help she could get.”
“Help from what?” Dante asks.
“She helped Luna escape the night of her engagement,” The Jekyll tells us. “And she did a good job of tipping her off anytime Castillo got a whiff of where she was.”
“Why did you put the tracker on her?” I ask him. He’s done everything but answer the question that’s been searing my skin, itching to get out. I need to know what he knows.
“Luna was honest with us when she told us the story of how her father was forcing her to marry Nestor Gamboa. I spoke with the maid; she verified everything. And when I went to get her clothes, I called Maria; I wanted to know what Castillo was really capable of doing to her daughter.”
“And?”
The Jekyll sighs and lets out a strangled gasp before he curses. His intention was to never betray the maid’s confidence. But now he realizes he has to.
“Whatever he intends to do with her, it’s not good.”
He says this matter-of-factly as he looks at me out of the corner of his eye.
“What makes you say that?” Dante asks.
“Because she’s not his daughter.”
* * *
It is the last thing I expect to hear. But it explains why Castillo is comfortable selling her, especially as there isn’t any blood relation. But he has gone to extreme lengths to retrieve her; I can’t imagine this is just to fulfil a contract with another business partner.
“If he’s not her father, then who is?” I ask, and it’s all I can think about. The fact that she’s not really a Castillo. Her use to us as a pawn has been moot from the beginning.
“And why does he want her back so bad?”
“To understand that, you need to go back to the beginning,” The Jekyll starts, stirring in his seat. His massive frame is too big for the chair.
I roll my wrist, telling him to get on with it. He is slowly killing me with his dribs and drabs method of spoon feeding us information.
“Luna’s mother had an affair with one of Castillo’s soldiers. Actually, a lieutenant he was quite close to. Luna was a result of that affair. When Castillo found out, he flew into a murderous rage and killed her mother. Then turned the gun on his colleague. Either he didn’t have the heart to destroy Luna, or he saw the bigger picture and decided to keep her around.”
“Does Luna know?” I ask.
“She knows only that her father killed her mother, because it happened in front of her. Castillo did a good job of covering it up, but she saw what she saw. She told me when I was showing her how to use the tracker.”
“She doesn’t know that he’s not her father?”
He shakes his head. The girl had a miserable, motherless childhood, and now even as an adult, she was still suffering. No wonder she’d taught herself self defense; it was the only armor she had. The only protection in which to wrap herself when the need called for it.
“How reliable is the maid?” Dante asks. “Can we trust her?”
“She despises Castillo; that’s reliable enough in my books.”