20. Cruz
CRUZ
We make it out through a service door that was never meant to be an exit.
Not for prisoners.
Not for men like me, either.
The hinges groan when I force it open, and for a second, I expect shouts. Boots. Guns raised. Zabala’s voice.
But only the darkness of night greets us.
Robin inhales sharply beside me.
“Move,” I whisper as I take her hand and pull her into the dark.
The ground outside the prison is uneven. Robin stumbles once, and I catch her before she goes down. She’s barefoot. I should have found her shoes. I should have found her something warmer. I should have found a hundred things before I dragged her through those corridors.
But a clean escape doesn’t exist.
Not from Diego Vega.
So I keep moving.
“Where are we going?” she whispers.
“Parking lot.”
“Are we stealing one of Vega’s cars?”
“No. His vehicles will be tracked.”
“So we’re not stealing a car from the psychopath holding me prisoner. That’s good.”
“We’re stealing from someone else.”
She goes quiet for a second. “I hate that I prefer that.”
“You can hate it after we’re gone.”
The parking lot comes into view beyond a low concrete wall. It belongs to a closed business, though I don’t know what kind. Doesn’t matter. Three vehicles sit under the weak security light.
Not ideal, but a hell of a lot better than nothing.
Robin stops with me. Her hair is loose and tangled around her face, her dark eyes wide open. Fear is there, yes, but also anger. Stubbornness. That same fire that made her talk back to me in the cell.
She should look broken. She doesn’t. And I shouldn’t be thankful for that, but I am.
“Stay close,” I say.
She nods. We climb the wall. I go first and then reach down for her. She grips my forearms, and I lift more than she jumps, pulling her over and setting her down as quietly as I can.
She winces when her bare feet hit asphalt.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
“I’ll survive. I’ve gotten this far.”
I move toward the closest car, an old sedan. Nothing flashy. Exactly what we need. I check the area once more. No movement behind the building. No cameras obvious enough to worry about, though that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
I pull a small blade from my pocket and work it into the door. Not my cleanest entry, but clean doesn’t matter right now. Fast does. The lock gives after a few seconds, and I open the door without letting the interior light spill too long.
“Get in,” I say.
She climbs into the passenger seat.
For a moment, I let myself look at her in the car. Just sitting there. Alive, furious, scared, and beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with soft lighting or pretty clothes.
Get your head on straight, Cruz.
I slam the door and move to the driver’s side.
Inside, the car smells like stale coffee and cracked vinyl.
I crawl beneath the driver’s seat and get to work.
Hotwiring a car is a skill I picked up in my teen years.
I learned how to do it just for fun. I practiced on an old vehicle of Senora V’s.
It doesn’t take long before the engine coughs and then catches.
I put the car in gear. “Seat belt.”
She obeys.
I pull out of the lot with the lights off until we hit the road and then flick them on. I keep my speed controlled. Not too fast. Not suspicious. Every instinct in my body screams at me to floor it, but I stay in control.
Robin twists to look out the back window.
“Do you see anyone?” I ask.
“No.”
“Keep checking.”
“I will.”
I grit my teeth. “You okay?”
She scoffs. “Great. I love dungeons, kidnappings, sexual harassment, and grand theft auto.”
“Robin.”
She turns her head. Looks at me. “I’m not okay,” she says quietly. “But I’m not back there, and we’re moving, so I’m better than I was.” She combs her hands through her hair, runs them down her face. “I’ll pay them back.”
“What?”
“The owner of the car.”
I squint at her. “That’s what you’re thinking about?”
“Yes.”
“We’re fleeing for our lives.”
“I’m multitasking.”
I huff out something that almost passes for a laugh.
She lifts her chin. “When I get home, I’ll figure out who owns it. I’ll make sure they’re compensated. Handsomely.”
“Handsomer than a stolen sedan?”
“Very.”
“Assuming we don’t dump it in a ditch and light it on fire.”
She gasps.
“Joke,” I say.
“Was it?”
I blink. “No.”
I think of the way she looked at me when she realized Zabala might have caught us. Her fingers crushing mine. The trust there, even under suspicion. Even when she had every reason to think I lied.
I don’t deserve that trust.
I take another turn.
Then another.
The road narrows as we leave the thicker streets behind. Houses appear farther apart now, set back behind walls and iron gates, some dark, some glowing with warm light.
A brothel isn’t a perfect destination for a woman under threat of being broken for sport. It’s not clean, it’s not innocent, and it’s not free of ghosts. But it has doors that lock. Women who know how to keep secrets. Men who know better than to ask questions if Valentina tells them not to.
The large house appears after another mile. Even in the dead of night, the place looks alive, softened by the exterior lighting and magenta flowers everywhere.
Robin leans forward. “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
I park a block away, tucked beneath a tree where the shadows are thick. I kill the engine and sit for a second, listening.
No cars approaching fast. No shouting. No sign we’ve been followed.
At least not yet.
“We walk from here,” I say.
Robin looks down at her bare feet.
I bite my lower lip. “I can carry you.”
Her head snaps up. “No.”
“Your feet—”
“I said no.”
I get out and then come around to her side. She opens the door before I reach it. The street is quiet as we cross it. When we reach the brothel, I climb the front steps and knock.
A minute passes before the lock turns.
Senora Valentina stands in the doorway wrapped in a deep red robe, her dark hair pinned back, her face softer with age. She stares.
Then her face breaks into a smile. “Cruzito.”
Before I can move, she grabs my face and kisses both my cheeks.
“My God,” she says. “Look at you. So handsome. So serious.” She frowns. “But too thin. Are you eating?” She shifts her gaze to Robin. “And who is this?”
Robin straightens. “I’m Robin Bellamy.”
Valentina lifts her brows. She knows the name. Then she looks back at me. “A new girlfriend?”
“No,” I say. “Not exactly.”
She isn’t my girlfriend. Until an hour or so ago, she was my prisoner.
A woman I was ordered to hurt. A woman I have now stolen from the man who owns my fear.
A woman whose mouth I’ve had under mine, whose body I’ve had against mine, whose voice I can still hear in that cell when everything between us turned dangerous in a different way.
We had fantastic sex in a prison cell.
That’s it.
But damn…I wish it were more.
There is something between us.
Something hot and impossible and wrong. And I can’t start picking apart what that means until I know she won’t be dragged back there.
Valentina watches my face. “Not exactly,” she repeats. “That sounds complicated.”
“It is.” I clear my throat. “We ran into trouble with Vega.”
Valentina wrinkles her forehead. “Diego?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The kind I can’t explain on your doorstep.”
She steps back. “Inside.”
I usher Robin in first.
The house smells like old wood and flowers. The entryway is tiled in faded blue and white.
I look away from the stairs.
Too late.
The memories are already invading.
My mother, barely out of her teens, laughing in this doorway, younger than I am now. My mother brushing my hair back. My mother telling me to wait in the kitchen and not speak to anyone unless Valentina said I could. My mother disappearing upstairs with men.
Valentina shuts the door and locks it. “Tell me what you need, mijo.”
“We need a place to lie low,” I say, “until I figure out our next move.”
She offers a wide smile. “Of course. We have plenty of empty rooms tonight. I’ll have clean sheets put in one of them.”
My stomach tightens.
A room. In this house. A place where my mother sold herself so I could eat, so I could have shoes, so I could be sent away from rooms like these and become nothing like the men who walked into them.
I became worse instead.
The irony is almost funny.
Almost.
“Thank you,” I say.
“If you are not together,” Valentina says, “I should prepare two rooms.”
“Yes,” I say. “That would—”
“No,” Robin cuts in. “I want to stay with him.”