Chapter 15
The cold muddy water had already numbed my legs from the calves down.
The darkness inside the room was thick, suffocating blackness, broken only by sporadic flashes of lightning tearing through the Pantanal sky outside.
Each time the pale light slipped through the cracks in the rotting wood, I saw Nicanor's shadow writhing in the mud just a few feet away.
The foreman cursed—a guttural sound drawn out by the pain in the knee I'd crushed with my boot. He groped blindly at the submerged floor, his thick hands splashing through the dirty water as he searched for the hunting knife he'd dropped.
I shrank even further into the corner. My back scraped against the damp wood, and my hands stayed clenched around the board with the rusty nail, raised at chest height like a pathetic shield.
My breathing came in short, silent puffs.
My heart beat so fast the sound pulsed in my eardrums, but I kept my teeth clenched, forcing my body not to make a single noise that could guide that monster to me.
I cradled my belly with my free arm. My child was quiet, protected by my most primal instinct. We were going to get out of here. I wouldn't let our tomb be a sunken house in the middle of nowhere.
“You think you're going to escape, you wretch?” Nicanor's voice dripped with pure hatred, mingling with the sound of water shifting. He'd found the knife. A distant lightning flash caught its metallic gleam. “I'm going to cut you to pieces before Jurandir even knows the lights went out.”
He began dragging himself toward me. The sound of the foreman's heavy body breaking through the murky water was the countdown to the end. I gripped the wood in my hands, preparing my aching muscles for the final clash. I would strike his neck. I would kill the Falc?o family's foreman if I had to.
But suddenly, the storm outside seemed to shift.
The constant sound of wind and hail battering the zinc roof was swallowed by a deep, mechanical, deafening roar. A rhythmic tremor set the floorboards vibrating beneath the water.
Nicanor froze, turning his face toward the room's only sealed window.
The sound of engines tore through the rain.
They weren't fishing boats, and they definitely weren't Jurandir's pickup trying to cross the flood.
It was the powerful, relentless roar of high-speed outboard motors ripping through the flooded river, joined by the crushing thunder of helicopter rotors hovering just feet above the roof.
Beams of white, blinding light, strong as the midday sun, swept over the abandoned retreat, piercing the cracks in the walls and transforming the dark room into an illuminated cage.
“The police…” Nicanor whispered, panic finally replacing his bloodlust. He tried to stand, leaning on his good leg, looking desperately at the broken door.
Male voices, deep and authoritative, echoed from downstairs. The sound of military boots crushing wood and doors being kicked in confirmed the house was surrounded. My letter had arrived. The Postal Box network had found me.
But the desperation of a cornered animal makes it infinitely more lethal.
Nicanor looked at the stairs, then at me, huddled in the corner. His eyes were pools of madness. He knew he was finished, that there was no way out, but he wasn't willing to fall alone. If he was going to hell, Jurandir had guaranteed his payment depended on taking me with him.
“You're going first!” he roared, ignoring the pain in his destroyed knee and launching himself at me with the knife raised.
I screamed, closing my eyes and raising the board to block the blow.
The crash that followed wasn't the blade hitting me.
The door frame, already damaged, was completely torn from its hinges with colossal force. The wood flew apart in splinters, falling into the water with a dull thud, and the doorway was blocked by an immense, dark, drenched figure.
The spotlights outside illuminated the man's back, leaving his face in shadow, but I didn't need to see his eyes to know who it was. That size… That posture…
Jo?o Bento.
He didn't shout. He didn't announce himself. The Falc?o heir entered that room not as a savior dressed in white, but as the very embodiment of Pantanal fury. His silence was more terrifying than any threat.
Nicanor froze just a couple feet from me, instinctively turning the knife toward the new threat.
“Doctor Bento, I was just…” the foreman tried to argue, his voice trembling for the first time.
Jo?o Bento didn't give him time to lie. He advanced like a derailed train. The speed and brutality of the impact were so absolute that Nicanor was lifted off the ground before being hurled violently against the back wall.
The entire house shook. The muddy water exploded around them, splashing my legs and face.
I shrank against the wall, covering my belly with both arms, completely paralyzed by shock.
The fight that unfolded before my eyes wasn't a technical bout.
It was a primitive, dirty, relentless massacre.
Bento grabbed Nicanor's neck with his left hand, shoving the foreman's head into the dirty water, drowning his words and screams. The larger man thrashed desperately, slashing blindly with the knife, tearing through the fabric of Bento's safety vest and shirt sleeve.
Dark blood began to mix with the muddy water, but Jo?o Bento didn't even seem to register the pain of the cut.
“You touched her!” Bento growled, the first sound to escape his throat, vibrating with a hatred so deep it froze my spine.
Bento’s free hand shot out and seized Nicanor’s wrist. He wasn’t just trying to disarm the foreman. With a brutal, merciless twist, a sickening crack of breaking bones echoed through the room. The hunting knife slipped from the thug’s limp fingers and sank into the muddy water, now harmless.
Nicanor howled, thrashing in the mud, choking on foul water, but the punishment was far from over.
Bento hauled him up by the collar, lifting the foreman’s bloodied face out of the water only to drive his fist straight into the center of it.
The sound of his nose breaking was nauseating.
The second punch caught his jaw. The third sent Nicanor crashing back into the water, completely unconscious, floating like a rag doll in the filth he himself had created.
Silence swallowed the room, broken only by the helicopter rotors outside and Jo?o Bento’s heavy, ragged, savage breathing.
He was kneeling in the water, his knuckles stained with the foreman’s blood. His broad chest heaved with gasping breaths. The cut on his arm bled profusely, staining the water around his knees red, but he wasn’t looking at his own wound.
His brown eyes, darkened by panic and adrenaline, slowly lifted from the water and searched for my face in the dark corner of the room.
My heart skipped a beat.
Jo?o Bento. The man who had destroyed me publicly.
The heir I’d sworn to hate. He was there, soaked, bloodied, struggling to breathe, having just shattered the monster who was going to kill me.
The icy mask he’d worn on the auction stage had vanished completely, replaced by the face of a man who had plunged into hell itself to find me.
He let go of Nicanor’s body. Bracing his trembling hands against the floor beneath the water, Bento began to rise, his eyes fixed on me, ignoring the chaos, the storm, and the world outside. His expression wasn’t asking for forgiveness—it was begging for confirmation that I was still alive.