8. Chapter 8
Chapter eight
Ishot upright, palms braced against the mattress, my heart battering my ribs as the blind panic of a night terror seized me.
Men shouted and fought beneath my room, their bodies crashing hard enough to shake the floor and tear me from a deep sleep.
But the scuff of boots, the men’s grunts and curses, and the scrape of the heavy wooden chair across the floor were too loud, too clear, and far too real to belong to a bad dream.
My bedroom sat directly above the dungeon, and an old brick-lined ventilation shaft from the finca’s original coffee cellar carried every sound straight up to me.
“Hold his shoulders,” a gravelly voice shouted in Spanish. “His legs. Get his fucking legs.”
“The drug is wearing off,” a second man yelled.
“No shit, you stupid bastards,” a man rasped in English. “I’d applaud the observation, but you’ve got my fucking hands tied.”
Flesh struck flesh with a thick, ugly thud. The new prisoner grunted, dragged in a breath, and unleashed a string of curses, his Irish accent roughening every filthy word. One of the guards ordered him in Spanish to shut his mouth, but from the sound of things, I doubted he’d obey.
I clutched the sheet in both fists against my chest as the pounding in my throat slowed. I glanced over my shoulder and saw 3:02 glowing red on the clock.
Damn it.
My father was home, and all hell had broken loose beneath my feet hours before dawn.
The old cellar had been quiet for more than a year, not because Father had discovered mercy, but because expanding his cartel’s reach across the northeastern United States had kept him occupied.
Apparently, New York hadn’t given him enough people to hurt.
He’d returned to Finca La Cruzona in full force, dragging a prisoner home with him.
A body slammed into the wall below, hard enough to rattle the picture frame over my bed.
“Get up, dumbass,” someone barked. “He’s drugged and tied, and you’re still letting him make you look weak.”
The prisoner gave a gruff, breathless chuckle.
“You should’ve moved faster.”
I knew that laugh would cost him.
I threw back the covers, unable to sit still. A terrible thought tightened my stomach.
Had my father brought Marcela back with him?
Bile rose in my throat at the thought of the traitorous bitch who’d stolen my name returning to my home. She’d used it to live freely in the outside world while I remained captive here.
The viper hadn’t been born into the Delgado family. She’d manipulated her way inside, feeding my father’s vanity and sinking her fangs in deep enough that he mistook her poison for loyalty.
Then she turned him against me.
I’d been alone for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like to be around another girl my own age.
Marcela shared my first name, laughed at the same things I did, and spoke to me as though I were a friend instead of the fragile child my father claimed I was whenever he justified keeping me locked away for my own good.
She told me that she understood what it was like to live under an overprotective parent’s control.
Within days, we were sneaking into the gardens to talk and sharing secrets I’d never trusted anyone enough to say aloud.
Or so I thought.
Marcela asked careful questions and made them sound like concern. She wanted to know whether I ever imagined leaving, then encouraged me to talk about the life I might find waiting outside the compound. I’d confessed to her how badly I wanted to run away.
Then she shared every word with my father, twisted my loneliness into an escape plot, and convinced him I’d been studying the compound so I could betray him.
My father answered by tightening the cage around me while she stole my identity and used it to claim every freedom he’d denied me.
She took Delgado as her surname and went wherever Father sent her—university campuses, courthouses, government offices, and private events—playing the daughter he wanted the world to see: educated, polished, submissive when obedience gained her access, and ruthless when someone stood in her way.
She used my identity to lure ambitious young women with promises of opportunity, then delivered them into my father’s hands.
The name Isabella Delgado was now attached to lies, sex trafficking, and crimes I’d never committed.
But Isabella Marcela Reyes was not Ciro Delgado’s daughter.
I was.
She’d taken the names Isabella and Delgado for herself, but our middle names still exposed the truth. Eliana was my mother’s name and my link to Eslovenya’s royal house. Marcela belonged to the woman she’d been before ambition convinced her that my name offered a better life.
I was my father’s captive, born inside Finca La Cruzona and kept here ever since because he counted me among the things he owned.
The old coffee estate spread across the volcanic slopes of San Vicente, its luxurious main house and manicured gardens sealed behind high concrete walls, armed guard posts, and acres of working farmland.
For the last five years, Marcela had lived in the world as Isabella Delgado.
Beyond these walls, I didn’t exist.
She had my name, my father’s protection, and the freedom to destroy my future.
I had his blood, a locked bedroom, and a dungeon beneath my bed to remind me what happened to anyone who tried to escape him.
A shout rose through the floor, followed by lowered voices I couldn’t quite make out.
Dark curiosity pulled me out of bed. This prisoner sounded nothing like the men my father usually brought home.
I needed to hear more. Information had kept me alive inside these walls far longer than ignorance ever could.
This room was a gilded cage, but I used it to my advantage, taking whatever knowledge the vent carried up.
Years ago, I’d taught myself to shut away the part of myself that recoiled at every scream—the nightmares, the guilt, the useless urge to help men I couldn’t reach.
I hadn’t stopped caring. I simply couldn’t afford to feel any of it while they suffered beyond my reach.
I kept my sympathy away because compassion without the power to act only gave my father another way to torture me.
My father had filled the room with carved furniture, fine linens, books he approved, and jewelry I had nowhere to wear. Every detail had been chosen for the daughter of a princess. Even the lock on the outside of the door was polished brass.
The carved walnut vanity against the opposite wall had belonged to my mother.
A tall mirror rose from its center, with smaller hinged mirrors on either side.
Silver-backed brushes, crystal perfume bottles, cosmetics, and small velvet jewelry boxes covered the surface—remnants of the beautiful princess she’d once been.
I sat on the cushioned stool and leaned toward the ornate wrought-iron grate set into the floor beside the wall.
The voices came through more clearly here, although I still couldn’t make out every word, so I pulled the stool closer.
Beneath the grate, a narrow brick-lined shaft dropped into one of the finca’s original coffee-storage cellars.
My father had converted the old bean-drying chamber into a room built for torture, but the vent still funneled every voice, blow, and scream into my bedroom.
It offered no view of what happened there, but that had never been its purpose.
My mother, Princess Eliana Sofija Dravik, had tried to escape my father. After her death, he’d moved me into this room so that I could hear every death cry. The stale air and odors rising from the vent were merely another part of his cruelty.
He believed the beauty of the room excused the lock on the door. The screams rising through the grate made sure I never mistook comfort for freedom and reminded me what would happen if I forgot.
No one crossed Ciro Delgado and lived.
A barked order came from below.
“Bring the chair over.”
The chair’s feet ground across the concrete and stopped with a hard thud as boots shifted and several men grunted with exertion.
“Keep him down.”
“I have his shoulders.”
“Then fucking hold them.”
“Chain his hands behind the chair.”
Metal knocked against wood. A lock clicked.
Then another.
“Secure his right ankle.”
“He won’t stop moving.”
“Then break his—”
“No,” a different man interrupted. “The boss wants him able to stand. We can’t kill him or make his pain obvious to a camera.”
A curse erupted below, followed by an impact hard enough to send the chair skidding across the floor.
“Hold him still and bolt the damn thing down.”
Boots shifted around him. The chair scraped several inches across the concrete, then stopped with a hard jolt.
Metal clanged against the floor.
A ratchet began clicking.
Once.
Twice.
Then again from the other side of the chair.
I knew that sound. I’d heard it too many times before. The men were fastening the chair to the steel anchors sunk into the cellar floor.
The prisoner continued to struggle, chains snapping taut while the men cursed and the wooden frame groaned beneath him.
Finally, something struck one of the chair legs.
It didn’t move.
“That’ll hold him.”
“Keep the hood on,” the same man ordered. “No one touches it until Senor Delgado gets here.”
None of the other prisoners had fought this hard. Drugged, hooded, and restrained, he should’ve been easy to control. Instead, he fought every man who laid hands on him.
Normally, the men locked to the chair were gang members who’d stolen money or drugs, cartel soldiers who’d failed an assignment, debtors, informants, or men accused of selling information to my father’s enemies.
They arrived shouting threats.
After the first hour, they offered money.
Then whatever else they might have.
By the end, most begged for death.
“Get your fucking hands off me.”
No one had ever spoken English from the chair beneath my room.
“Shut up.”
“Is that the best you can do?” the prisoner demanded, his voice husky from the drugs and the struggle. “Christ, you are all idiots.”