19. Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
“Isabella.”
Lachlan’s voice stopped me the moment he saw me.
I turned and scanned him from head to foot.
Of course I did. I hadn’t been able to see much through the sliver of the open panel, but I’d heard enough to know how badly everything had gone wrong.
He was still cuffed to the chair, but he was alive, with no fresh bullet wounds or obvious new injuries after the room had gone insane while I hid behind the wall listening to it happen.
His green eyes locked on mine.
Relief hit hard enough that I nearly forgot how to breathe.
“Jesus Christ, Mouse.” His voice came out rough. “You scared the hell out of me when you opened that panel with a room full of bloodthirsty armed men only feet away.”
I blinked.
For some reason, the fact that I’d frightened him hit harder than the scolding. I’d spent what felt like forever terrified someone would shoot him, and all that time he’d been worried about me behind the wall.
“I—I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to scare you. I just needed to know you were all right.”
“There wasn’t much you could’ve done if I wasn’t.” His mouth curved into a crooked half-smile.
“I was careful.”
“You really believe that?” he asked, cocking one brow. “You were behind a false door while Isabeast was waving a gun around and Ciro Delgado was losing his fucking mind.”
“Well, when you put it that way, maybe it wasn’t the best idea.”
I glanced toward the hidden panel.
“But still, what would you expect me to do? I wanted to help you.” Trying to explain an irrational impulse to Lachlan was probably hopeless.
The man seemed to keep a grip on every one of his.
“You have no idea how badly I wanted to come out when she climbed onto you. I wanted to grab her by the hair and drag her off you.”
That earned me a real smile, brief but unmistakable.
“But I didn’t. I stayed where I was because if I opened that door any farther, somebody would see me, and the first person they would punish was you.”
“So you waited without making a sound, even while they were shooting each other just feet away, so you could help me?”
I nodded, twisting the key between my fingers.
“It seemed like the least terrible choice available.”
His smile returned.
“There’s my Mouse.”
My entire body was trembling.
Wonderful.
Of course Lachlan noticed. He noticed everything.
I looked down at my boots because if I kept looking at him, I was going to cry, and I absolutely did not have time for that.
“Hey. Look at me.”
Chewing on my lower lip, I lifted my eyes to his.
“Thank you for coming back.”
The simple way he said it made my throat tighten.
“I promised I would.”
“And now you’re standing in the middle of a fucking horror movie with a key in your hand instead of halfway down the mountain by yourself. That’s brave, Isabella. Maybe a little insane, but brave.”
I swallowed.
“I’m not feeling particularly brave right now.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re here.”
One side of his mouth tipped up again.
“Now come get me out of this fucking chair before someone decides to come back.”
I nodded and finally pulled my attention away from him.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen the blood on the walls when I came into the room.
Or the bodies. I had. But after listening to gunshots and shouting while Lachlan sat helpless in the middle of it, I’d only cared about finding him alive.
Everything else had stayed at the edges until I knew he was safe.
I simply hadn’t let myself register any of it yet.
Now there was nowhere else for my mind to hide, and the rest of the room came rushing in.
The smell really hit me. Blood, gunpowder, and the damp cellar odor I’d known since childhood all mixed together in the stale air.
The guard Mateo had killed lay near the main door.
I had seen dead men before.
That was one of the uglier truths of growing up at Finca La Cruzona.
But I had never stood this close to what a bullet fired beneath a man’s chin could do.
Most of the top of his head was simply gone.
Blood had sprayed across the doorframe and ceiling and was running down the wall in thick streaks. One arm was trapped beneath his body, the other bent at an odd angle.
I slapped a hand over my mouth and nose, trying not to lose it.
“Don’t look at him.”
Lachlan’s voice came from behind me.
Too late, my eyes found Father.
Everything else disappeared.
He lay beside a small table on his back, one shoulder twisted slightly beneath him.
For one stupid second, my mind insisted he was going to get up.
Ciro Delgado did not lie on the floor.
Other men did.
Men who disappointed him. Men who betrayed him. Men who had something he wanted.
Father stood over bodies.
He gave orders while someone else cleaned up the blood.
He sat at the head of the dining table in an immaculate shirt with his cuffs buttoned and his cigar resting between two fingers while grown men waited for permission to speak.
He did not die on the concrete floor of his own dungeon.
Except here he was.
The bullet hole between his eyes was almost shockingly small.
That was the part I couldn’t stop staring at.
A dark, round, sunken pit in the center of his face.
Blood had run from it down the bridge of his nose, around his lip, and down his chin. His eyes, pupils blown wide, were still open, staring at nothing.
Behind his head, the wall told the rest of the story, smeared with blood, bone, and gray matter where the back of his skull had taken the real damage.
My father had always hated disorder. Shoes left by a doorway. Papers sitting crooked on his desk. A dinner setting missing the correct fork.
Now one side of his jacket was bunched beneath him, his shirt had pulled partly free from his trousers, and there was blood soaking into fabric that probably cost more than most of the people who worked for him earned in a month.
One polished shoe had turned sideways.
I couldn’t stop looking at that either.
Such a ridiculous thing to notice.
Father would have hated it.
“Isabella.”
I heard Lachlan, but I just couldn’t make myself answer.
I had imagined Father dead before.
More times than I would ever admit to anyone.
Sometimes someone shot him.
Sometimes I poisoned his liquor.
Once, when I was sixteen and particularly furious with him, I spent an entire afternoon imagining him falling down the main staircase and breaking his neck while I stood at the top and did absolutely nothing to help.
Those fantasies had always ended the same way.
With freedom.
I had believed his death would feel like a door swinging open.
Instead, I stood there staring at him and couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to feel.
He looked smaller.
That was the first truly unsettling thing about it.
Father had never seemed small to me.
He had filled every room he entered, even when he said nothing. His moods decided whether the entire finca breathed easily or spent the day trying not to be noticed. He decided when I left my bedroom, what I learned, where I went, who I spoke to, what version of my own life I was allowed to know.
Even when he was gone, I measured my choices against what would happen when he came back.
Now he was dead.
There would be no coming back.
He would never unlock my bedroom door because he felt generous.
Never lock it because I had annoyed him.
Never tell me what my mother would have wanted as though he had known her heart better than I did.
Never put his hands on me.
Never threaten Rafael because he had stepped between us.
Never decide what happened to me again.
My mother had died trying to escape him.
For years, I had carried the private, horrible wish that someday Father would pay for that.
Apparently, someday had arrived.
And beneath the shock, beneath the nausea, beneath the fact that the man on the floor was my father, relief rushed through me so strongly my knees nearly gave out.
He was dead.
Ciro Delgado was finally dead.
And he could never own another second of my life.
The guilt came immediately after.
I pressed my lips together.
My mother was gone.
Now my father was dead.
That left me with no parents. No family. No one in the world I belonged to.
A burst of gunfire cracked somewhere beyond the cellar.
I flinched.
“He’s dead,” Lachlan said softly. “You’re not.”
I turned back to him. His eyes dropped to the key in my hand.
“Key, Isabella.”
Right.
I hadn’t come down here to mourn a father I’d never really had.
I had come for Lachlan.
I rushed behind the chair and dropped to my knees.
My hands were shaking badly enough that the key scraped against the first cuff several times before I found the lock.
“Hold still.”
“I’m the one chained to the chair, Mouse.”
A breath escaped me that might have been a laugh if anything about the room had been funny.
The lock turned, and the cuff popped open.
Lachlan yanked his right hand free and brought it around in front of him, flexing his fingers.
I moved to work on the other one.
He twisted his wrist to give me better access, and this time the key went in on the first try.
Click.
His second hand came free.
Lachlan took the key from me.
“I’ve got the rest. Watch the door.”
No argument.
I stood and pulled the knife from the side pocket of the backpack while he bent forward and unlocked one ankle, then the other.
For a second, neither of us moved.
Then Lachlan planted both boots on the concrete and stood.
His face tightened.
That was all the pain he was going to show.
He rocked backward, but caught the back of the chair with one hand and stayed on his feet.
He rolled one shoulder, looked toward Father, and became a different man.
Not the prisoner.
Not the man I’d been sneaking water and food to.
But the dangerous one I had suspected was sitting beneath all those restraints all along.
Lachlan crossed the room.
He crouched beside Father with a soft groan, reached beneath the back of his jacket, and pulled a pistol from its holster.
He checked it with quick, practiced movements.
Just then, a key scraped inside the main door’s lock.
He moved before I could speak.
One second he was beside Father, the next he was directly in front of me with the pistol raised toward the door.
“Lachlan—”
The door opened.
Rafael stepped in with his own gun already drawn.
“Wait!”
I pushed beside Lachlan before either man could decide the other was a threat.
“Rafael.”
Lachlan shifted just enough to block me with his arm.
“Get behind me.”
“He’s with us.”
Rafael’s gaze flicked to the arm Lachlan had put across me, then to the pistol aimed at his chest.
No fear.
No insult.
Just assessment.
“He’s the reason we can escape,” I said quickly. “He got me the key.”
Lachlan glanced back at me.
“The man you told me about?”
“Yes.”
Rafael lowered his weapon first.
Lachlan waited another beat before lowering his.
“Then talk fast.”
“The compound is splitting,” Rafael said. “Marcela has men moving toward the armory, and the gates are locked. Ciro’s men are trying to stop them.”
Gunfire sounded again, farther away this time.
Rafael’s mouth tightened.
“We’ve only got minutes to get out of here—if we’re lucky.”
He looked at Lachlan.
“Can you move?”
Lachlan checked his grip on the pistol.
“Lead.”
That was apparently answer enough.
Rafael leaned into the corridor and checked both ways, then stepped back inside and pulled the dungeon door shut. He locked it from our side. Anyone coming to check the cellar would have to waste time opening it.
I slipped back into the hidden passage first.
The backpack caught briefly against the stone, and Lachlan’s hand closed around the strap, guiding it clear and properly up onto both of my shoulders.
He followed so close behind me I could feel the heat of him in the narrow stairway.
Rafael entered last.
The hidden door scraped shut behind us.
Father was dead on the other side, and for the first time in my life, I was walking away from him without wondering when he would force me back.
He couldn’t. Not anymore.
I tightened my grip on the knife and kept moving.