21. Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Well, this was thoroughly fucked.
We were hiding behind a dead man’s truck in the middle of a cartel civil war.
Rafael had bled out on the ground less than a minute ago.
Isabella was still on her knees beside the father she’d only just discovered belonged to her, with his blood covering both hands.
Somewhere on the other side of the truck, men were shooting at one another over Ciro’s corpse and whatever pieces of his empire they thought they could claim before the day was over.
And standing directly in front of us was the cunt who’d started it.
I kept Ciro’s pistol trained on Mateo and took in the rest of the scene.
Mateo stepped closer to me as the rifleman went right, the two of them spreading apart to divide my attention.
Smart.
The move also cleared the rifleman’s line of sight, positioning him so that the barrel pointed straight at Isabella’s head.
I adjusted my stance, keeping Mateo in front of my gun while tracking the rifleman in my peripheral vision. They were far enough apart now that I could cover either one with a quick turn of my wrist.
I just couldn’t kill both at once.
That decided everything.
A few minutes ago, I could’ve concentrated on getting us through the next gunfight, through the service door, and beyond the compound’s thick concrete walls.
I’d been doing some version of that since Isabella opened my cuffs—find the threat, kill it, keep moving.
Pain, thirst, whatever the fuck my left leg was doing could all be dealt with later.
But Isabella, with a rifle pointed at her head, had changed the equation.
At this range, I could put a bullet in Mateo before he fired. I could turn and get a second shot off at the rifleman too. On a good day, I probably could’ve killed them both before either man understood what happened.
This wasn’t a good day.
I was dehydrated, half-beaten to hell, and running on whatever adrenaline my body still had left.
The rifle was already lined up on Isabella’s face.
If my second shot was a fraction too slow, if the bastard’s finger tightened while he was dying, if I missed by an inch because my arm decided two days of torture had finally caught up with it—
No.
I’d gambled with my own life plenty of times, but there was no fucking way I was gambling with Isabella’s.
Rafael had looked me in the eye while he was dying and trusted me with the only thing in the world that had mattered to him. But the truth was, the old man hadn’t created this need to keep her alive. He’d only put honor behind something I’d already decided.
Isabella had done the rest herself.
She’d done it when she brought a bottle of water to a stranger chained beneath her bedroom. When she came back after hearing Isabeast torture me. When she opened my restraints, even though she knew I could overpower her the second my hands were free.
And definitely when she walked back into that dungeon with the key instead of using Ciro’s death to save herself.
Somewhere along the way, Mouse had become mine to get off this fucking mountain.
Marcela glanced down at Rafael’s body before looking back at me.
“Put the gun down, pet.”
The rifleman’s finger flexed and then settled more firmly against the trigger.
My attention dropped briefly to Isabella.
She was still beside Rafael, the little backpack strapped over both shoulders. Her kitchen knife lay on the concrete near her right thigh, close enough to reach if she could get her head out of the nightmare she’d been dropped into.
Rafael’s pistol lay a little farther away, the leather strap with the service door key beside it.
“I won’t ask twice,” Marcela sneered with that fucking smug smirk she had.
She had that arrogance back in her voice. Same one she’d used in New York when she thought a navy suit and a stack of legal papers made her untouchable. Apparently watching Ciro’s brains hit a dungeon wall had done wonders for her confidence.
I lowered the pistol.
“Good boy.” Marcela’s mouth curved with satisfaction. “All the way on the ground.”
Christ, I was going to enjoy killing her one day.
I placed Ciro’s gun carefully on the concrete beside Rafael’s pistol.
To Isabeast, it probably looked like surrender. To me, it put both pistols within reach if anything shifted the odds in our favor.
I raised my hands slowly.
Marcela looked entirely too pleased with herself.
“You should enjoy this part, Isabeast,” I said. “Things have a habit of going to shit for you right after you think you’ve won.”
Mateo’s mouth compressed into a hard line.
Marcela gave a quiet scoff. “Still convinced Volkov is going to save you?”
“Nik doesn’t need to save me from you.”
“No?” She swept one hand toward the compound, where another burst of gunfire cracked somewhere beyond the loading yard. “Look around you, Lachlan. Ciro is dead. I have access to his accounts, political contacts he spent decades buying, and enough armed men loyal to me to get exactly what I want.”
“Half the compound is trying to kill you.”
“I don’t need every illiterate gangster and cartel thug Ciro kept on his payroll.” Her voice sharpened. “That was always his mistake. He thought power meant owning the most guns and terrifying the most peasants.”
Interesting.
She straightened and smoothed one blood-speckled cuff of her white blouse as though we were standing in a Manhattan courtroom instead of beside Rafael’s body.
“I have men who have already chosen me. I have money Ciro never understood how to use properly and connections in places he could barely reach. Courts. Banks. Politicians. People who wouldn’t have allowed a man like him through the front door without someone like me making him presentable.
” Her chin lifted. “What happened here today is messy. Temporary. I have much bigger plans than spending my life ruling a mountain full of MS-13 trash.”
“You really think those men are loyal to you?” I asked.
“They chose me over Ciro.”
“No. Some chose the money you gave them. Some chose the free pussy. Some chose Mateo. A few probably chose whichever side they thought would still be standing by dinner.” I lowered my hands a fraction, relaxed enough to make the insult conversational.
“You’re confusing people you bought with people who’d die for you. ”
That finally cracked through her self-satisfaction.
The tendons in her neck drew tight, and she pressed her lips together hard enough to pull at the stitches I’d left in the corner of her mouth.
Her fingers went to the blood-spattered cuff again, smoothing fabric that was already flat.
Once. Twice. The same polished little correction she’d probably made a thousand times before walking into a courtroom or an expensive room full of men she needed to impress.
Only this time, there was blood on the blouse, a dead cartel boss at her back, and an Irishman she’d spent two days trying and failing to break.
Marcela drew herself upright and took one slow step away from Mateo, as though moving closer to us would remind everyone she was the person in charge.
Then she looked down at Isabella.
I knew that move.
She couldn’t intimidate me, so she went looking for somewhere softer to attack.
“Don’t tell me you’re turning me down because that bleeding heart of yours found another damsel in distress,” Isabeast said. “Jesus, Lachlan, you’d think you would’ve learned that lesson after me.”
Isabella lifted her head.
“Don’t,” I warned.
Isabeast ignored me.
“You should put what you are to better use. All that muscle, all that stubborn resolve, all those powerful friends willing to cross borders looking for you.” Her lip curled as she glanced down at Isabella. “Wasting it to save some weak little cellar rat is beneath you.”
Rat.
That almost pissed me off enough to laugh.
Isabeast had no fucking idea who she was looking at. Isabella had more courage in that quiet little body than most of the armed men in this compound, and enough patience to survive years waiting for the right chance to escape.
But Isabella didn’t think of it the way I did.
I saw Isabeast’s words cut into her. Her shoulders drew in, and she lowered her head a fraction, taking the insult instead of dismissing it for the bullshit it was.
Of course Isabeast noticed.
“Did she tell you where she’s been living all these years?
” she asked me. “Her beautiful little bedroom was directly above Ciro’s dungeon.
She heard everything that happened down there.
Men screaming until their voices broke. Bones cracking.
The wet choking when somebody fought to breathe through blood.
Men begging Ciro to kill them before his animals started again. ”
Isabeast tsked.
“And women. She heard them too. Crying. Screaming for someone to help them. Begging men not to touch them while Isabella lay in her bed one floor above and listened.”
Isabella’s face went white.
“Sometimes it went on for hours. Sometimes the same person was still down there days later. She heard people vomit, sob, pray, and finally go so quiet that only the occasional groan made it through the floor. And when everything downstairs went quiet, she knew exactly what that silence meant.”
Her voice dropped, becoming almost intimate in its cruelty.
“And do you know what your brave little cellar rat eventually learned to do, Lachlan? Sleep through it.”
Isabella flinched as if Marcela had struck her.
“She learned to roll over and close her eyes while somebody else screamed themselves hoarse beneath her floor. Then she’d get up the next morning, put on one of her pretty dresses, walk across the courtyard, and eat breakfast while Ciro’s men cleaned the blood out of the room below her.”
Isabella went completely still beside Rafael.
I looked at her.
Those pale blue eyes met mine and stayed there.
She didn’t look away or start searching my face for the response she needed. There was none of the quick calculation I’d watched in Isabeast’s eyes whenever one lie stopped working and she needed another.