22. Chapter 22
Chapter twenty-two
For one glorious second, I thought locking that steel door meant we’d made it.
Then I turned around.
Isabella was already halfway down the maintenance channel.
“Fuck.”
She ran without looking back; the concrete chute dropped steeply enough that gravity was doing almost as much work as her legs.
The little backpack bounced against her shoulders, and Marcela’s blood still shone wet on the knife in her right hand.
She didn’t slow for the bends, check what waited ahead, or bother with any of the caution that had kept her alive inside the compound for twenty-five years.
For half a second, an uglier thought got hold of me.
Maybe she was running from me.
Marcela had spent the last several minutes telling Isabella that everything she’d done for me had been selfish. That she’d used me, used Rafael, and would eventually get me killed too. I’d seen the way Isabella looked at me, afraid I might believe it.
Then she nearly lost her footing on a turn, caught herself against the wall, and kept going as though she hadn’t even noticed. Hadn’t anyone ever taught her that running with a knife was dangerous?
That killed the uglier thought.
She wasn’t choosing to leave me. I wasn’t sure Isabella was choosing much of anything at the moment.
She was running from Rafael’s death, from losing the one person she’d trusted all these years.
He’d been her only confidant, the only person in that entire fucking place who had cared about Isabella instead of what she represented or what he could get from her.
And only minutes before he died, she’d learned he wasn’t simply the man who had protected her all her life.
He was her father.
She’d barely had time to call him Papá before he bled out beside her.
As if that weren’t enough, Ciro was dead too, and whatever complicated place he’d occupied in her life had ended with a bullet between his eyes.
Not to mention that she’d just carved open the face of the woman who had stolen her identity and spent the minutes before Isabella finally struck back, ripping into every bit of guilt she’d spent years learning how to cope with.
Standing still would mean having to feel all of it.
So I understood why she was running full speed into oblivion.
I shoved Rafael’s leather key strap into my pocket, kept Ciro’s pistol in my right hand, and went after her.
The first few strides reminded me that my body had been through a rather unpleasant two days.
My left thigh objected to the downhill grade, my ribs didn’t appreciate the pounding, and apparently everything Isabeast and Ciro’s boys had beaten, shocked, or otherwise abused had decided this was an excellent time to complain.
But none of that mattered because Isabella was getting farther away, so I pushed harder.
Mouse had somehow turned into a fucking jackrabbit, racing downhill with none of her usual caution and far more speed than a woman with legs half the length of mine had any right to manage.
I used one hand against the sloped wall when the channel pitched sharply downward and kept moving.
A muffled scream reached me from somewhere behind the retaining wall.
Marcela.
Then distance swallowed the sound.
Pity.
I’d been enjoying that.
The concrete under my boots grew cracked and uneven before ending altogether.
The man-made channel spilled into a natural cut in the mountainside, the bottom carved through black volcanic rock by years of runoff.
Dry leaves collected in pockets between chunks of basalt, exposed roots crossed the path at ankle height, and loose dark soil shifted under my boots whenever the grade steepened.
A thin ribbon of water followed the lowest part of the cut. Not enough to call it a stream, just runoff trickling between rocks and disappearing beneath leaves before showing itself again a few feet farther down.
Coffee shrubs crowded the higher bank to my left beneath taller shade trees. Banana plants had taken over the other side, their broad leaves hanging into the ravine and smacking my shoulders and face as I shoved through them.
Isabella stayed ahead of me.
Sometimes I caught the dark swing of her hair or the pale flash of her shirt around a bend. Then the ravine twisted, and she disappeared again.
Every time she disappeared around another bend, I thought about how little I really knew about what she’d survived before I ever heard her sneaking in from the hidden passage. Isabeast’s version was poison, but there was still so much about her I didn’t know.
I didn’t give a shit that Isabella had first looked at me and seen a possible way out. We’d both started with something we needed from the other. That part was old news.
What I wanted to know was everything that had happened in the years before I ever landed in Ciro’s dungeon.
What exactly had Isabella lived through inside that place?
Had any of those bastards put their hands on her because they knew she couldn’t complain?
Had Ciro ever handed her over to someone to punish her or prove a point?
Had she been forced to do more than just listen to the torture beneath her bedroom?
Had she ever been ordered to participate somehow, to clean up somebody else’s cruelty, or keep quiet about a woman who disappeared because refusing would have put her on the other side of the dungeon door?
And right now she was tearing down the side of a mountain so lost in her own head that I wasn’t sure she even remembered I was behind her.
What bothered me was the possibility that I could lose her before I ever got the chance to hear any of it from her.
That mattered a hell of a lot more than whether Marcela had managed to lace a few truths through all her poison.
I wanted the answers because I wanted to know Isabella. The ugly parts too. The things she was ashamed of. The things somebody had done to her. Even the things she might have done herself, because surviving Ciro Delgado had demanded them.
I could decide what I thought about those answers after I had her somewhere safe enough to give them.
Right now, I needed to catch the woman before grief did something her enemies hadn’t managed to do.
The ravine curved hard to the right and deepened.
The little ribbon of runoff joined a narrow stream cutting across the bottom of the slope. It wasn’t much—maybe eight inches deep where it passed beneath us—but the water had worn a shallow rocky gully into the mountainside. The compound’s outer security fence crossed directly over it.
Years of wet-season runoff had eaten away the soil beneath the lowest wire, leaving a gap where water and debris could pass under the fence rather than damming it.
Rafael and Isabella had known exactly how to get out of this place.
She didn’t hesitate when she reached the stream. Isabella splashed straight into the water and headed for the section of fence crossing the narrow gully. Water covered her boots and climbed partway up her shins before she stopped beneath the wire.
She pulled the backpack off her shoulders.
For one hopeful second, I thought she might wait for me.
Instead, she shoved the bloody knife into the side pocket, grabbed the backpack by one strap, and threw it over the fence.
It landed on dry leaves several feet beyond the water.
Smart.
At least some part of her was still thinking clearly enough to protect the supplies. Just not calm enough to wait for the enormous injured bastard trying to keep up with her.
She dropped to her hands and knees in the shallow stream and flattened herself into the eroded gap. Water soaked the knees and lower thighs of her jeans and splashed over her forearms as she wriggled beneath the lowest wire.
By the time I reached the gully, she was already crawling out on the other side.
I stepped into the stream.
“Isabella, hold up.”
Cold water filled my boots immediately.
Wonderful.
My mouth was dry enough that seeing running water made every part of my body demand that I drink it, but the stream ran downhill through coffee fields and God knew what else.
Spending the night shitting myself to death on a Salvadoran mountain would be a particularly humiliating ending after everything else that had failed to kill me this week.
Besides, Isabella had surely packed water in that pack she was holding onto so tightly.
Assuming I ever caught her.
I pulled Rafael’s pistol from my waistband.
The gap under the fence had been plenty big enough for Isabella.
Me?
Not a fucking chance.
I pushed Rafael’s gun across the wet rock beneath the wire, then Ciro’s, far enough that I could reach them from the other side. After that, I dropped into the stream and turned onto one shoulder.
The first attempt got me nowhere except wet.
I shifted lower, flattened myself as much as a six-foot-four man built like me could reasonably flatten, and shoved forward, praying I wasn’t going to have to dig out this stream with my bare hands.
The wire scraped across my bare back, and my left leg caught briefly between the bottom of the fence and the slope of the rocks.
I twisted, freed it, and scrambled forward.
A fence was not putting me back in that fucking compound.
And a few ugly seconds later, I planted both hands on the opposite bank and dragged the rest of myself through.
I grabbed the pistols and got to my feet.
The backpack was gone from where Isabella had thrown it, and so was Isabella.
Below me, the mountainside disappeared into rows of coffee shrubs, towering banana leaves, and darker patches of forest.
I couldn’t see her anywhere.
For one terrible second, all I heard was my own breathing and the thin stream trickling beneath the fence.
Then a branch snapped somewhere downhill.
Another followed farther to the left, accompanied by the unmistakable crash of somebody forcing their way through brush without giving a damn how loud they were.
I caught sight of her rushing ahead. At this rate, she was going to take another decade off my life before sunset.