Their Cartel Princess: The Complete Series: A Dark Reverse Harem Box Set Page 52
“He already tried taking her once. It was his guys on the road the other day.”
“So…” Lars mused quietly, “Escape the castle, find the archives, kill the dragon, rescue Princess’s father, try not to get Princess kidnapped. Again. Is that it, or am I missing something?”
“You really think this is a time for jokes?” Finn hissed.
“I was hoping this was a time for getting the fuck out of here.”
Finn spun to Lars, catching his shoulder in a meaty hand. “You want to tell me you’ll have no fucking issue getting to sleep tonight if we leave right now with this shit going on?”
“My conscience is offended at that statement,” Lars said moodily. “Of course I won’t fucking sleep. But I’ll still be alive. Which I probably won’t be if we start off on this fucking rescue mission of yours.”
“Stop thinking about yourself, just once,” Finn muttered.
“I’m the selfish one here?” Lars yelled after him as Finn started forward. “You’re the one that just couldn’t bring yourself to let your little bunny go. Had to have your fucking plaything, didn’t you, Milo? Never mind the gig. Never mind the fact that she’s as dangerous as fucking—”
“Plutonium?” Finn cut in. “So what? She didn’t choose any of this, Lars.”
“Yea, oh, noble knight!” Lars said, throwing his hands in the air. “Her riches and wealth were simply thrust upon her despite her every protestation!”
Javier had moved out of sight, and Finn swung around again, gritting his teeth at Lars. “Stay here, then. You don’t want part of saving her father’s life? Hers? Then you can just stand right here and watch.” He flashed his gaze down Lars’s body. “Isn’t that what cowards do? Watch?”
The words lashed from him like a whip, but he couldn’t claw them back.
Lars’s face grew hard, his eyes the green of fossilized grass. “Fuck you, Finn.” He took a step back, shaking his head. “Fuck you and the fucked-up world you live in.” He gave a wide wave, a brittle smile tugging up his mouth. “I’m sure you two will be perfect together. Maybe all the dead bodies you’ll have piling up around you will finally be enough to satisfy you. Fuck knows, nothing else ever does!” The last was a hoarse yell.
“Lars—”
But his friend had turned away and stalked away at a speed that Finn would have had to run to catch up with.
And he should have. He should have caught up to Lars and made him see reason.
But Javier was going to get god knew what to wake Cora up. And he had no idea what Javier intended to do once she started answering his questions.
47
A murder of crows
A wave of something akin to electricity sped through Cora. She sat bolt upright, mouth gaping open as her body drew an unbidden breath. When she turned her head, the room felt unsteady, but it snapped back to solidity as soon as she focused on Javier’s face.
He had his hands on the side of her bed, a grim smile on his face. Beside him stood another man, someone she had a vague recollection of. The man’s face was set in a disapproving sneer, and as she watched he put away a needle that was stained with a streak of blood.
“I’m sorry, mi reinita, but your rest will have to wait,” Javier said. “I need you to be lucid right now.”
He touched her wrist. It almost felt a fond caress until she realized he was feeling her heart rate.
Her breath became erratic. “I’m…awake,” she managed.
More. It felt like every nerve ending on her body burned with cold fire.
“Good. Now, do you remember your father giving you anything when you left your home? A file, or a disk. Important information?”
Her brain scrambled, and dragged the memory of Papá handing her Santa Muerte’s pendant.
“Yes,” she said, before she could stop her mouth forming the words.
Someone was holding her hand, and they squeezed her hard. She swung her head, and jerked in surprise at seeing Finn standing beside her. When had he come back? Or had he never left at all?
“Where is it?” Javier asked, near breathless. “Elle? Where is it?”
She opened her mouth, and Finn’s fingers twitched around her. He wasn’t looking at her, but at Javier. And he wasn’t happy.
“I…” She frowned and looked back at her uncle. “I left it in my room.”
“I had your room searched,” Javier said. “There’s nothing there.”
“I…hid it. Hid it away.” She had, and she could remember that now. Maybe it was the way her heart was thudding in her chest, driving surplus amounts of blood into her brain. She could remember taking off her necklace and shoving that pendant into her pocket, afraid she’d lose it as her gelding tore through the desert.
“Then show me,” Javier said. He dropped his voice, concern darkening his eyes. “Your father’s life is at stake.”
Urgency sparked through her body, so intense that she had to hold herself back from leaping off her cot.
“He’s alive?”
“Do you think you could walk?” Finn asked quietly.
She swung to him, mouth open. “He’s alive!” Then back to Javier. “You’ve found him? How? Where—”
“Cora, can you walk?” Frustration drew hard lines between Finn’s brows. She swallowed and tried to force down the wave of sparkling joy flooding her.
No, she couldn’t walk.
But she could fucking fly.
Cora slid off the bed, grabbing onto Javier’s arm when her left leg gave way under her. He slid his arm around her waist, and propped her up against him. Loud footsteps bore down on them, and Cora looked up just in time to see Finn coming around the cot to step in front of her.
“I’ll take her.”
“Do you really think I would let something happen to her?” It seemed a rhetorical question.
Finn ignored the man and bent to scoop Cora into his arms.
Every point of light in the room—a fluorescent bar on the ceiling, a small window high up in one wall, a computer monitor on a small desk—left tracers in their wake. Streaks, like afterimages, that made her think she could see into another dimension.
Cool air moved over her skin as Finn carried her somewhere. Sunlight blinded her. A stray thought—crows?— made her try and stare past the sun to the pale blue sky.
She was aware with every jolt and bump that there was something wrong with her leg. The skin around her knee felt too tight, the leg itself too stiff. And there were places on her cheeks and arms that were more sensitive than the rest. She could feel the sunlight oozing into it like liquid fire.
Finn was taking her through the villa. Lights flashed down on her, cast through the pillars of the hallways they strode through. So fast, it was like a strobe light flashing over her closed lids.
The horse. Falling. Her body scraping over the rough ground.
She grabbed Finn’s shirt in a fist, disorientated when gloom replaced sunlight. When she looked up at him, he was staring ahead. But, as if he could feel her looking at him, he glanced down. Almost nothing in his expression changed, but suddenly he wasn’t glaring bloody murder at the world, but gazing down at her like he’d found something he’d lost a long time ago.
She sighed when he set her down on her bed.
Her one leg was crooked at the knee, but the other didn’t want to bend like it used to. Her jeans had been sheared off mid-thigh. Bandages wound all the way from the top of her knee to halfway down her shin. That’s why her leg had felt so weird. She could see some scrapes on her leg; more on her arms when she stretched out a hand to investigate the bandages.
She heard people moving about in the room, but it was almost drowned out by the sound of her jaw creaking. No, not her jaw, her teeth.
Finn’s hand fumbled in his pocket and came out holding a mint. He slid it between her lips. She took it grudgingly, and then closed her eyes and sighed at the burst of flavor that filled her mouth. Her mouth shuddered as she sucked at the mint.
Someon
e clicked their fingers.
Cora swallowed hard. Her throat had gone bone-dry. “Water.”
She looked up, and saw Javier staring at her, impatience carved into the unhappy set of his mouth. “Where, Eleodora? Where did you hide it?”
“What?” she asked.
“What did you give her?” Finn’s voice drew her eyes to him.
Her chest inflated with a hard, happy breath. In this moment, she could have kissed him over every inch of his rugged face. His eyes crinkled with a frown, and he looked away from her.
“Something to wake her up.” Javier’s voice. God, it sounded so deep and melodious.
“Do you sing?” she asked, lights streaking across her field of view when she turned to her uncle. She still thought of him as that, even though he’d told her he wasn’t. She had a memory of him pushing her on a swing, but for the life of her she couldn’t tell if it was real or not.
“Do I sing?” he repeated, voice quavering as if he was about to laugh. “No, mi reinita. I do not sing.”
She brought fingers to her throat. “You should. Your voice…it’s…”
“Cora!”
She jerked. Javier showed her his teeth, but he wasn’t smiling. “The files. Now.”
“What files?” Cora asked. But then an image flashed in her head. Papá, handing her the Santa Muerte pendant.
Something as strange and insidious as deja-vu crept over her. She’d had this exact same thought. A hand wrapped around her, and gave her a squeeze.
It had done that before.
A warning.
“I lost it,” Cora said, and her eyes slipped closed. People were talking in the background, and the sound of their muted conversation rose and fell like a radio with the volume turned down low. It lulled her, rocked her, sang her to sleep. A sleep filled with an army of marching Santa Muerte pendants. A foaming gelding crashed through them, splintering them like glass as it plowed through their ranks. Javier rode that gelding, one hand holding down his cowboy hat, the other on the reigns. Smiling at her, wide and deep. A smile so warm, so inviting, so suggestive that it didn’t matter how many of those unsmiling skeletons he crushed under his horse’s hooves.
A hand on her shoulder. A warm breath touched the side of her neck. “Are you with us?” came Javier’s voice, so close and so sonorous that she shivered violently as she came to from that vivid dream.
She turned. Javier’s face was inches from hers, his dark eyes filling her world. She stared at his mouth as he spoke again, but white noise drowned out what he was saying. Cora leaned forward, her eyes fluttering closed, expecting her lips to touch his, but finding air instead.
Her eyes flew open. Javier stood a foot away, face set in a deep frown. He opened his mouth to speak, but then his phone rang.
The sound propelled her back in time. Pseudo-reality snapped around her like an elastic band, shivering. She was on the back of a gelding, but bareback. Clinging to his mane as the landscape blurred around her. She gripped as hard as she could, willing her eyes to close before it fell so she wouldn’t have to feel that pain again.
“Not now!” Javier’s voice fragmented the memory into a thousand shards that spun away like she was the center of an invisible explosion.
“What?”
He turned an angry face, considering her where she lay in the bed. “Wait.” He stabbed at the screen of his phone and slid it back into his pocket.
Javier stepped forward, moving too quickly. “Don’t play games with me, Elle,” he said. “You said you hid it. I need those files!” Suddenly, Tío was no longer charismatic and irresistible, but deadly. A shadow black with plague. Cora fumbled urgently in her belt for her Taurus, but it was gone. And the top button of her jeans unbuttoned.
Who’d unbuttoned her jeans?
“Looking for this?” Finn asked. He’d materialized besides her, her Taurus on his outstretched palm. She took it, cradled it to her chest. It was cold and hard, but comforting. “Where’d you find it?” Her thumb traced the inscription on the side, but it felt different. Like distinct ridges, not the barely discernible calligraphic etches she remembered. They stood up so high she could trace their shape and read each letter.
Not ‘Creo en ti, mi corazón’ but ‘aqua’.
She blinked hard, and squeezed the Taurus. It went crump against her chest, and she dropped it in shock.
A water bottle fell into her lap and then rolled off her bed and onto the floor. Her heart raced as her mind scrambled frantically for reality.
“What’s going on?” she moaned. Her fingers gripped soft sheets.
Finn came walking to her from across the room, where he’d been whispering with Lars. The closer he got, the bigger he became. Javier, standing a few feet away with his hip against her dressing table, looked lean and tall in comparison.
“It’s okay, Cora,” Finn said. “You’re safe.” But his eyes told a very different story. They were dark with worry, his mouth an unmoving line she recognized by now. The last few moments of reality rushed in, leaving her woozy before she could grasp a single, clear thought.
“Saddlebag,” she blurted out. And then blinked back sudden tears. Her fingertips still thrummed where she’d felt the inscription on her Taurus. “It’s in my saddlebag,” she repeated again, turning to Javier.
The man’s eyes glowed with a dark light.
“Why did you put it in there?” Javier’s voice drew shivers on her skin.
“When we were galloping,” she said, her words blurring together as her mouth began another furious stutter. “Thought it would fall. Break.”
Javier turned without another word and strode for her bedroom door. He left streaks of black in the air like demon dust.
“Tell me what you gave her,” Finn growled after him, getting to his feet. He still held Cora’s hand, but he wasn’t squeezing it anymore.
Javier laughed, paused at the door, and said, “For every downer, there’s an upper.”
Several men filed out behind him when he clicked his fingers and left the room. There was silence—or there would have been if the air hadn’t churned like an ocean.
Ouch. Her knee thumped pain in memory, and she soothed it with a quick brush of her fingers over the bandage. Bandages that felt rough and cool compared with her skin.
How come she’d never noticed how soft her skin felt? How smooth her waist? She undid her bottom button of her shirt and felt at a rib bone. It moved when she pressed on it.
Hands caught her wrists. There was anger in Finn’s eyes when she looked up.
“What did I do?” she said, pouting.
“Nothing,” he murmured. “Stay. Rest. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
But when that bedroom door closed behind him, it slammed with the same leaden thump as a coffin lid.
She hadn’t had a chance to tell him she’d been lying. Her fingers brushed the low bulge in her jean pocket. She put a trembling hand inside and drew out the necklace. Santa Muerte grinned up at her with that perpetual, toothy smile. Her robes shifted as if a breeze blew on those molded folds.
“What did I do?” Cora murmured.
The pain was worse this morning. It had woken Angel from a troubled sleep, one where he’d kept jerking awake thinking he’d heard Marco’s terrified yell.
He’d heard that sound too often on their trek from Michoacán to the border. He knew now that he should never have trusted the coyote. But, at the time, he couldn’t have gone another day selling his body to survive.
If he could go back, he’d have put up with that torture for the rest of his life. At least, then, Marco would never have had to experience the things he did.
Marco’s innocence had been stolen, and it was entirely his fault. A debt he’d never be able to repay, but would keep trying to the rest of his life.
Footsteps. More than yesterday. Three, perhaps four men.
Angel willed himself into a sit. His entirely body was stiff and aching, like he’d aged a hundred years overnight.
Angel slunk forward, welcoming it.
The jailers may have been used to this darkness, but light meant they’d brought someone who wasn’t.
Javier Martin.
The man was too resplendent, silhouetted against the grimy backdrop of the cells opposite Angel’s. He wore pressed, light blue jeans, a cowboy hat, and a white linen shirt so bright it stung Angel’s eyes.
He didn’t recognize the jailers; this was the first time he’d seen their faces after being dragged down into his cell yesterday.
The man in the crisp clothes didn’t say anything for a long time. He studied Angel through the grates with a slight sneer on his face, as if he would want a wash after having to come down to the cells.
“Don Javier?” Angel asked, when he couldn’t take the stifling silence anymore.
“Have you met with Zachary West in person?”
If there was any doubt in Angel’s mind that this was in fact El Guapo, his voice eradicated it. Those words held such an air of authority that Angel wanted to bow his head and beg forgiveness for anything he’d ever done to wrong this man.
What was he supposed to say?
“Si,” Angel said in a shaky voice.
Javier shifted his weight. “Do you know where he lives? Where he operates from?”
“Si.”
“Can you show my men?”
Angel shifted uneasily. “Si, but Zachary has a lot of—”
“Then you will show me.” Javier turned to the jailers. “Tomas, search the stables and bring me Cora’s bags. Miguel, keep watch. In an hour you bring this…” Javier looked down at Angel like a pile of shit he’d almost stepped in. “Bring him to me.”
48
No place for a lady
Finn had been gone for what felt like hours when Cora’s legs began twitching and aching like she’d been running the whole day. She swung her legs out of bed and hobbled to a stand, testing if she could put weight on her injured leg. There was still no pain, just a dull ache every now and then. Probably meant it was good enough for her to walk around a little, if only to get rid of the irritating tension in her muscles.