Eva was gone and she didn’t even love me in the first place, so fuck it.

I was pretty much done in Mexico. I would take the money and the coke, sell it on the down-low in San Diego, and then get the fuck out of the drug trade and away from the DEA’s grasp before they knew I was gone.

Hey, if they couldn’t catch Luis Reyes in over two years of searching for him, I was sure I could stay ahead of them if I hid somewhere south of the border.

Louisa and I walked up the stairs to my room. I held her by the hand as I led her, but any kind of hook up was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to get a little information out of her. Because this Luis Reyes shit, after two weeks of being there, was driving me up a wall. Where was the guy? Was he a ghost? I didn’t even care if the DEA found their information, but I had to know for me.

We took a seat on my bed.

“Louisa, I need you to be totally honest with me. Okay? Let’s just sit down on the bed for a second.”

“I mean I always found you very attractive, Corbin.” Not what I meant at all, but I didn’t want to piss her off since I was trying to get information from her.

“Let’s just do what we came here to do,” I said.

“Why so serious?” she leaned over and gave me a big kiss right on the lips.

I was pissed but surprised, and it took me a second to push her off. “What are you doing?”

“What I came here to do,” she smiled. “You. Just like Marco told me to.”

I stood up and paced around the room for a moment, needing to put distance between the two of us. “Listen, I need to know what Marco has been saying about me, about Luis, anyone. Anything at all. Talk to me.”

She shrugged and flopped her hands backward on the bed. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean last night when I got in from San Diego, he mumbled something about having solved that rubik’s cube last night while we were having sex. Sort of weird dirty talk.”

I froze in my tracks and swallowed hard. “He talked about the rubik’s cube…while you were having sex?”

Louisa shrugged, seeming pretty unphased. “Yeah. I mean he always yells out weird shit during sex, and he likes pillow talk too. I dunno. Let’s see. Anything weird…”

“Come here.” I took her by the hand, led her to the bathroom, and turned on the shower as high as the pressure would go. I didn’t disrobe and we didn’t get in. I just prayed the water was loud enough while we kept our clothes on. If Marco had found the chip, I was fucked. And not in the way that I liked Eva to fuck me. Like, royally, Marco-would-bust-out-a-gun-and-put-ten-caps-in-me fucked.

Not a pretty image.

“Listen. I don’t have time to explain everything to you right now. But we may be in some very deep shit. And I have a very bad feeling. I need you to answer me a question.” I thumbed through my rolodex of people who might be a chink in the armor, who knew Marco’s inner circle even more than I did. “Let’s see…who brought you here?”

Louisa’s cute hazel eyes looked very worried all of a sudden.

“One of Marco’s guys drove me in. Sapo, I think.”

“Did you chat with Sapo on the way here? Did he say anything at all?”

She twirled her hair with her index finger.

“Um, yeah, I think he said something about how he needed me to distract you.”

“Distract me? From what?” That could mean so many different things.

“Or trade me for something? Maybe it was someone. I don’t know what he said exactly, his accent is so thick.”

I grabbed her shoulders.

“Louisa. I need specifics. Clues. Hints. Names!”

“Um well. He kept talking about some girl and laughing. I think he said her name was Eva?”

My hair stood on end. “Did you say Eva?”

“Yeah, definitely Eva. Why?”

Well then. The jig was fucking up. I felt like I’d just had the wind knocked out of me.

I heard a loud bang and voices outside the door. That is not a knock. That is a gun.

“Holy fuck,” I growled.

I locked the door to the bathroom. It wouldn’t hold them forever, but it would at least serve the function of slowing them down.

“What are you doing? What’s going on?” she screeched. We both heard several hard blows on the door outside leading into the room. I reached the obvious conclusion: Marco knew Eva was not Alexa, he knew about the chip in the rubik’s cube, but he wanted to screw with us before he killed us.

And not just figuratively screw. Well, Eva at least.

I ripped out the towel rack and used it to shatter the bathroom window that led to the outside balcony. I jumped up into the window frame.

I might not have been Louisa’s biggest fan, but it wasn’t her fault she got mixed up in all this.

“Take my hand goddamn it, just do it.”

“I’m scared, though,” she said.

“Take it!”

She reluctantly grabbed hold of my hand and I pulled her up onto the frame of the window. Now that we were both outside, I pulled myself up onto the roof, and she followed. Or to be more accurate I pulled her up almost entirely. The girl seemed scared shitless.

Once we were on top of the roof, the sun shone down on the vast property.

“Do exactly as I say, and we might make it out of this alive,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, sniffling.

We ran across the roof and I heard Marco’s guys climb up onto the balcony, yelling in our general direction. We scrambled over to a ladder and up another level, barely out of their sight. They hadn’t seen us, but they’d find us soon undoubtedly.

We sat with our backs against the brick wall. Gunshots echoed through the air, and Louisa trembled.

“I’m scared, Corbin.”

“I know. And it’s not your fault you’re involved in all of this—it’s mine. So wait here. If they come near you, you’ve got this.” I handed her the bar from the towel rack.

“You’re not going to leave me, are you?” she asked, teary eyed.

“There’s only one way I can stop them. And it’s not by staying here.”

I popped my eyes over the roof and assessed the situation. There were three of those fuckers, they all had assault rifles, and they were headed our way. It was about a fifteen foot drop down from our level to where the thugs were coming toward us.

“Louisa, you’re a good woman. I don’t care what Marco says about you. Wait here--and I’ll be back.”

She nodded, scrunched against the roof.

Like me, she knew there was only one way out of this.

I took a twenty foot running start and jumped, aiming for their little black haired heads before they even looked up.