XAVIER
It was when I saw her hip bones that I decided I wasn’t leaving without her.
She was unconscious, when I arrived. Tucked up in her bed, a cold cloth on her forehead that was rapidly turning as hot as the fever that raged within her veins. Her hair was impossible; hanging loose, it ran across her pillow, over the edge of the bed, and pooled on the floor as if it had been spun from gold right then and there.
The girl with the golden hair. The girl I fixed when she fell from a window.
The girl Ignacio told me was dead, all those years ago.
She wasn’t dead. She’s been here, in this tower, now a woman but still trapped in the body of a child. Malnourished, barely five foot tall by my quick estimations, her cheekbones almost as severe as her hips. This girl has been starved. This girl has been held prisoner. This girl has been in my nightmares since the day I flew out of the Sierra Madre mountains ten years ago, thinking I’d saved her life after her horrific fall, only to get a call when I landed in Chicago telling me she had died, and that it was my fault.
Ignacio enters the room just as Seraphina’s eyes are fluttering shut, the gas doing its job of sending her off into a twilight sleep so I can operate on her. I’m so used to working as a duo with my brother, that I’m noticing Liam’s absence acutely. It’s a juggle, making sure she doesn’t feel pain while I take out her dangerously inflamed appendix.
“Did she wake up?” Ignacio asks. I shake my head. “No.” I don’t want to give him any information. For some selfish, strange reason, I want to keep the conversation I had with Seraphina all to myself. High on pain and drugs and the cusp of death, she somehow managed to bare her soul to me in what probably amounted to three or four sentences we exchanged.
“I heard talking,” he says, his eyes narrowed at me. You were on the fucking phone, I want to say, but I don’t. Ignacio Garcia Hernandez is a cruel man, a vicious man, and just being in his presence dials up the danger that I might earn myself a bullet or two. Of course, if I had a weapon, and he didn’t have two machine-gun-toting thugs following his every move, we’d be able to try to kill each other like civilized men.
But here, I have been stripped of all my weapons—literally, those fuckers took my gun and my knife as soon as I strolled my ass onto the private jet Ignacio chartered from New York. In this apparently disused water tower among fields of illegal opium poppies, I wield nothing mightier than a scalpel.
“I tried to wake her,” I confirm. “You heard me talking to her. She’s out for now.”
Apparently satisfied, Ignacio nods, thrusting his hands into his pant pockets as he paces on the other side of my makeshift operating table. I make the first incision into her flesh, clearing my throat as I suction blood from around Seraphina’s angry, swollen appendix. She’s lucky it hasn’t ruptured already; in a place like this, I doubt very much that I could save her. A ruptured appendix requires a higher level of surgical prowess than I can possess alone, in the dark, without so much as a second pair of eyes to monitor my patient’s vital signs.
Then again, looking at where we are; in the possession of a homicidal drug cultivator, a cartel lackey, a man who purposely locked a girl away for most of her life – I don’t need to draw conclusions about where Seraphina has spent her days; I can see, in the hollows of her cheeks, in her small stature, the way her pupils are permanently inky-black and wide, like a cat’s, and the paleness on her skin.
This girl has lived her life in this tower, a prisoner. Ignacio’s prisoner.
It takes every ounce of strength and self-preservation that I possess to stop myself from launching across this table and embedding my scalpel in Ignacio’s jugular. I’d give anything to watch him bleed out on the dirty floor of this room and take this poor girl away from what must be a living hell.
First, though, I have to make sure she survives this surgery.
Again, I wish for Liam. My constant off-sider, we work in synchronicity. When we were kids, we were a team, protecting our little sister from the procession of step daddies who liked her a little too much; one of us hiding her away while the other fought the latest guy who was obviously not in our house because he enjoyed our mother’s company; and when our mother would slip, it’d be Liam holding her hand, calling an ambulance and prying her eyes open while I found a half-decent vein to inject the Narcan.
Yeah, I’m not a solo operator, that’s for damn sure. Fucking Ignacio.
As if reading my mind, Seraphina stirs momentarily. Ignacio appears at her side like a fucking ninja, all concern and fatherly care, a great charade for a man who kept a child for his own deviant pleasure for God knows how long.
“What’s happening?” Ignacio barks, taking her hand in his.
“She’s fine,” I say quietly, making no attempts to soothe the crazy bastard. “She’s probably having a dream. It’s twilight sedation. She’s not entirely under like she would be with a general.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, boy?” Ignacio says, clearly hating that I’m encroaching on his space, touching his property, knowing his dirty secret. He’s itching to shoot me. I glimpse the gold-plated pistol on his hip and have to force my eyes not to roll back in my head at the ludicrousness of this man. Yeah, looking back at his dark, determined eyes, I have no doubt that if it’s up to him, I won’t be leaving this water tower alive.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, old man,” I say, even though Ignacio isn’t that old. He’s probably fifty, wiry and fit, and I doubt he’s ever so much as tasted the drug that he supplies to thousands upon thousands of desperate addicts each and every month. He’s a smart man, a businessman.
A depraved man.
I continue to work, finally freeing the appendix from Seraphina’s abdominal cavity. Once it’s gone, sealed in a sterile plastic bag for disposal, I clean up the surrounds and can finally start to suture the wound closed.
“You told me she died,” I say, surprised at the hard edge of emotion that rattles in my words. It’s barely discernible, and my voice holds steady, but there is so much rage in my chest when I think about the past ten years. Rage for all of the nightmares, of the flaxen-haired girl who was one of my first patients outside of a hospital, back when people like Ignacio started to understand what an asset an off-the-books surgical resident could be to the sprawling arteries of the criminal underworld.
I look up, meeting Ignacio’s fiery gaze, remembering what Seraphina told me about him. He’s always saying it’ll be us who burn the world down together.
“What?”
I had to wait until now, until the sutures were almost complete, before broaching the subject with him. Because his fingers are already twitching at his side, and that usually means bullets, and bloodshed.
“This girl,” I say. “Seraphina. I treated her when she fell from the window ten years ago. You told me she died.”
I’d been back in Chicago with Liam and our sister, Moira, to get the right drugs and equipment to treat such a severe injury. The girl—this girl—couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old at the time. Ignacio had fed me a lie about how she was playing in the window when she fell, that her mother was working out in the fields. But now, seeing the thick boards across the windows, the ones that weren’t there ten years ago; I know. He lied. She lived.
I’ve been torturing myself about the way she died for ten fucking years; the crack in her skull, the pressure on her traumatized brain, but death probably would have been kinder than surviving. There are chains on the walls with black leather wrist straps, the girl is covered in bruises, and the windows are boarded up permanently. The fucking windows.
“Are you calling me a liar, Mr. Bishop?” Ignacio asks slowly.
“She has the fucking scar on her head where I stitched her up,” I snap, my eyes stuck to that spot just below her temple, the spot where she hit the earth below the window I’m working in front of, where her skull cracked and she fell into a coma.
I slide the last suture into place and snip off the excess, making a neat knot. Ignacio doesn’t reply. He knows I know. And that’s basically my death sentence, in his eyes; I can already see the decision made in his cool stare.
Do you want to burn the world down?
No, but I would like to see it.
“I’m a criminal just like you, Ignacio,” I say. “I break the law. I do bad shit, terrible shit. I’ve killed people, same as you. But this is some next-level shit. You kept a girl in a fucking water tower in the dark as your plaything for how long?”
Ignacio blinks, his face like stone. Unreadable. Fucking poker-faced asshole. Me, I’m struggling to tamp down the rage that builds inside me like a funeral pyre set alight. His funeral pyre, if I had it my way. My funeral pyre, if he had his.
“I suggest you pack your supplies up and leave, Mr. Bishop,” Ignacio says. His voice is like a razor blade across coals. They say you never feel more alive than when you’re in danger of dying, and they’d be on the fucking money. I’m going to die here if I don’t do something.
“First I need to tell you about her aftercare,” I say, making a show of placing my scalpel down and taking my gloves off. “See this here?” I point at the sutures holding Seraphina’s wound closed. “This yellow thread?”
He peers closer, looking for a thread that doesn’t exist. Idiot.
I’ve always got a few spare blades somewhere. These little scalpels might be small, but they’re sharp for a fucking reason. To slice a person open like a hot knife in butter. I slide my extra scalpel out of my surgical scrubs and sink it into Ignacio’s neck, up to the hilt, going for the jugular and praying I don’t miss. His eyes bulge as he reaches for his neck with one hand, the other going for his gun. And all this time his neck is spurting streams of dark blood on to Seraphina’s bare torso.
Fuck.
I wrench the scalpel from his neck and strike again, this time getting the meaty bit at the top of his arm. I’m most worried about what happens if he gets his hand on that gun. We’ll all be dead, and I refuse to be killed by a bullet that comes from a fucking gold-plated gun that looks like it belongs in some B-grade Steven Seagal movie.
Ignacio howls in pain when I get his arm. It’s deep, and no doubt it hurt like a motherfucker when I severed the tendon that runs from his shoulder all the way down his arm and into his hand. I hope it’s the hand he uses to jerk off. That’s not going to be pleasant from now on.
I round the table, Seraphina still oblivious to what’s happening, and crash-tackle Ignacio. I can hear footsteps on the stairs, and I’ve got to get to his gun before his guards get to me. I lunge like a fucking panther, flying through the air, knocking Ignacio to the ground where we land in a bloody pile. His head hits the hard ground with a sickening crunch. I hope the blow to his skull fucking kills him. It’d be karma, that’s for sure.
My life is measured in milliseconds; my fingers curl around Ignacio’s stupid gun as the door bursts open, hinges groaning as the wood splinters from the sudden force. Two guys, both brandishing AK’s I raise Ignacio’s gun, squeezing the trigger in rapid succession, two bullets for each of them, and they’re dead before they can focus their eyes long enough to pick out who shot them.