Dread should have slicked her palms with sweat, made her practiced movements rough and uncoordinated. But as always, as Natalia’s fear escalated, as sweat broke out at the nape of her neck, as her thoughts tried to race out of control, her training took over. Her hands steadied, and she slipped her tension wrench into the lock, then followed it with her go-to rake. Lock picking was a skill—one Natalia practiced religiously on everything from combination locks to standard tumblers to handcuffs—but it was an art, too. Something that took instinct and a delicate touch—
The tumbler moved, little more than a sigh in the casing, but she had it. Two rakes of her pick, and she had it. A record, for her, at least.
It figured that the only lock in the entire world she’d be out of her mind to pick gave in with little more than a whisper of protest.
What was it her father used to say? The doors to hell are wide open, but the entrance to heaven is sealed shut.
Natalia turned the tension wrench and slid the bolt to the unlocked position. She took a breath, cast one wary glance toward the stairs at the end of the hall, and turned the tension wrench to the end shaped like a small flathead screwdriver. Slim but steady, the wrench outperformed most of the other tools in her kit built specifically for this sort of work. Which, she mused as she slipped the edge against the pin, was just as she liked it. Simple. Straightforward. A reliable multitasker.
If only everything in her life was so predictable and accommodating.
Leverage and a steady hand was all it took to edge the pin to the right. She twisted the knob, stood, and let herself inside.
Step one, down. Her path only got harder from here.
The door snicked shut behind her, throwing Natalia into an eerie midmorning twilight created by dark-paneled walls, drawn curtains, and burgundy leather. Odd, how so very little in this room had changed. The furniture, down to the huge Chippendale desk, the large wingback chair, and the sprawling hand-knotted rug, were all as they had been when her mother had decorated this room nearly twenty years ago.
Which was probably why Hernan hadn’t changed anything.
But for Natalia, despite the decor that bore her mother’s signature, this room would always remind her of her father.
It had been uniquely his domain, as evidenced by the heavy glass ashtray that still sat on one corner of the leather-topped desk. It had been the one place in the entire house her mother hadn’t admonished him for what she’d playfully referred to as his “filthy mistress.” Cigars, fat and sweet and pungent . . . and her father’s favorite vice. They were, to Natalia’s recollection, the only thing her father had ever denied her mother. So he’d smoked them here, in this room where so much of her father’s time and attention had been sacrificed to the business.
Natalia had such fond memories of this room. Spread out on the rug, coloring as a child while her father learned to type on an old computer. Report cards, delivered with pride and expectation, and always filed away in the locked cabinet by the window with other “important things.” Natalia traced her fingers over an arm of one of the chairs that faced the desk as she headed toward her uncle’s desktop. So many memories rose to mind, but one always eclipsed the rest. The afternoon she’d entered, too excited to knock, and stood before him, nervous and proud, with a huge, flat envelope from Brown University. Her first choice, her future. At the time, it had felt so far away.
She couldn’t have known how much would change.
But still, even as she sank into the chair behind what was now her uncle’s desk, she remembered her father’s hushed I’m so proud of you, mija, and his wry But let’s not tell your mother just yet. Boston is not as close to home as she’d like, eh? For forty-eight amazing hours, it had been their secret. A mere day later, her father was gone.
It had taken Natalia ages to wash the gore from her hair, for her skin to rinse clean, for her tears to dry.
Her mother’s favorite tablecloth—heirloom lace from Spain—and the one she only ever used for celebrations, had been ruined with the single bullet to the back of the head. One shot had stolen a beloved father, devastated a devoted mother, traumatized a little sister . . . and irrevocably changed Natalia’s life.
Even now, so many years later, when Natalia thought back on that night, on her uncle’s surprise visit, on her father’s final words, it always seemed to blend with the innocent happiness of the days that had preceded it. Today, instead of pushing away the bittersweet memories, she embraced them.
Let the hurt, the anger, the rage bubble up within her. The time for cold detachment had passed. This risk? Breaking into her uncle’s office, tampering with his computer, betraying him to Ethan and who knew who else? It changed things. Permanently.
Natalia had always known, from the first time she’d considered what it would take to slide her knife between Hernan’s ribs, that there would only ever be one opportunity. That the first step toward aggression was the first step toward the end—one way or another.
She couldn’t claim to be ready, and she was as terrified as she was committed, but Ethan was right. Every day her uncle grew more and more paranoid, more and more unreasonable, more and more violent. The time for caution and quiet submission had passed. If Ethan had done nothing else, he’d reminded Natalia her uncle wouldn’t fight fair.
Neither would she.
Natalia plugged her headphones into the port, ensuring they would muffle any noise upon start-up, and turned on her uncle’s computer. With the agonizing urgency of a computer several years out-of-date, the motor whirred, and the screen came to life.
The default icon appeared on-screen, her uncle’s name inscribed inside, a password field waiting for authentication just beneath it.
Natalia plugged in the drive Ethan had given her, but for a long moment, nothing happened. The cursor blinked. The light on the edge of the thumb drive flashed. And Natalia held her breath as footsteps fell against bare wood floors, then continued from the top of the stairs and down the hall. They were light, not the heavy clod of her uncle, who’d left for a meeting Ethan had arranged to go over Milner’s ledgers.
Footsteps passed the door again, this time pausing in the hallway.
Ana Maria, maybe? Natalia had seen her working on a term paper at the kitchen island downstairs.
Her heart hammered in her throat, and her hand hovered above the drive. It hardly mattered; no excuse she could possibly give would appease her uncle’s suspicion or spare her his fury, were she caught.
So with bated breath and nerves she’d long grown accustomed to, she waited.
To be missed. To be caught. To finally, finally be free.
But the footsteps continued, echoing along the hall. The creak of a door—third one down, if she had to guess—confirmed it was only Ana Maria.
Natalia breathed again, relieved but jittery with adrenaline. So much could go wrong . . .
The light on the drive glowed solid, and the desktop appeared.
Now to wait. Each time she’d had Ethan walk her through it—what to expect, how to tell if it worked, how long it would take—Ethan had promised that five minutes was all the program would need to download itself. That the drive left no trace, didn’t even open a window with a progress bar that had an agonizing countdown like in the movies.
Five minutes for the program to load. Five minutes to provide an all-access pass to everything the cartel did.
Five minutes to change her life forever.
After that, the first time her uncle sent an e-mail, accessed a cloud drive, or did something as benign as order another batch of cigarillos, the program would run, swiftly and silently, creating a door within his private network for Ethan’s colleagues to access.
You’ll know it’s finished when the light stops blinking.
Yeah, she’d been staring at that blinking blue light for all of thirty seconds, and already she wanted to rip the drive from the port, pry open a window, and shimmy down the drainpipe. Every creak of the house, every sigh of the air conditioner, set her teeth on edge. But that blue light kept blinking, as agonizing as any progress bar could have been, and the door stayed firmly shut.
And really, this was the easy part; leaving would be a nightmare. But sitting here, watching that damn blue light flash like the steady thrum of a safety light on the back of a bicycle? That was just mind-numbingly boring.
God, she hated waiting. How did spies and undercover operatives handle the stress? Give her a good, straight fight with an armed and angry opponent any day. At least then she knew what to expect.
Dragging her gaze from the thumb drive, Natalia sat back in her uncle’s chair, then forward again as it squeaked beneath her weight. She glanced at the light.
Still flashing.
She skimmed her gaze over to the time and date on the bottom right corner of the screen. Not even two minutes since she’d plugged in the device. Great.
Out of sheer boredom and a little curiosity, Natalia let herself scan the contents of her uncle’s desktop screen. Jesus, didn’t the man understand what folders and hard drives were for?
Obviously not. Hernan had everything from three versions of solitaire to old travel itineraries saved atop a stock background of a faraway beach. But one icon stood out among the rest. The same size as every other image, it was little more than a bland folder that she’d noticed only because of its placement on the screen in the upper right-hand corner, well away from the other files and folders.
She might have dismissed it but for the label.
Culo Americano.
American asshole.
Natalia glanced at the drive—still flashing—then at the door, still sealed firmly shut.
She didn’t have to investigate that file to know what, or who, she’d find inside.
William Bennett.
Slowly, she slid the mouse across the screen, her finger hovering over the button.
She didn’t need to open the file. Not really. She’d offered to open a private browser, to send an e-mail to herself or someone else, but Ethan had cautioned against it. The smaller footprint she left, the better, he’d argued. Less for her uncle to notice or wonder about. Less risk of getting caught. She’d let it go, if only because her uncle spent nearly every night in here, and because Ethan had assured her that once the virtual door was open, there would be no going back.
Still, he’d told her that nothing would be instant. That his team would have to sort through every file, review every e-mail. Parse through terabytes of data. Judging by her uncle’s desktop, that was going to take a lot longer than any of them had hoped.
Chewing on her bottom lip, her finger poised like a scorpion’s tail above the mouse, she glanced at the drive again. Still blinking. Still working.
She should let the file finish loading, shut down the computer, and walk away. Nothing in that folder would do her a damn bit of good. At best, she’d confirm what Ethan already suspected—that Will Bennett was alive and a prisoner of the Vega cartel. Opening this file, confirming what everyone already seemed so sure of, would only lend speed to a discovery Ethan was bound to make anyway. And worst-case scenario . . .
Worst-case scenario, she opened this folder to find that Will Bennett had succumbed to his injuries, infection, or Hernan Vega’s final demand. It was, Natalia knew, a greater possibility than Ethan wanted to admit. Hernan wasn’t particularly patient or clever when it came to subjugation and torture—but he employed people who were. People who would view Will as a challenge. People who could break him mentally if they couldn’t break him physically.
At the very least, they’d enjoy the attempt.
And at the end of the day, it wouldn’t matter if Will had died two months, two weeks, or two days ago, the result would be the same . . . Ethan would no longer have a reason to stay, and Natalia would have taken this risk for nothing.
She pulled the mouse away, watching as the cursor dejectedly slid down the screen.
There was no good reason to open that file and a thousand reasons not to.
But as Natalia watched that damn light flash, all she could think of was the expression on Ethan’s face: agony and grief and bitter acceptance that he didn’t know where his friend was, only that if he were alive, he was likely in a hellish prison of pain and fear and loneliness.
Not so long ago, Natalia had been in that same prison. Surviving day by day, hour by hour, waiting for something, anything, to change. To get better.
Or to end.
The only way it could have been worse was if it had been Ana Maria in her place. If Natalia had gone to bed every evening, woken up every morning, with the same litany of thoughts driving her.
Is she alive?
Has she given up on me?
Living with that uncertainty, that helplessness, it would be a prison of a different sort but a prison all the same.
She could give Ethan answers now.
She didn’t have to ask herself what she’d want him to do if the situation was reversed.
She opened the folder.
A new window appeared, a cascade of files dropping down to fill half the left-hand column. No names, no clever titles. Just a string of numbers it took her a second to recognize.
Dates—year then month then day. And military-style time stamps.
Twenty-four files in all, the most recent time and date from the week before.
Bile rose up the back of Natalia’s throat. The file type—.avi—gave away exactly what she was looking at. Video files. A recorded history of torture and torment her uncle kept at his fingertips. A folder he visited often, given the digital history.
Disgust gave way to the hollow realization that she wasn’t surprised. It was all too easy to imagine. Hernan, reclining in his chair, a lit cigarillo between his lips, the latest file open and playing. He’d relish it: the screaming, the pleading, the suffering.
Six months of files. Six months of agony. Of desperation.
Of defiance.
In Will, Hernan Vega had found something precious, something valuable. An opponent who wouldn’t forfeit the game, wouldn’t bend to his demands. A challenge.
Natalia shuddered. She didn’t consider her uncle particularly smart or patient. He didn’t have a head for numbers or logistics or the ever-changing demands of an illicit business. Neither was he attractive. More bull than stallion, he was a large man, taller than most in her family, but brash and graceless in his skin. In his youth, his size and his power, fueled by anger and the blood-deep conviction he’d been wronged at every single turn, he’d leveled his opponents. Now, the stairs winded him.
Were it to come down to a brawl, Hernan Vega would keep his feet, and his life, only as long as a man like Ethan Somerton allowed.
Ethan was an operator, perhaps not born and bred, but forged and hardened and utterly devoted to maintaining his lethal edge.
The same could not be said for Hernan Vega.
No. Natalia’s uncle had been blessed with only one gift in this lifetime—fear.
He knew it better than anyone she’d ever met. Had taken the feral and malicious thing and made it his own. With a look, Hernan Vega could discern what held power over his opponents. Greed. Ambition. Love.
It didn’t matter what weakness a man harbored in his heart or how carefully he hid it. Hernan Vega would find it and use it to pull him apart, piece by piece, until nothing remained but the desire for it all to end, no matter the cost.
That there were twenty-four files here—twenty-four tiny rebellions that made Natalia smile with mean satisfaction—meant that someone, somewhere, had driven her uncle to an unwelcome stalemate.
She’d never met him, but Natalia already liked William Bennett.
Assuming, of course, he was still alive.
She drew her mouse down the column, double-checking the dates and times. The time stamps varied, but the date the file was saved did not. Every Tuesday, without fail.
Would there be another one next week? Or would Ethan find he’d missed his window by mere days?
Only one way to be sure.
She glanced at the flash drive: still blinking.
Picking up a single earbud and placing it in her left ear, her right one still trained on the hallway, she opened the most recent file.
A man appeared in the center of the screen, far enough from the static camera that she could see the bottom of his bare feet where they rested against a dirt floor all the way to the top of his shaggy head. Cold, dark eyes stared out of a gaunt face smeared with dirt and blood and sweat wrung from the oppressive Colombian humidity. She found herself wondering what Will had looked like before he’d become a guest of the Vega cartel. Before he’d learned to embrace pain as a familiar friend. Before his hair had grown harsh and unkempt. Before a beard had grown in, thick and tangled, obscuring his expressions, his ears, his jawline, as effectively as the jungle undergrowth obscured the dead and decaying layers that had come and gone in the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth the rain forest was famous for.
Caught in his own endless, unforgiving cycle, Will looked wild—cornered and trapped and waiting for the first opportunity to turn his fury upon those who held him.
Because he was furious, that much Natalia knew. Maybe some would look at this and see a man who’d shut down, who’d retreated, who’d given up.
But not her.
She knew too well what it looked like when someone harnessed the hate, the anger, the rage, to trap it and hold it and feed off it. It was a bitter meal—but it was also sustaining. Those weren’t the eyes of a man who’d given up. He wasn’t far away, tucked safely behind the comforting layers of his own mind.
No. Will Bennett swam just beneath the surface, watching, waiting—a shark in murky waters.
A man appeared on-screen, stepping in close to the metal folding chair Will had been secured to by wrists and ankles.
“Listo para gritar, gringo?” he asked, squatting down to eye level but ensuring he remained outside the camera shot. “All scream for la hormigas, eh?” He laughed, shaking a jar in front of Will’s face.
Oh God.
Acid burned on the way up the back of her throat, dread and fear and memories as potent as if she’d made them that morning swamping her.
You failed. But you’ll learn.
Her own scream echoed in her head as a high-strangled wail escaped through Will’s clenched teeth and stubborn resolve. He’d scream—of course he would. If not now, then with each new bite, each new location, every one more sensitive than the last.
Intense and unrelenting as it was, the pain would fade. But the dread would not. It would only grow. Natalia shook out her hands, brushing away the ghostly footsteps marching across her skin, then set the video back to the start and closed the file. She couldn’t watch. Not this. Already, her skin crawled, her eyes burned, and remembered pain flared on her thigh, on the inside of her elbow, on the thin, sensitive skin just behind her ear.
Every failure—and there’d been many in the early days—had merited a bite.
Fear for her sister’s safety had made Natalia a devoted student. Fear of failure, of being told to put her hand in the jar—
Yours or your sister’s. Choose.
That had made her a student possessed. Taken her knife work from passable to lethal.
Will would live, but she didn’t need to watch. She had more than she’d hoped for—confirmation of life and a new file to anticipate. Now that she knew when to expect it, perhaps that would make it easier for Ethan’s men to intercept and trace.
Maybe a single e-mail would end all this.
So many maybes.
The drive stopped flashing.
On a sigh, Natalia slid it free and tucked it back into the zippered pocket that usually held a spare set of keys when she ran or cycled on murky Virginia mornings. She went through the motions of shutting down the computer, unplugging and storing her headphones, and then, on quiet feet, she made her way to the door.
For a long moment, she lingered there. One hand on the brass knob, the other pressed flat to the smooth, solid wood. She breathed in on a count of four, exhaled on a count of eight. Did it again. And again. And again until her pulse slowed to a steady, even thrum, until the blood stopped rushing in her ears, until she was no longer deafened to the world beyond the door.
There was no way to be certain what lay on the other side of this door. If the hallway were empty or occupied. If someone would hit the landing as she closed the door—a door she still had to lock again from the outside. On a final, steady exhale, she turned the knob beneath her hand all the way to the left. Then, before she pulled open the door, she turned the lock on the knob back to the locked position so she could simply pull the door shut behind her. She’d have to reengage the dead bolt with her pick set, but this, at least, she could secure.
A wry smile curled her lips. If she stepped out into the hall to find she wasn’t alone, to find her uncle had returned home early, to find death and defeat waiting, at least she’d know that she’d sent one final “Fuck you” to her uncle. Whatever else happened, Ethan had his access.
Victory in defeat.
On a breath, she stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind her.
Fuck. Her breath left her in a rush, her palms going suddenly slick with sweat and nerves she’d held back until now.
The hall was empty. Thank God.
Turning, she withdrew her picks from the zippered pocket of her fleece and went to work on the lock. Why was it, she wondered as she struggled to get the tumbler to slide back in place, that securing a room she’d just broken into was so much more difficult than breaking in?
“What the hell are you doing?” Ana Maria hissed, her voice an unwelcome surprise that had Natalia fumbling tools she hadn’t dropped in years. “Are you out of your damn mind?” her sister asked, her voice rising even as she fought to maintain a whisper.
Natalia stood, glanced at the stairs, then back at her sister. “Go downstairs, Ana Maria.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Natalia turned back to the lock, her wrench and rake twisted in a way she hadn’t intended. She shimmied them back and forth with a scowl. Stuck. Great. On a frustrated tug, the rake came loose, the three even waves irrevocably warped. Dammit.
The tension wrench, however, wouldn’t budge.
“Go downstairs,” she repeated, squatting so she was eye level with the tumbler, as if by some miracle she could see what the L-shaped tip of the wrench had caught on. “Now.”
“What are you doing up here?” Ana Maria asked, striding toward her like an angry, flustered hen.
“Nothing.” Natalia twisted the wrench, heaving an irritated sigh when the handle moved but the short end didn’t. Shit. She couldn’t leave it like this—but if she forced it, she risked breaking it off in the lock itself—something her uncle was sure to notice.
“Natalia.” Ana Maria dropped a hand on her shoulder, her fingertips digging into Natalia’s skin.
“I’m a little busy at the moment, Ana.”
“Natalia,” Ana Maria repeated, her voice low and thick with tension.
Carefully, fingers slipping on the end of the wrench, she turned it a quarter to the right, straightening out the bend she’d created when Ana Maria surprised her. No way was she going to be able to relock the dead bolt—not with ruined tools. But there was a chance Hernan wouldn’t notice that the dead bolt wasn’t set. He could insert his key, turn the lock, and never realize there wasn’t any resistance or, if he did, assume he’d forgotten to set the lock in the first place. She’d been careful, touched as little in the office as possible. Nothing would look amiss . . . she hoped.
Hope, the four-letter bitch of a word, hadn’t done her a lot of favors over the years, but maybe, just maybe, she’d catch a break.
But that meant Natalia had to remove the wrench—and do it cleanly—because she was damn certain her uncle would notice if he tried to insert his key, only to find something that looked like a hairpin wedged in the tumbler.
On a prayer, she grasped the wrench between thumb and forefinger and yanked. “Oh thank fuck,” she said, the curse falling from her lips as the wrench came loose in one mangled piece.
“Let’s go.” She stood, glancing up in surprise when Ana Maria didn’t say anything. The second Natalia saw her face, sheet white, eyes wide, hand at the necklace around her throat, Natalia paused and forcibly swallowed down her fear. The hair along the nape of her neck stood on end, and as she turned toward the stairs, she knew what she’d find.
Carlos.
He stood at the top of the steps, his face inscrutable but his gaze alight with curiosity.
“Gatita.” His voice was flat and toneless beyond the normal grating rasp, but his lips thinned and stretched into something that should have looked menacing and instead broadcast dark amusement.
“I—” Natalia swallowed, a hundred lies dying on her lips. Carlos wouldn’t believe a single one of them. He stared at her; she stared back. She’d been caught, and she knew it. But she’d learned the hard way that there was little Carlos enjoyed more than sparring with her—and provoking her to reckless action. So though fear thrummed through her, a living, breathing torment, she held her ground and waited for him to make a choice.
“You play a dangerous game, little cat.”
“I needed her help,” Ana Maria rushed out. “My term paper,” she said, grabbing for her messenger bag and flipping over the top flap.
“Ana, hush.”
“No. No, it’s fine.” She brushed past Natalia, dodging the grab she made for Ana Maria’s elbow. “I had to print it, see?” She brandished the paper as if that somehow proved something. “Tio lets me use his printer, but he wasn’t here . . .” She trailed off beneath Carlos’s dark stare. The scar near his mouth twitched as he glanced at her. He didn’t say anything, just stared her down as she fidgeted as if he physically held her in place.
Finally, he looked up, directly at Natalia, and stepped aside to give Ana Maria access to the stairs. She took two wobbly steps forward, then glanced over her shoulder. “You’re giving me a ride, right?”
Natalia dipped her head once and forced her feet to move, to carry her down the hall and within striking distance. When she drew even with Carlos, he stepped in to her, his lips near her ear. “Mind your footing; the ground moves as we speak.”
She kept her eyes forward and put one foot in front of the other, until she was down the stairs and shrugging into her coat. Another warning. Another game.
And a reminder that he had her at his mercy.