“Can you give me a hand?”
I nodded and grabbed the duffel bags of guns and ammo nearest me. My own weapons filled my trunk, but there was plenty of room in the back seat. Between us, we could easily fend off a small army.
“Who’s Caballero’s boss?” he asked as he slid into the passenger seat after we’d finished loading the back seat. If we got pulled over, we were fucked. Fortunately, my car could outrun just about anything else on the road.
“Mateo Lopez,” I answered. There wasn’t any reason to hold the name back. He’d have every one of my contacts soon. But the way his shoulders stiffened had me wondering about his response. That name meant something to him. Not that it mattered. Whatever Mateo had done to piss off Michael was too fucking bad. That kill was mine.
Back on the road, my thoughts turned to what was waiting for me at home. Heat flared through my body, but I tamped it down. Now that Michael would be there, my plan to keep Scar out of trouble didn’t seem like such a wise one. She was going to be beyond delirious with arousal when I got home, and there would be a strange man in the house.
Fuck it. I’d keep him locked in the garage if I had to. I now had less than four days left with her and filling my head with thoughts of what I was going to do to her super-charged body sure as hell beat thinking about all that had happened to her.
The meeting spot had only been thirty minutes from the house, so even with taking a convoluted route just to be safe, we were pulling up to the outer gate forty-three minutes later. I was curious how much Michael knew about me, so I watched surreptitiously as I scanned and typed, and proceeded up to the house.
He didn’t look the least bit fazed by the property. Had he researched me? How much did he know? And why had he been looking into me? An image of the young woman who’d been his wife flashed through my mind. I was in this man’s debt. Did I perhaps owe him this?
I paused in front of the garage and shifted to neutral. “Michael, I know you put a lot on the line to help Scar…to help me the way you did. I’m not used to being indebted to someone. Actually, I make it a rule to avoid it, but…”
“Derek, it’s fine,” he cut in.
I was not used to being cut off, but I swallowed my aversion to it. “It isn’t fine. Alicia…she was delivered to Caballero eight years ago. If she looked as much like Scar as you say, then I’m certain of it. I tried to help her, but it wasn’t enough.”
Michael was silent for a moment, but then he looked me directly in the eyes, “You were just a kid, and Caballero was a monster. There isn’t anything you could have done. Thank you though. I could never be certain where she ended up.”
I sat there. I knew I should open the garage door, but it felt like there was more to this conversation than had been said. And by the sudden stunned expression on Michael’s face, I’d guess I was right.
“Derek, why did Marcos have you take Scarlett? Did he ever tell you?”
“He didn’t have to tell me,” I sneered, remembering the scene I’d walked in on what felt like a lifetime ago—Marcos, with his whip raised behind Scar and deep lashes cut into her skin. “He let me think it was for me, for my revenge against James Garcia, but it was never about me. He’d wanted her all along. He wanted to torment Garcia for running off with a woman he’d claimed as his own—Scar’s mother. The twisted fuck apparently didn’t give a damn that it was his own daughter he was torturing to try to make Garcia pay.”
Michael closed his eyes and put his head back against the seat. I wondered why that particular information was affecting him—until the pieces started to come together. Scar’s mother. Scar. Alicia—a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Scar.
Fuck. None of it had been random. Marcos had known exactly what he’d been doing. The mother. The daughter. The aunt—Scar’s aunt.
“Eight years ago, Scar’s mother was already dead. He couldn’t have her back, so he went looking for the closest woman to her—Alicia.” I put the puzzle pieces together out loud.
“Alicia was Scarlett’s aunt,” Michael said slowly. “Maybe only by marriage, but that means Scarlett is…my niece.”
Yeah. Hopefully, Michael wasn’t the fanatical uncle-type, or else he really wasn’t going to approve of the way I had his niece restrained on my bed at this very moment.
“Fuck!” Michael shouted and slammed his fists on the dashboard. He managed to collect himself quickly though. “I’m sorry, it’s just…it was bad enough when the girl on the monitors had been a stranger, but now…fuck, it just never ends, does it?”