It made no sense. I’d expected to find a museum of body parts—and I still did—but this was more akin to a drugstore.
Drugs. It hit me. People smuggled narcotics in all sorts of creative ways. I picked up a tube of toothpaste, cracked the seal, and squeezed some out. I smelled and tasted it, but there was nothing suspicious about it.
I broke open a plastic toothbrush, half-expecting something like cocaine to come spilling out. But as far as I could tell, it was just a regular toothbrush. Frustrated and confused, I threw the evidence of my snooping into a garbage can and left the room, glimpsing more boxes, this time with packaged food like trail mix, nut bars, and dried fruit.
Was this some kind of processing center for the women and children he trafficked? And if so, where were they? Surely he kept them somewhere else in the Badlands . . . but then why hadn’t I seen a single one?
I turned to leave and came face to face with a whiteboard that took up half of one wall. It was divided into four sections—Missing, Taken, Found, and Belmonte-Ruiz.
I covered my mouth with one hand as my eyes roamed over myriad photos of women and children taped to the board under each section. The images had names scrawled beneath them except each column also had a subsection titled No photo.
I ripped off a printout of several stapled pages that had been taped to the board. Thumbnail photos filled each page. Some faces had been crossed out in red.
A door slammed, and I dropped the dossier. Footsteps on the stairs had me hurrying back into the cellar as quickly as my heart raced.
Alejandro jogged down the steps and stopped short at the base of the stairway. His eyes drifted from my head to my toes.
He knows.
Surely there were cameras everywhere, and that included down here. Someone had seen me snooping.
Alejandro was a friend, though—wasn’t he? As he tilted his head, my mouth went dry as a desert. Maybe the sun peeked through the clouds. Maybe its warmth was inviting. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t also scorch you.
I took a step back as Alejandro took one forward.
And his mouth twitched into a friendly grin. “Ready to panic?”
13
Cristiano
I leaned in the doorway of my spacious dining room as my delectable wife, completely oblivious to my presence, licked the tongs of her fork between bites of Black Forest cake. Her dark hair curled around her shoulders and arms, encircling her like dying black roots.
It’d been a few days, but my desire for her burned just as hot as it had in our bed. Back in her presence, I could sense my emotion overtaking my reason. How to stop it? And why?
Because attachments were dangerous. They blinded men. They exposed us. They hurt us. I’d learned that lesson early. And now, I’d relearned it. I wanted to trust Natalia, but I couldn’t yet. I’d thought to get what I wanted from her, I had to give the same. A safe space to speak the truth. It was the first thing I’d asked her for after we’d said our vows—honesty.
And my honest reaction to my security system picking up the signal of an unauthorized phone in Natalia’s things while I was away?
I possessed a deep-seated need to remind my wife whom she answered to, and that I’d been a far kinder and more generous husband than I needed to be.
Natalia Cruz—Natalia de la Rosa—was a handful. And she was a problem. She’d proven herself untrustworthy just by having the phone, not to mention all the system breaches it could cause.
But the bigger problem was that Natalia put me at odds with the one person I feared most—myself. I’d married her for purely selfish reasons. The things I wanted to do to her were everything I stood against. Everything I hated. They were part of a past I’d overcome.
I prided myself on having a code.
For her, I’d broken it.
Would I go even further than that? I’d resisted her the other night, but just barely. She knew my patience held on by a tenuous thread, and when tugging on it got her no reaction on it, she yanked on it.
The right thing would be to set her free—but the moment I’d let myself think of her as mine, I knew that wasn’t possible.
Did keeping her cancel out anything I’d accomplished the past several years?
Did my urges to defile her undermine those I’d helped?
Her fear both excited and calmed me. Her tears were mine to collect and soothe. Her pussy was mine to devastate and worship. And lick and explore and fuck. All in due time. But what did it make me that I wanted to do it now? That I had taken her in the first place and wouldn’t let her go?