“Natalia, mi amor,” I said, surprised at the even, calm tone of my voice. I may have learned to keep my composure in a threatening situation, but this was something else entirely. This was my entire fucking life. “Can you hear me? Where are you?”
She nodded almost imperceptibly, but her eyes shifted to the side of the camera. She wasn’t alone.
I prayed she’d been taken for ransom by some recklessly stupid federation and that Belmonte-Ruiz hadn’t broken their truce.
But why should the devil’s prayers be answered?
“Brother.”
Chills spread over me at the all-too-familiar voice. One I’d never mistake. One I never thought I’d hear again.
A face resembling my own filled the screen, but it might as well have belonged to a stranger. My brother. Diego.
What the fuck. He was alive. Everything in my body ceased to function. I froze, and it was a good thing. I never wanted Diego to think he’d caught me off guard.
He blocked Natalia as he looked from me to Costa and back. “Good. You’re both here.”
My hands twitched with the urge to reach through the screen and wrap my hands around his neck, tighten them slowly so he’d experience the crush of every delicate bone, the collapse of his windpipe—
“You don’t know what you’re doing, boy,” Costa said from beside me, his voice reverberating through the room. If he was shocked to see his former charge, he didn’t show it. “Let her go. She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“She has everything to do with this.” Diego retreated until Natalia came back into view. She focused her eyes above the camera lens.
On me?
“Natalia.”
She closed her eyes, swallowed, and reopened them. I couldn’t miss the fire in them as my own stare bored into her.
You’ve got this, I silently told her. Be strong. We’ll get you out of this.
“This will be easier for all of us if Talia’s alive,” Diego said, removing a gun from the inside of his jacket. “I love her and don’t want to hurt her. But let’s get one thing straight—I will put a bullet in her pretty face if I have to, so don’t do anything I don’t explicitly instruct you to.”
Rage burned up my chest like heartburn of days past. Days past—since Natalia had decided to change my lifestyle. She wanted me healthy. That was my fucking wife, taking command of me when I’d never let anyone tell me how to live. Anyone but her. The love of my goddamn life.
My throat closed. I breathed in and out, willing my fury away.
Focus.
Diego had loved her in his own selfish way. I believed when he said he still did. But she was more than that to him. She was my weakness, and Diego had always known it.
I had to trust Natalia could get herself out of this after all the drills we’d run, the moves she’d perfected, and the countless hours I’d spent punishing her and myself for the fact that a man had come too close to taking her from me months ago.
A roll of duct tape on the desk gave me hope—she’d be able to free herself if that was what he’d used to bind her hands.
And I didn’t miss the way Diego stupidly turned his back to her.
He trusted her—that was good. But even better—he didn’t seem to consider the possibility that she could fight back. He’d never seen her as anything other than precious. Breakable. Compliant.
But she was none of those things, and if she ever had been, it’d been a product of her environment.
She could take him on.
She had to.
She just needed to free her hands, and I needed to keep his eyes on me and off of her.
Reluctantly, I tore my gaze from her and returned it to Diego, who was watching me with a hint of a smile. He knew this was killing me. “What do you want?” I asked Diego.
“It wasn’t so long ago that I asked you the same thing.” Diego put one hand in his pocket and inspected the other, running his thumb along a tattoo on the inside of his ring finger. “You and I stood across from each other in your office as you stripped away my options until there was only one left—submit to the Maldonados and face death.”
Aren’t we a little old for story time, Diego? I bit my tongue. I could think of a thousand responses that would bruise Diego’s ego as I slowly worked my way under his skin. I had rattled him before, like that day at La Madrina. But Natalia could pay the price for provoking him. I had to grin and bear it.
“You thought you had me,” Diego continued. “You should’ve known not even my death would end this. Aren’t you curious how I’m still alive?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t give two shits about that or any other lie you’ve spun to justify the way you are.” Natalia jerked silently behind him. She was working her hands free. As Diego started to turn, I said, “Why are you doing this?”