Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (26 page)

“Your turn.”

She looked up and caught his eye. “I know.”

“Need help?”

She smiled and looked down.

Paolo concentrated, switching his letters into different combinations behind the small box that served as a barrier, and sometimes he’d consult the English dictionary. Maybe it was good spelling practice.

Little by little, Hugo relaxed. He was playing with them. There was no trick to playing, it seemed; no mystery to it other than the participation. Simple participation. You didn’t have to laugh or have fun; you simply had to participate.

He stood at one point and placed another log on the fire. He crouched in front of it, stoking the flames to get more warmth into the room on the crisp night, and then he stood and turned.

Paolo curled sleepily on his side with a tiny smile. Liza was brushing a hand over the boy’s hair with a look of fondness that shattered Hugo’s heart. And his fire blazed and warmed them.

And then she looked up at him and smiled.

And he knew that there had never been a moment when he didn’t want a son, a family.

She cocked her head quizzically, sensing his strong emotion. He wanted to tell her that he, too, loved Paolo. He wished she could understand that. He turned back and built the fire higher, as if that might show it.

She set a hand on the boy’s arm. “Paolo,” she whispered. “Bedtime.”

“No,” Hugo whispered, drawing near to the boy. He knelt on the other side of him and, gently as he could, he lifted him in his arms, something he hadn’t done since Paolo was small.

He grumbled about it being a long day, but seeing Paolo play in front of the fire, being a boy in a way that Hugo never had, it made him want to hold him, to care for him.

It was Paolo he wanted to hold, yes, but maybe, just a little bit, it was Hugo’s younger self.

Hugo left, holding his boy to his breaking heart. All these years. It would’ve been so easy to play with him.

So easy to call him by his name.

R
io stepped out
of the Aeropuerto Internacional El Dorado in Bogotá into a chaos of taxis and buses. He made his way past harried travelers and hurried businesspeople and on past scammers who wanted to befriend him, most of whom quickly turned away, deciding that they didn’t, after all, want to befriend him. The air was cool and rich with the scent of smoked meat and diesel; he drew in a deep breath as he straightened his black jacket and fixed the cuffs of his silk shirt, looking forward to a good, hard hunt with a supposedly lethal opponent at the end. They were all supposed to be lethal, but they never were. Maybe this one was.

The car Dax had arranged for him was right where he said it would be. Rio slipped in and began to reassemble his Smith & Wesson Platinum 500 from the various pieces he’d sent through baggage. He could get firearms in Bogotá; in fact, there was a sniper rifle waiting for him in a little shop in the Bogotá suburbs, but he was sentimental about his weapons. He didn’t mind new friends. But he liked to have old friends around him, too. And the 500 was a good friend.

He’d never heard Dax sound so worried.
Find her. Extract her if you sense danger. I prefer Kabakas alive, but I can just as well use him dead. Kill everybody you have to.

Dax had warned him about Kabakas. Rio had heard of the man, of course, but he wasn’t worried. He was more than ready, and he’d worn his best suit.

Kill everybody you have to
, Dax had said.

He always did. He slipped in the magazine.

H
ugo forced himself
to sit in the boy’s room and watch him sleep.

He’d done that a lot at first, watching him, this small being who’d been robbed of his parents.

A noise out in the great room. He hoped it was her going to bed—the feeling between them was too strong, too big. He was not his father, forcing himself on the help.

It was only when everything was quiet out there that he allowed himself to return. His heart leapt when he saw her, curled up in front of the fire herself, head next to the stupid word game.

Sleeping.

He knelt beside her, sucking in her scent like a burglar inside her house. His heart pounded. He wanted to have her so badly it was very nearly a physical pain.

Then she turned and opened her eyes. Her cheekbone was marred by imprints of the rough jute rug. There was no softness here; it was no place for a woman.

“Isn’t it your bedtime,
señorita
?”

She smiled, then. “It meant a lot to him that you played.” She turned away and gazed into the fire. Was she thinking about that first night? The night he’d made her come? Did she regret it?

Even in stillness she had an unceasing quality, like a spring-fed stream. He’d felt the depth of her silence out in the field, but he felt it so much more now.

He took his chair. He should direct her to bed, but instead he sat with her at his foot. He enjoyed it perhaps a little too much. Her bright hair flashed in the light, but the part nearest to him was dark. That was the part that he wanted to touch.

“It meant a lot that you played,” she said again.

“I never…I never knew,” he confessed.
Never knew the boy would want that. Never knew how.

“But you went ahead and did it,” she said, gazing at the flames.

She would make him sound noble. As if he’d noticed that Paolo wanted to play and had indulged him, when really, he’d been pulled by the ear. By her.

Like a starving man, he feasted on the beauty of her stillness and the glow of her skin—this woman who’d done her own terrible things, who could dwell with him in the quiet. He’d never met anybody like her. He found that he loved everything about her.

Could she be happy here? She had been a prostitute in her other life; surely that wasn’t a good life. Could he induce her to stay?

The idea stunned him.

No. Somebody light and free and passionate like Liza, she wouldn’t choose life with a man who kept himself locked as tightly as that cabinet.

He glanced over at the cabinet itself—all that pain and yearning that was in there. His life was in there. What if he showed what was inside? Wasn’t that her accusation—that he was as closed as the cabinet? What if he proved her wrong? Opening it would feel very much like opening himself.

He couldn’t believe he was considering it. Then again, the act itself was simple: walk over and open it.

“I want you to see something,” he blurted.

She looked up, green, green eyes awash in humorous light. He got up and went to the cabinet, and when he looked back at her, the humor had faded. He himself hardly believed he was doing it. He’d never shown anybody the treasures and tokens he’d collected. Not even Paolo. He pressed up on the bit of molding that secured the key, and drew it out.

She stayed by the fire. Did she not want to see inside? “Come,” he said.

She rose tentatively and came to him. Why would she resist? Hadn’t she wanted this? Well, it was too late now. When he committed to something he committed with his whole heart.

He unlocked it and drew open the door, revealing the carefully arranged trinkets and medals. Shiny coins. Train tickets. Colorful bottle caps he’d collected as a boy, before he’d learned the truth of who he was. Miniature figurines he’d loved. Colorful stamps, Swiss army knife, Chinese jade carvings, American baseball cards, a Canadian pen with a maple leaf on it.

She stood next to him, now. Even the air between them grew livelier when she came near.

He drew out an American baseball card. “It may not seem exotic to you,” he said, “but when I was first in America, these cards seemed so very American with the shiny bits and the bold marks.” He tipped it back and forth, letting the hologram coating catch the light as he’d done so often as a boy. “Everything so bright and important.” He felt so bare to her, suddenly. A strange feeling, but not altogether bad. He felt as if something inside him shifted. As if the scar tissue covering his heart had softened.

He put it back and drew out the puzzle box. “Have you ever seen one?”

“It’s beautiful.” She sounded so sad. Why?

He handed it to her. “Try to open it,” he coaxed. “I think you cannot.”

“Probably not.” She seemed hesitant suddenly. Why? Had he made a mistake in showing her?

“A gift. My father chose it,” he went on. “He chose it for me, and it meant a lot.” He wasn’t explaining it well. It had been one of the good moments, when the man who raised him had seemed to care. It had meant the world. “He was a gardener, a handyman.”

“Is that where you got your love of plants?”

“No, he hated plants.” He should tell her. If he truly wanted to let her in, he would tell her the things that he never told anybody. He wasn’t sure if he could; he had never developed that muscle. “Go ahead. See if you can open it.”

Fruitlessly, she slid around the pieces. Their hands brushed as he took it from her and slid the panels in the combination that would make the lid spring open. There inside was a lion’s head.

“It’s beautiful,” she said in a faraway tone.

“All of these little treasures I collected.”

He felt her keen interest in spite of that strange hesitation. “Go ahead.” He forced himself to gesture toward the box, inviting her in further. He stiffened as she touched a Jordanian coin, drew out a bus ticket from Nigeria, a pink jade box, and then a pen with the name of a Bangkok restaurant emblazoned upon it.

“You visited all of these places?”

“Lived in all of these places.”

Finally, her fingers lip upon a small, blunt stick with a few crude carvings. The Moro graduation rite wand. It looked like nothing next to the shinier, more colorful treasures, but it was the most important item he owned. He’d struggled long and hard to earn it, spending years perfecting his skills, hands bloody from throwing the blades, from working the patterns. She seemed to sense its importance in the same way in which she sensed just how to touch a plant, the way she sensed what the boy needed. She turned it in her fingers. “Where did you buy this?”

“It was given to me.”

She would not meet his eyes. “A gift?”

“In a way,” he said.

“From your parents?”

“No,” he said, studying the side of her face, needing her to look at him. “From a teacher on Quoro, down on the southern islands of the Philippines. I had left my parents by then.” He took it from her and gestured at the box. “I was miserable in all of these places; but this place, it saved my life.”

She met his eyes now. “You left your parents…” It was more a statement than a question.

He took a breath and studied the rites stick. “My mother and father served an oil company consultant who traveled the world. A Bolivian man. Very wealthy. My father hated the plants, but not as much as he hated me.” He slid his finger up and down the side. “Over and over I would go to him, thinking that this time I’ll make him proud, but with every accomplishment, he seemed to hate me more. I remember times he’d take the belt to me for good marks in school. He would beat me for being good. I never understood. But then one day I did—I was not his child. I was the Bolivian’s bastard. My mother, she would not have wanted her employer in that way. But she and my father needed those jobs, and sometimes you do what you must…” He had never revealed these things to anybody. “Hurting me, that was how my supposed father punished the oilman.”

“Hugo.” She set a hand on his arm.

He shrugged. “My biological father, he knew what was happening to me, but he would not stop it. My mother tried to intervene, but she could not guard me, and could not square off against her husband. That home, it was like poisonous soil. You take that poison into your veins, and it forms you.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Our relocation to Manila made things worse. So much worse. One day I took all of the money that I had saved and my small box of trinkets—these things here—and I stole a boat, thinking to live on an island alone. I went deep into the Sulu Archipelago and arrived on a remote island, wild and quiet. I thought it was uninhabited, but I was wrong. The island people, the Moros, took me in. They were warring with other islands at the time, and I was big and strong and fast. And so angry, Liza, so angry. They trained me. They put me in their army. They were fierce, these fighters, descended from generations of fierce fighters. Even the Americans could not subdue the islands. The Moro fighters were the reason the army switched from .22 to .38 caliber sidearms. Those men taught me everything.”