Don't Let Go (11 page)

But I did what every good little captive girl should want to do. I walked out of there in my bare feet with a soft white sheet draped around my naked body, my clothes and confidence long gone. I found a payphone and called 911. I fell asleep curled up beside a Dumpster before help arrived.

For three days I’d woken up on a soft bed that smelled faintly of roses. Not the sickly sweet scent that got passed off as roses in perfumes, but the real earthy smell of rose petals wafting from cotton sheets. But now a sharp chemical tang burned my nostrils. That was the first thing I noticed, with my eyes closed, my mind still sluggish and half-asleep.

The second thing I noticed was the constant drone of noise. No expectant silence. No lilting strains of
La Bohème
. Instead, machinery beeped and voices sounded muffled in the distance. This bed was hard, the sheet rough and paper-thin between my fingers. I opened my eyes, then immediately shut them. The air felt like sandpaper against the surface of my eyes. An irrepressible groan of pain emanated from my chest.

“Shhh,” came a voice from my side. “Take it easy.”

For a moment, panic beat in my chest. Was it him? Was I still his captive? And if so, I must have done something wrong to end up here instead.

This was punishment.

He’d taken away my only luxuries, the soft bed, his tender touch.

He would hurt me now, he would…

“Samantha.” Sharper now. My name spoken in a command pulled me back. And I recognized him.

“Hennessey.”

“That’s right. You’re okay now. Just rest and take it easy. You don’t have to get up right now. You don’t have to do anything.”

My lips felt dry and cracked. I marveled that I could still feel the slight pinch of them where the skin split, considering the resounding ache in my whole body. I’d read once that the lips were one of the most sensitive parts of the body, a high concentration of receptor cells. Maybe that was why Carlos never kissed me. Maybe he’d thought it would tell me too much. A sob escaped me, manic-sounding, helpless.

A warm hand enclosed mine. “Are you in pain?” he asked, a note of concern deepening his voice. “I’ll get a nurse.”

I squeezed his hand to stop him. “No, stay.”

“Don’t try to move. Just rest.”

Slumping back against the thin pillow, I sighed. “How long?”

“Twenty-four hours. You’ve been out of it mostly, on the pain meds.”

“Mostly?”

When he said nothing, I knew I must have done something embarrassing. I glanced over to find his expression hard, jaw tense. His nostrils flared. Anger. No, scratch that.

Rage.

“Hennessey, look. I know I disobeyed—”

“Don’t you dare give me that bullshit. This isn’t your fault.”

“But if I’d only—”

“The van and its location were compromised. It wouldn’t have mattered if you were inside or not.”

I considered that. “How
did
they find out where the van was?” Silence again. “Hennessey?”

He blew out a breath. “Jesus. I think Brody might have set you up.”

Shock tore through my chest. “What?”

“I’m sorry. He knew you were Laguardia’s type. I think he put you on the team to lure him. And he knew the position of the van… He forced us to move early.”

The silence filled in the rest. He’d put me on the team to lure Carlos in. I was a bit of cheese in the mousetrap. That part wasn’t a surprise, but what came after had been. The spring hadn’t gone off like it should have. Instead of being caught, Carlos had caught me instead. He’d stolen me away, like the thief that he was, the criminal.

“Makes sense.” My voice sounded flat. “You always knew there was something off about it. Me, on a high profile case. The rookie.”

“Shit. I shouldn’t have said anything.” He ran his hand through his hair, and only then did I notice how ruffled it looked, the dark blond with glints of silver. He must have been messing with his hair a lot to get it in that state. I’d never seen him looking less than polished before now. For that matter, dark circles marred his bloodshot eyes. His white T-shirt and jeans looked hastily thrown on and rumpled. Had he sat in that straight-edged plastic chair the whole twenty-four hours?

I swallowed. “Look, I can’t promise I’m going to be normal or happy, but I don’t want you to hide anything from me. I’m still your partner. Right?”

“Right,” he said, but his eyes were veiled, and we both knew it was a lie. I would have been pulled, officially, as soon I’d been taken. I might get reinstated, but that would only be after Brody signed off on it. Considering this case had just gotten personal with me, I doubted that would happen.

“Do you... Do you want to talk about it, what happened to you?” He grimaced, self-deprecating, as if aware of the awkwardness he exuded. I imagined he’d have been far more comfortable taking a witness statement, or even better, interrogating me. Instead he offered me friendship.

A smile ghosted over my lips. “I must be really bad off if you aren’t even pushing for details.”

“Those can wait,” he said. Then paused. “I can put Brody off for a few days at least.”

I raised my eyebrow. “How, exactly?”

“I’ll say you lost your memory. Temporary amnesia.”

Reluctantly, I laughed. There was no way in hell Brody would buy that.

“Or we just won’t tell him you’ve woken up. You’re in a coma.”

I rolled my eyes, shocked and pleased that we could joke about this. About anything. The awkwardness slipped away, leaving only raw friendship. As if I’d never even left.

“I’m sure he has a direct line to the doctor.”

“Then I’ll barricade the door and keep him out.”

“Held captive again? Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

“Only this time you’d want to stay captive.”

My smile slipped. Had I wanted to stay kidnapped before too? I wasn’t sure. Any sane person wouldn’t, but then I’d figured out a long time ago I wasn’t sane.

As a kid, I hadn’t wanted my father to hurt me. But I’d resented him that he hadn’t. So which was it? Which did I want? Both had pain, one physical, one emotional. Both were sick in their own dark way. It was the only life I knew, one drilled into me as a child. Every moment was defined in terms of pain or its lack. At least pain meant attention.

It meant love.

“What happened at the warehouse? Over the comm, we heard you… It sounded like…”

I couldn’t say it. That was how head over heels I was for him—even laid out in a hospital bed, beaten and bruised, I couldn’t fathom the idea of him hurt.

His eyes were a million miles deep, just then. He took down the walls and let me see how much it meant to him.

“Laguardia broke free,” he said simply.

And yes, it was easy for me to understand how, now that I’d met him. Even without the specifics of what lock and which guard and how so—I knew he wasn’t a man to be contained. He was a giant, and not even a hundred little men and all the rope in the world could keep him tethered to the ground.

My voice roughened. “Did you… Did you find him? After?”

After I was recovered.

These images were somehow just as bad as the ones of Hennessey injured had been. I imagined Carlos in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit. I imagined him dead in a standoff that hadn’t ended well. Hennessey’s eyes were troubled. The glimmer in his expression clenched a cold fist around my heart. He was unshakeable, but here, now, at the thought of telling me this, he felt something. Gladness that the man he hunted had been caught?

“By the time we followed your tracks to the warehouse, it had been destroyed. We found blood and other…matter at the scene. They’re running the DNA at the lab, but we suspect it’s Laguardia.”

I’d been made of glass, I realized, solid but frail. And now the glass cracked down the middle, branching out into a thousand tiny shards. Carlos, dead or alive. I shouldn’t care. I didn’t. Either way, I would never see him again. Never get to ask the questions about why he’d taken me or what it all had meant.

They wouldn’t find only his DNA. Mine too. Mixed together and charred in an explosion. Who had set it? Didn’t matter. In-fighting, that was what Brody had said. Meaningless deaths.

I should be glad that Carlos was dead. Glad he’d never hurt me again. It was completely irrational to wish I could see him again, to imagine him tracking me down at the hospital or later. To wish he would abduct me again. Even now, I shook with fear and anticipation.

God, I was crazy. Imagining a bad guy, even when I knew he was dead.

Hennessey’s voice roughened. “I’m sorry we couldn’t catch him. Couldn’t…bring him to justice.”

Justice. “It’s okay.”

“Jesus, Samantha.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Three days…”

Three days, and with every passing hour, the chances of surviving had dwindled down to nothing. Like an integral equation, arcing low but never touching the baseline, racing toward zero into infinity. But I’d lived. Coincidence? Hennessey didn’t believe in coincidence, and strangely enough, neither did I.

In his steel eyes, I saw bleakness reflected. Had he searched the morgues for Jane Does? Had they run DNA tests on nameless, faceless corpses? I felt sick for him. Sick for myself. I should have been on the slab. Then everyone’s lives would be simpler. Just like my father should have murdered me along with all the other kids he hurt. Why did I always have to live?

Survivor’s guilt. The textbook hadn’t been far off the mark. And it sucked.

Tears slipped down my cheeks, and I clenched my hands.

Hennessey put his hand over my balled fist. “It will be okay. It will…get better.”

I shook my head. How could it get better? There would never be any closure, not with my father and not with Carlos. There’d never be any reasoning behind the actions of a psychopath. I should be happy to be safe again, to be in this buzzing, beeping, cold hospital room. I should be glad to have my partner at my side, when I wasn’t really even his partner anymore.

But I couldn’t be happy. An ineffable sadness weighed me down, heavy as lead, molten as lava.

A single tear slipped down my cheek, like a crack in my skin. A crack in my false composure, and I was lost. Sobs tore from my throat before I could hold them back. They racked my body, rattling the thin metal frame of the hospital bed. I cowered on the sheets, feeling exposed and miserable. Alone. For three stuttering, helpless cries I
was
alone. Then Hennessey scooped me up. He held me in his arms, sitting on the hospital bed while I spilled tears onto his T-shirt, while I breathed his musk and clutched at broad shoulders.

Should have died, should have died.

All I could think was that I wanted to die. But I already had. When Carlos had hurt me, when I’d realized I liked it after all, that even as an adult I still wanted the abuse—it had been a form of death. It felt like dying, but the part that really hurt the most was coming back to life.

When I woke up a second time, the room was empty. I glanced around, suddenly alert. A rap came at the door, and I managed to croak a weak, “Come in.”

The door opened in shadows, and a small frame entered. A stab of disappointment lanced through me. Not Hennessey. But instead of a nurse coming to check on me, like I’d thought, a familiar face emerged.

“Mrs. Martinez,” I said in surprise.

She gave me a gently chiding look. “Call me Mia.”

I struggled to sit up, but a sharp pain stole my breath away.

Making a
tsking
sound, she rushed to my side. “Lie down, love. Don’t strain yourself. Here, let me help you.”

Mia eased me back to the thin comfort of the hospital bed and tucked the sheet around my waist. I let her do it…because damn, I ached all over.

I wasn’t even sure how I’d really gotten hurt. I winced as the harsh sheets pressed against my back, but that was a small twinge compared to the overall pain in my body. It felt like I’d been beaten—not beaten with a whip or a leather strap, but beaten with fists and kicks inside my body. But when I ran my hands over my stomach, I didn’t feel any bruises or cuts. The pain was on the inside, hurt and anger coalescing into a sick burn inside me.

Mia’s expression was pure sympathy. No, scratch that. Empathy. Like she knew exactly what I was going through. Which she did, really. She’d been with Carlos. I tried to let that sink in. She’d been through exactly what I’d been through, except instead of days, she’d been with him for
years
.

“How did you do it?” I asked helplessly.

Her smile was sad. “It was hard sometimes. Other times…I found it surprisingly easy. To put my trust in someone who was strong enough to take it. To focus on the sensations only. But I’d been with him a long time by then. I wouldn’t expect it to be the same for you.”

Her voice lilted up at the last word, turning it into a question. The really crazy part was that I understood what she was saying. The release of being bound and gagged, the freedom of having nowhere else to go. And instead of feeling horror, I felt curiosity. Was he always that rigid in the way that he fucked her? Was he relentlessly cruel? Or had he, at some point, opened up to her?

Strangely enough, that had hurt the most. If he had been a mindless, heartless animal and treated me that way, I could have understood it. I could have moved past it. You didn’t blame an animal for biting you. A monster only knew how to scare. But Carlos had too much intelligence, too much
thoughtfulness
to his actions to be an animal. A monster. He was just a person. He wasn’t kind, but then neither was the world.

“I hope you don’t mind me coming here,” Mia said. “I can go if you’re too tired…or if seeing me will upset you.”

“No, I’d like to talk to you. Actually,” I said, feeling unaccountably shy, “I’d like it if you could talk to me. Tell me about your time with him. We didn’t get to talk very long the day I came to see you. And now I—” I spread my palms, as if in supplication. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to know or why. Only that she was part of the answer.

She drew up the plastic chair and sat down. “I can tell you about him. Maybe it will help you reconcile what happened. Or…I don’t know, help with closure.”

“Or help us catch him,” I whispered.

“Right. Of course.” She said it so quickly that she clearly didn’t think it would happen. To her, he was invincible. And I wasn’t sure she was wrong.

I sighed, letting my eyes fall closed. In the darkened hospital room, it was almost the same. My eyes felt tired, and I let her words wash over me like a lullaby. Like a story before bedtime, and that was what it was. Her voice was a sweet melody, soothing to my roughened nerves.

“Carlos’s father ran a fairly large drug trafficking operation out of Colombia. His mother was an American woman. I saw a picture of her once. She was really beautiful. Exquisite. And you couldn’t tell her origins from the picture. Her dress was shimmery, and she had diamond earrings and a necklace. It was kind of a fairy tale, back then, and they were royalty.”

I could picture them, the stern-faced drug lord in a sharp suit. The glittering bride at his side, elegant and severe. My mind painted them in black and white, with vintage glamour. But this story had a dark side. Even light casts a shadow.

“Families were important back then. All the important men had wives and kids and they’d meet up for big dinners.
La familia
.” Mia’s laugh sounded soft and musical, like a wind chime in the night air. “When Carlos was eight years old, there was a dinner. His parents’ anniversary and it was a big affair. But the two of them had been fighting that day, in private. The way things worked, the women didn’t talk back to the men. Not ever.”

Mia paused, and I felt her sadness drench the air. For who, though? For Carlos? Or for the woman from a previous generation, who was so much like her. Used for her body and elevated through her status with a man who did her harm.

“That night, she turned on him. In front of everyone, she shouted at him and told him she’d been sneaking behind his back. He pulled out his gun and shot her. In front of Carlos.”

I shivered in horror and sympathy, imagining that moment. Remembering how it felt to see violence too young and unprepared. None of this excused what Carlos had done, but I could tell from Mia’s voice that she knew that too. More than that, I got the sense she hadn’t even thought he’d done wrong. We were all animals, acting on instinct. He was just a particularly intelligent and powerful animal. A lion with rippling muscles and a beautiful mane and a pair of jaws that could rip you to shreds if he wanted.

“He kept the party going. That was the breaking point for Carlos, I think. They removed the body, and his father kept the party going because they already had everyone there, and food, and music.”

“That’s awful,” I whispered, feeling the horror of it wash over me. Imagining a little boy, who had probably already seen too much, being told to pretend that nothing had happened. That his mother hadn’t just died.

Mia nodded. “He went to live with relatives after that, and he barely ever saw his father. They were involved in the organization as well, so he still saw what was happening, but he had no plans to follow in his footsteps. In fact, he…”

She trailed off, and I looked at her. Her smile was wistful. “He had other life plans.”

“What were they?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but that was a lie. She knew. It was just weird that after telling me all this personal stuff about Carlos, she’d omit something like this. Surely it wouldn’t matter if he’d wanted to be a doctor or even a racecar driver or whatever little boys wanted to be.

“Go on,” I murmured, determined to get as much information—honest information—from her as I could.

She lifted one slender shoulder. “He told me when he picked me up off the street, when he decided to keep me…he said he was going to shoot me one day. So don’t get too comfortable. At the time I believed him.”

I remembered her using the same phrase at our last meeting. “At the time. And what do you think now?”

“I learned to trust him by his actions, not what he said.”

“So he didn’t put you in chains? He didn’t whip you?” I demanded, already knowing the answer.

“He did.” She nodded. “But he always took care of me after. That’s not what you do if you don’t care. Believe me. I met plenty of men who wouldn’t have. But Carlos didn’t let them touch me…until the end. When things started breaking down.”

“Why did he let you go?”

Her eyes were open, guileless. A deep, bottomless brown. “I think he started to care about me, honestly. More than he was comfortable with. He started to worry that he
would
shoot me. That he’d marry me and care about me, and that he’d act on instinct. On blood. It’s not entirely logical, but when horrible things happen to young children, they change the way they think.”

A shiver ran through me. A premonition? I knew exactly how much the horrific events of a young child could shape a life. My brain had been wired different from everyone else’s at that young, impressionable age. I hadn’t realized how lonely it made me. But Carlos knew what it felt like. And so did Mia, both because she had experienced it herself and because she had an innate compassion that bled through her every word. I began to understand why Carlos had kept her for so long, and it wasn’t only for her lithe body or delicate features.

“He told you all this?”

She must have heard the disbelief in my voice. Her smile was wry. “Not at first. He tried to keep things really strict. Completely separate. But he must have realized he could trust me. He started opening up to me. About his hopes. His fears.”

I could have laughed. I didn’t. “His fears? What would that be, not making enough of a profit on the illegal drugs he’s importing?”

“Something like that. You see, when his father died, the empire he had built would have passed down to Carlos. Except Carlos didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He was done.”

This caught my attention. “What happened?’

“There was a second in command. An older man, closer to Carlos’s father’s age. He assumed control, and that would have been the end of it. But he didn’t trust Carlos. I don’t know whether he thought Carlos would rat them out, since he knew so much, or if he thought Carlos would come back looking for a piece of the pie. So he decided to have Carlos killed. Sent a couple guys on a hit.”

My palms were sweating. My heart pounded, as if I cared. Silly, because obviously Carlos had made it through alive, but something in me still yearned to hear the completion. To know that he’d made it out okay. It was as if he’d tied us together somehow, merged a part of our bodies so that now his safety was mine. His happiness too. Disturbing, considering he was a sadist and a psychopath.

“Carlos killed them. I believe they were the first lives he ever took. Self-defense.”

Yes, it would have been self-defense. If he’d gone directly to the police and explained the situation. But if he’d done that, he would have been a sitting duck for the next pair of hit men who came along. Without even hearing the words, I knew Carlos had done the only thing he could do. He survived. And as fucked up as it was, I respected that. There was no good or bad, sometimes. There was just living and not living. A person had a right to do whatever it took to survive.

I had to believe that, otherwise my actions at the warehouse were untenable.

Self-defense.

“He knew more men would be after him, so he went after the guy in charge directly. Killed him and replaced him as the head of the organization. But there was chaos by then. Losing their leader twice. Having a young man in charge of everything, one who didn’t even want to be there. People started flipping out. There were so many deaths. It was chaos, and Carlos was sucked into it, righting the organization and bringing everything back to order.”

“Why didn’t he just turn them in?” The question was out before I could call it back. I’d just meant that he could be free of the situation, wash his hands of the heritage he’d never wanted.

“They were family,” she said simply.

And yes, of course. Because normal people didn’t sell out their family. That was only for the disloyal, like me. How dare I call Carlos cruel when he hadn’t been able to do what I did, turn my back on blood.

* * *

“What do you remember?”

The psychologist sat with her legs crossed in a short pencil skirt. Did she know how much attention she drew to them? Did she want her male patients to look at her legs? Fucking psychologists. Voyeurs and exhibitionists.

Her question hung in the air. What did I remember about my captivity, she meant. But the question was open ended, and I wasn’t thinking about captivity. New memories had started to float to the surface, ones long repressed.

A better question would have been:
How did you escape your father’s attention?

No one has ever hurt me.
It had been my mantra for so long, a lament and longing rolled into one. But was it true? I could no longer be sure. Of that, of anything.

 “Samantha?” she prodded.

“I don’t remember. It’s all a blank.” It wasn’t completely a lie. It wasn’t blank, but it was a blur.

Her eyebrows rose. “You don’t remember anything?”

“I remember Lance. He’s one of the agents I work with. I remember we were stepping out of the van, trying to figure out what had happened. Everyone inside the warehouse had gone quiet.”

“Were you worried?” she asked.

She was trying to profile
me.
And doing a piss poor job of it, too. But I was a good little agent, so I answered. “Yes. The plan was very specific. And we’d heard them over the comm. Something was wrong.”

“What did you do then?”

“We headed toward the location to see if we could help. Only, we got separated. And…someone attacked me. They disarmed me before I could stop them. I remember being punctured with a needle. Some kind of drug.”

I looked at her, the nameless, faceless woman who was supposed to analyze me. She’d be the one signing off on my return to duty. Her expression was politely blank. Her eyes were placid—borderline vacant. The only reason I knew she was listening was her pencil moving, marking down notes, judging me.