Manipulate (Deliver 6)

They’d fucked themselves into a coma.

Moving slowly and silently, she slid out from between their hot, heavy bodies.

Martin grunted, reaching for her, and she froze. His hand curled around her hip, clinging to her in his sleep. She waited with tears in her throat.

Eventually, his fingers loosened, and she slipped out of bed.

She dressed in the dark, grabbed a towel and soap, and checked the time on her phone.

Matias Restrepo had told Martin and Ricky that a military guard would arrive on the ninetieth day with court orders to release them from Jaulaso.

Their ninetieth day started three hours ago.

Hector wouldn’t learn about their release until they were gone. She would fake her surprise and pretend like she didn’t really care. He believed her relationship with them was just sex and manipulation.

That was all it was supposed to be.

She never expected to fall in love.

She’d been very careful to hide her feelings from Hector. He’d sent her to do a job, and it was compromised the moment she learned he’d lied to her.

To survive the next three years in his prison, she would have to fake every interaction she had with him. His organization thrived on loyalty. Traitors and dissenters were killed without mercy.

The lights were off as she crept into the corridor and soundlessly shut the door.

She wanted to be clean for them when they said goodbye. Not just her body. She needed to cleanse her state of mind.

The Mexican government would honor the deal that was made for their release. In fact, the government was the only entity that had the power to reduce her sentence. Maybe Martin and Ricky could’ve negotiated for her if they had the intel on Hector that the government wanted. But they didn’t.

She faced three years of separation from them. She needed to accept that and purge the bitterness that had been gnawing at her for weeks.

She would say goodbye, absorb their promises, and do what she could to survive the rest of her sentence.

Her trudging gait carried her through the empty corridor and into the dark stairwell. When she entered the ground floor, she glared at the closed door across the hall.

Was Hector asleep in there? Was he dreaming about the women and children he extorted for a business he considered unprofitable?

Maybe his involvement in that operation was so hands-off he didn’t know his cartel was kidnapping people and selling them into slavery.

She grimaced. That sounded really naive, even in her head.

With a glance up and down the hall, she found it vacant as usual at three in the morning. One thing she could count on in Area Three was that its residents partied hard and crashed even harder.

Thirty steps from the stairwell, she passed her old cell. Garra had given it to another inmate weeks ago. Not that she cared. After Martin and Ricky left, she would stay in their cell, wrap up in the lingering scent of them, and pass the rest of her time replaying the best three months of her life.

A one-minute walk took her out of the cellblock and into the corridor that housed the showers. She stepped into the bathroom and peeked around the corner.

Empty.

The light in there stayed on at all hours, and she used it to find a clean place to store her towel and clothes.

As she reached for the button on her jeans, she heard a terrified squeal.

The squealing cry of a child.

A horrible coldness trickled down her spine, and her senses went on high-alert.

She used to wake to the sound of a crying child when she slept in her old cell. But she hadn’t had a nightmare since she started sleeping with her guys.

Was she having some kind of traumatic flashback?

The cry sounded again, farther away, and the echo lingered, hitting her circulation with electric shocks. The hairs raised on her arms. Her blood turned to ice, and a paralyzing chill trailed goosebumps across her skin.

She wasn’t half-asleep or drunk on tequila. She was wide awake, totally alert.

This wasn’t her imagination.

Where did the cry come from? The vents in the ceiling? The empty corridor?

Her heart banged in her chest as she approached the door and peered out.

Not a soul in sight. No sound. No crying child.

It wasn’t uncommon for the families of the inmates to visit Area Three. Sometimes, those families included children.

Did a kid get trapped in here? The prison guards did a head count on every person who came and went in the prison. How in the fuck could a child have been missed?

She stood on the threshold to the hallway, her feet frozen in ratty sneakers as she waited, listened.

Then she heard it.

A faraway, muffled shriek. The horrifying sound hiccuped into a convulsion of sobs before abruptly cutting off.

Terror struck her gut and locked up her joints.

Someone was hurting that kid.