“Not Lucia. I left her to die in prison. What’s your last request, Tate?”
A hot ember formed in his throat and sank slowly, agonizingly into his chest, where it spread like fire, consuming him in excruciating heartache. His vision blurred, and despite the inferno charring him from the inside out, his skin felt cold, his limbs heavy, and his eyes gritty with hot sand.
He lowered to the blanket and stared at his empty hands. He had nothing. If she was truly gone, he wanted nothing. Yet his mouth moved, voicing the question before his brain caught up.
“Do you have a photo of Lucia?”
“Yes.”
There was something. Something he could ask for, and as he closed his eyes, it was all he could see.
So he said it out loud.
He told Badell his final wish.
CHAPTER 32
Three months later…
“Stop the car.” Lucia grabbed the binoculars, her pulse hammering and her mouth arid dry.
As Cole Hartman rolled the jeep to idle on the dirt road, she adjusted the focus on the lenses and scanned the parched horizon.
There weren’t any big trees to provide a canopy in this part of Venezuela, and with the blistering temperatures, wavy heat lines distorted the landscape.
Where are you, Tate? I know you’re out there.
Woody-stemmed shrubs dotted the salt-crusted earth. Between the widely spaced out cacti with their spiny slender arms, there was nothing but rocky sand and bare dirt as far as she could see.
“According to the old man,” Cole said, leaning forward with an elbow propped on the steering wheel, “the monastery is supposed to be twenty kilometers the other way.”
They’d already driven twenty kilometers in every direction, chasing one of the hundreds of possible locations where Tiago might’ve been holding Tate.
“This has to be it.” Sweat beaded on her brow as she shifted the binoculars and dialed in on an obscure formation in the distance.
“What are we doing, Lucia?” He grabbed a bottled water from the backseat. “We’re wasting time on the musings of a senile man.”
“He said there was a gate, and I’m not moving on until I find it.”
With a scowl, he snatched the stack of papers from her lap and held them up. “There are two-hundred and seventeen places with gates. We’ll never get through all of them.”
Her desperation to find Tate might’ve pushed her past the point of insanity, but she wasn’t stopping, wasn’t budging. She would find him, dammit, and he would be alive. She refused to accept any other outcome.
“This one feels right.” She glared at Cole’s cocky aviator sunglasses and held her ground. “It’s a hunch.”
“You said that the last three times. This whole damn operation has dissolved into a hunch.” He gulped back the water and tossed the capped bottle onto her lap. “This isn’t how I do things.”
Her chest constricted with pressure and insistence. “We spent three months doing things your way.”
Three months chasing dead ends and all they knew was Tiago had left Caracas the day she attacked him. How he survived the head injury, where he went, and what he was doing—all of it was one big fat mystery.
Meanwhile, Tate was missing and alone, his body beaten and susceptible to infection. She couldn’t stop obsessing over it, couldn’t eat, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think straight. Every second without him was another second he spent in misery.
Cole had hunted down the cops who had apparently tossed Tate into the trunk of a car. But the corrupted police didn’t know where he’d been taken or who’d been driving. Any clues leading to Tate had been so thoroughly buried not even Cole could bribe, threaten, or wrestle the information into the light.
But she knew Tiago, knew how his unshakable mind worked, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the night Tate was tortured. It had been a trial, a disgusting experiment that put Tate’s love to the test.
Over the past few months, she wondered if this was her test. Tiago wouldn’t just throw her in a prison to die. His god complex demanded that he challenge, control, and weigh everyone around him, including her. He’d challenged Tate, and now it was her turn.
So many times, she replayed her conversation with Tiago right before she attacked him.
You have the power to give him what he wants most.
His survival is up to you.
There had been a lot of mumbo jumbo twisted into his words, including his suggestion that she move on. But there was something deeper at play. He never eluded to it, but he’d left her a clue.
He’d carved an image into Tate’s back.
For her.
He tortured countless men that way, leaving scarred welts on the arms, chests, and legs of those who lived. But his designs tended to be more primitive—geometric lines, whorls, and simple shapes. What he’d sliced into Tate’s skin was altogether different. It was a detailed illustration. Hours of gruesome cutting that painted a place with gates and a human-like figure floating through them.
Tiago had given her a way to find him. A depraved challenge to test her determination and love. Yes, it was just a hunch, but it sat heavily and deeply in her gut, howling and bucking and refusing to be ignored.
Then she met the old man.
She and Cole had comprised most of their list of gated places by talking to people, such as historians at universities and locals in small villages. They’d traveled the breadth of the country, and that was how she met the elderly man in an impoverished town an hour’s drive from here.
In thick Spanish, the man had told her about a monastery called Medio del Corazón. Translation: Middle of the Heart.
Abandoned a century ago, it was left in rubble and ruin. He said the gate still stood to protect the dark secrets that loomed behind its bars. Secrets about a high-ranking monk who had fallen in love with a village girl. The religious order condemned their relationship, separating them. But the lovers had found a way to steal a night together, and within the sacred walls of the monastery, they’d killed themselves.
The old man claimed the lovers could still be heard in the crumbling foundation. He called it a silent, unified heartbeat in the midst of devastation.
She knew it was just folklore. Whispered words among superstitious locals. But the story resonated with her. If Tiago put Tate behind gates, it would be those gates. She believed it down to the bottom of her soul.
Problem was, the old man wasn’t exactly sure how to find it. He’d never been there, and his directions were approximations. She and Cole had been circling the desert for days.
“Find a road that goes that way.” She pointed at the formation on the horizon.
With a sigh, Cole handed the papers to her and shifted the jeep into gear.
An hour and several wrong turns later, he slowed along a rocky road that ended on a hill. At the top of the incline stood two towering pillars of stone. And between them hung a massive wrought iron double gate.
“This is it.” Her heart slammed against her ribcage, and her hand shot out to grip Cole’s arm. “Those pillars… I remember them on his back.”
She couldn’t breathe as she fumbled with the door handle, shaking all over with urgency.
“Lucia, wait.” He caught her wrist, stopping her from scrambling out of the jeep. “If he’s here—”
“He is!”
“—there will be guards. Security. We don’t know what’s up there, and they probably heard us approach.”
With panting breaths, she opened the glove compartment and removed a 9mm gun.
“I’m going in alone.” He drew a pistol from one of the many holsters he wore. “Stay in the car.”
“Not happening.”
After spending three months together, their power exchanges had fizzled into a laughable waste of time. He barked orders. She barked back. Then he stormed off, grumbling about how he should’ve never taken this job. Which he did now as he slid out of the jeep, tossed a backpack over his shoulder, an
d crept up the hill with his gun raised.
The sun beat down on her neck as she followed behind him. Then they separated, seeking the concealment of the pillars on either side of the gate. The gun rattled in her hands, and the atmosphere was so dry it burned her lungs.
Beyond the heavy black bars sat clumps of simplistic, boxy structures made of stone. A passage of archways cut through the largest building at the center. Two wings of corridors spread out from there, connecting smaller, one-room buildings. No doors. No bars or glass on the windows. And from this vantage, there didn’t appear to be a roof on the main belfry.
She scanned the perimeter. No cars. No people. No signs of life whatsoever.
Her gaze locked with Cole’s where he stood on the other side of the gate.
No one, she mouthed.
Muscles bounced along his jaw, and his shoulders loosened. The disappointment on his face made her stiffen. He’d already decided they had the wrong location.
“I’m not leaving until I look around.” She stayed alert as she sidled through the two-foot opening in the sagging double gate.
Arms locked in front of her with the gun trained, she made her way to the ruins on silent feet. Cole trailed at a distance as she crept through the largest building.
The scent of dust and baked earth permeated the air. Loose gravel crunched beneath her boots, and birds took flight in the open rafters. Very few plants grew in this region, but something twiggy and leafless had vined its way up the stone walls toward the open sky.
The altars and benches and pots were long gone. There was nothing. No indication that anyone had been here in decades.
Desperate and tense, she continued moving, passing through the decaying corridors and rooms that would’ve slept rows of monks on spartan beds. A century later, this monastery only housed families of birds. Nests made of spindly shrubs lined what was left of the rooftops.
She searched everywhere for a hidden door, a basement, someplace that could house a prisoner. When her quest brought her back to the main tower, she let her head fall back on her shoulders and stared at the pale sky peeking through the rafters.
Why isn’t he here?