"Nuh-uh." Lucia shook her head, tangled curls swishing. "She went for a walk and she didn't even ask me to go. I'm mad, but I didn't eat a bug."
A walk? Leaving Lucia alone?
Even with the guard outside, he seriously doubted Sara would leave Lucia by herself in the room. "Where did she walk?"
Lucia rocked forward on her knees and pointed down. "Through the floor with Tio Ramon."
Sara squinted in the dark tunnel, Ramon's machine gun in the middle of her back a persuasive reminder to keep marching. Their only light gleamed from a miner's lamp on his head, casting a thin stream through the pitch nothingness. Seemingly endless with no way to tell how much longer until they reached an exit.
At least she'd persuaded Ramon to leave Lucia behind. She'd vowed she would scream if he took one step toward her daughter. He would have to blow her brains out as he'd threatened, which would alert the guards.
The only way she would go peacefully was if Lucia stayed behind. At least Lucia had pretended to stay asleep through it all. Thank heaven they both hadn't been asleep when he'd come through the floor or he would have almost certainly gagged her.
For a moment, she'd thought he would kill her anyway and blaze his way out with Lucia. Was this the man he'd been back in his guerrilla fighter days'? She shivered at the thought of Nola Seabrook on the road with him, shuddered to imagine this element of his personality had been lurking, ready to snap free at any time.
Some sanity must have remained in his twisted mind, because he'd accepted her bargain. She'd known by then that Lucia was faking sleep, but her daughter didn't wince. She grieved that her child had to witness her mother's kidnapping, especially after an already bizarre childhood.
But she also prayed Lucas would check in soon and Lucia could explain well enough. Sara wanted to confront Ramon with his years of deception in letting her believe her husband and brother were dead. Wanted to scream at him for the pain he'd brought her, for robbing Lucia of her father. But she wouldn't indulge impulsive emotions and risk upsetting him. Bottom line, she had to delay their journey down this dank earthen tunnel long enough for her daughter to alert Lucas.
"Tio Ramon..." She hoped calling him uncle would remind him of softer emotions, the pseudo-family-tie that had bonded all of them together for years. "My father would not want this for me, or for you. You have your own family. Please let me build mine."
"In the United States?"
He seemed to already know anyway, so she allowed herself a small nod.
His sigh racked long and hard behind her. "I had already suspected, feared, but crawling around under the floor place to find your room, I heard much about your joyous reunion with your husband."
He'd been listening? Hope of reasoning with him faded away.
"Puta." He spit. "You betrayed your family when you left with these people. And the rest of my family..." His voice cracked on the last word, his steps faltering. "They are gone."
"Gone?" All of them? Her mind reeled with flashing images of his grandchildren, his adult children, too, all pawns in his perverted control games.
"The whole compound has been destroyed, my family with it."
Grief chilled her even more than the underground iciness. Ramon's grandchildren had been Lucia's only playmates. Sara's charges in her nanny duties.
What-if scenarios chilled her further. If she hadn't left, Lucia would have been in the room with them when Padilla's bombs and bullets hit. In Ramon's fanatical attempt to "protect" them from the outside world, he'd left them all defenseless.
Except she wasn't defenseless any longer. She'd defied him by escaping once. She could—and would—do it again.
He prodded the steely barrel of the gun against her spine again. "Walk, damn it."
She hadn't even realized her feet had stopped. "Of course. I'm sorry, I'm just..." She swallowed down emotions she couldn't afford to indulge at the moment if she expected to live long enough to see Lucas again. "I can't believe they're all dead."
"I have nothing left but the hope of returning my country to its former glory."
"Then why risk that by coming in after me?" She willed Lucas to hurry, her fist closing around the few remaining rose petals she'd snuck from the room. She'd been dropping them when she dared, praying Lucas would see and understand. Follow through the crawl space under their room, into the bomb shelter with a hidden door to an old drug runner's tunnel.
Heaven help them.
He would need a map, not a pathetic few dead petals that blended with the murky mud of the damp floor. But she didn't even have a knife for protection this time. Only her mind and the flowers she'd scooped into her pockets.
Ramon steered her forward, the light strapped to his head streaking ahead. "Hostages make powerful bargaining tools when dealing with the United States. They cared enough to come after you once, and that caring makes them vulnerable. That, I understand very well."
"They won't bargain with a criminal."
"One country's criminal is another country's freedom fighter. Regardless, they'll tread warily when they know there's a gun to your traitorous head."