Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (12 page)

He couldn’t have her communicating with the outside world. His eyes fell to the bandage on her wrist. He needed to get a look under there. She was his to care for now.

She dashed a drip of sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I might want to contact a friend to say I’m all right. Could I do that?”

“We’ll see,” he said as he emailed her name and everything else he had on her—Miami, Mikos, all of it—to his private investigator in Bogotá.

His beautiful mother had been a wonderful cook, and she’d never needed recipes. “Do you know how to make anything without the aid of a recipe?”

“No.” She looked him in the eye as she said it, unashamed.

“Not even a peanut butter sandwich?”

Her blank expression lit briefly with a flare of emotion—incredulousness, annoyance. Whatever it was, he liked it. “You want peanut butter sandwiches?” she asked.

“
Ni loco
.” He turned to the traffic speeding by on the dusty street, watching out the corner of his eye as the boy looked up recipes. “No.”

Okay, then.

She insisted that they examine three recipes for each dish and create a shopping list. Was she hoping to contact somebody?

They sent the boy down the street to a small market with the list.

“He’s not yours, then?”

“No,” Hugo said simply.

“A relative?”

He shook his head.

“Orphan?”

“Probably.”

“What do you do for his birthday? Do you celebrate the day you brought him home?”

“I see no reason to celebrate that day,” Hugo said, picturing the boy weeping among the bloody bodies. “Do not teach him that word,
señorita
.”

“You don’t want him to know the word for
birthday
.”

“No.”

“I’ve never heard of a child without a birthday.”

“I’ve never heard of a woman who needs three recipes for one sauce.”

She kept her face perfectly blank, but she wasn’t fooling him. He could feel her flare hard and hot, like a flame upon a match head, and it made his heart speed. “I did not take you on to teach him Mickey Mouse and birthdays.”

“Fine,” she said. “No birthdays.”

Was that a taunt? “Perhaps you could celebrate that you are alive and not a corpse being torn apart by jaguars or El Gorrion’s men. It can still be arranged. I can still bring you back there. Is that what you want?”

“No.”

He had the sense that she wanted to tell him more. He found he wanted that, too. He waited. Then, “Objections?”

“No.”

He gazed at her hard, but what he marveled at wasn’t in the looking, it was the way she felt. The contours of her.

She looked away, eyes full of thoughts. He wanted to know her thoughts. He wanted her face to light again with emotion. He wanted her to sweat some more, too. He wanted everything from her. Everything.

He sat back. “You know science? Did they teach that to you in high school?”

“A bit.”

“You will teach that to the boy.”

Liza looked down and nodded.

He had the sense of secrets in her. What? Had she not finished school?

Hugo’s own schooling had ended when he ran away. Everything he knew he’d learned at the hands of fighting men, and that did not include science and math. He would not allow the boy to be limited in this way.

She patted her brow with a napkin. The sun had risen beyond the tin roof that had once shaded them. She would most certainly be roasting, but she didn’t complain.

“The last cook who worked at the house left her uniforms. They will be several sizes too large, but they will be cooler than that.”

“Thanks,” she said. “So Paolo doesn’t go to school?”

“He does not like school.”

She took this in. “And school doesn’t like him?”

He gave her a longer look now. She was perceptive. More…

But then the boy was back.

They returned to the Jeep and the boy drove on glumly, having lost reception and gained a governess sure to disturb his life of reading outer space adventure tales and practicing archery and shooting. Hugo addressed him in Spanish. “You will treat her with respect and obey her in everything, or you will forfeit the phone and all books. Do you understand? I will crush the phone under my boot and rip up your books.”

The boy didn’t answer.

“Do you understand?”

The boy nodded insolently.

They headed into the foothills, fully at the mercy of the blistering sun now. The boy took to telling him a science fiction tale. Planets, UFOs—
Ovnis
and
extraterrestres.
Hugo nodded. Liza sat in back looking bored; she wouldn’t understand the boy’s tale, aside from the explosion sound effects. Hugo wondered what she made of those, what she made of him and the boy. The glaring overhead sun made her shining, sweating face look more angular, more sculpted. She really was beautiful, even with the fake hair and eyes.

What had driven her to drugs? She’d said she’d quit. Was it true? It was not an easy thing, quitting. What had inspired her to quit? What was important to her?

She lay down in the back and slept for a few hours, but she woke when they turned off and began the steep climb up the mountainside.

Eventually, they reached Buena Vista. As they motored through the ruined village, Hugo had the strange impulse to cover it up, as though he didn’t want her to see it as pitiful.

Her expression was blank as always, but she saw. Somewhere inside, she was reacting. How much of Valencia’s struggle did she know about? Did she think of the region only in terms of drug cultivation and drug wars?

“The people will return to this village soon,” he assured her. “It will be restored.”

She nodded as she took it in—the burnt cars, structures hollowed out by the bomb blast, dark gated shops.

He could see evidence that they’d come and taken the old man’s body away to bury. “The danger is over now. The attacks are over.”

She nodded. Again, that blaze of intelligence. What was she thinking?

He looked away. Why should he care?

The Jeep whirred as they climbed on past Buena Vista. The sky was pure blue today, and the forest lush. The way up to his home was only two miles as the crow flies, but six miles on the winding trail. He himself had to maintain this path, had to move the rocks when they fell. The way was dangerous and beautiful.

He looked forward to her seeing the grand house come into view.

They’d lived in Bogotá for a year or two when he was a young boy. On a flea market outing with his father, he’d found a postcard of a Buena Vista farming manor. He’d been excited to find an image of the place his mother had come from. The card depicted a Spanish-style farmhouse home perched on a mountaintop that blazed with the reds of the rare
Savinca verde
. He had used up his pesos to purchase it for her, thinking it might remind her of where she’d come from.

She’d hated it.
This is a lie,
she’d told him.
The homes in Buena Vista are not beautiful like that. The people are no better than farm animals. And the flowers are never allowed to bloom.

Years later, he’d pieced together the story of his mother from conversations he’d overheard at Café Moderno. She’d been a beauty who hated the remote village. She’d wrecked a few marriages and alienated everybody before heading to the big city. Nobody ever heard from her again, not even her heartbroken parents. Years later, her parents—Hugo’s grandparents—had tumbled off a cliff. Some said that his grandfather had died trying to save his grandmother. Most, however, seemed to think it was suicide. Hugo imagined his grandparents’ tract had bloomed blood red after they’d gone off the cliff.

His mother had never shown up at the funeral. Well, they were living in New Delhi at the time. The villagers had divided the family’s tracts among themselves.

They think they are lucky because they are the only ones in the world who can grow the rare savinca,
his mother would say,
but the rare savinca is their curse
.
The flower keeps them stupid, trapped into following the ancient ways.

But Hugo loved the postcard as a boy. At the time, he’d only known gray cityscapes and violence, so a quiet, rural mountaintop sounded like paradise. He dreamed of going there someday. He believed that beautiful home really was there. He imagined he’d be happy there. Through the worst of his father’s violence and his mother’s unhappiness, he would cling to his someday life on the mountaintop.

By the time he made it back, war was raging. The war had upset him on a deep level and he’d taken to the killing fields like a duck to water, wild and brutal, battling back the war itself. Never making it to that mountain.

And then came the fire and the explosion that burnt him and took his mother. All meant for him. In those painful, dark days afterward as he lay in the old church, swathed in bandages, unable to think straight, aware of the boy always next to him, he’d imagine the village as a sanctuary. His goal, if he ever recovered, was to find that home—he had enough money to purchase such a property out from under most anybody.

After a few inquiries, he’d learned the home didn’t exist.

A figment of the painter’s imagination.

There was, however, a lone, crumbling, far-flung estate some miles above Buena Vista, at the upper edge of savinca-growing area, scrubby savincas gone wild.

He’d bought it from the absentee owner and had the home from the postcard built. A massive expense. That was when the rumor of his being American started among the villagers. He allowed it; he preferred they didn’t know who he was.

Twenty minutes later, they hit the last bumpy twist in the trail. The red-tile roof and white stucco of the manor came slowly into view. Hugo found himself watching her face in the mirror instead of enjoying the view for himself.

She appeared unimpressed.

Well, this was her home now, whether she liked it or not—until he decided he could trust her enough to let her go, or until he killed her.

He could feel her from across the vehicle. “This mountainside is full of predators,
señorita
.” He turned and eyed her straight on. “The most dangerous of which would be me, should you try to run.”

A strange light appeared in her eyes—just a flash, and then it was gone. He found he enjoyed this woman and the strange friction between them.

“You understand?”

“I hear you,” she said smoothly. Not quite a yes. He had the impulse to pursue her even in this, until he got her assent. What was he doing? He turned, pulse galloping. He forced it to slow.

Up top, the boy shoved the Jeep into park and pulled the emergency brake, and they went in.

He paused in the dining room. “This is where we eat. Dinner is at five. The boy’s bedtime is nine.” He liked to keep a military-style schedule.

“Okay,” she said.

He’d been a fighter long enough to know when people were concealing things. What would it take to break that plaster mask?

He strolled to the bell. “This is how the household will summon you. With this bell.” He didn’t know what moved him to say such a thing. It was a dinner bell, to be rung for dinner, an old Valencian custom. He rang it.

Clang-clang-clang.

Her outward appearance didn’t change, but there it was: that heat, that flare, that something that came alive inside her.

He’d seen dogs react to whistles that no human ear could hear; this woman’s emotions were a kind of whistle to him, pitched to his frequency. He found he liked to…push her. And all he could think about, standing there, was how it would feel to take her when she was flared hot like that.

“Put the groceries away. The boy will show you the rest of the home.”

H
ugo walked off,
undoing the small black scarf from his thick neck as he went. He yanked it off and allowed it to swing from his massive and muscular hand, which looked powerful and even brutal in contrast.

Zelda had built a career on reading people, but she found him impossible to fathom with his stony expression that sometimes seemed so angry. He’d saved her, yes, and then proceeded to take her captive. And this boy he refused to call by name and treated like a dog. What was the deal? And playing Kabakas, getting the details wrong, even the basic ones. But God, the way he felt.

And those hands.

If anybody had ever come to her, telling her they recognized a fugitive by his hands and by the way he made them feel, she would’ve laughed them out of her sight.

He paused at a large, intricately carved door. “
Muéstrale la casa
,” he began, giving Paolo instruction in Spanish. He didn’t think she’d try to run, but they should keep an eye on her all the same. She would have the south bedroom.

Paolo nodded, then turned his angry little face to her. “Come.”

Hugo left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Where was he going?

The windows were covered in fanciful ironwork. Even from across the room, she could see the pale blue sky and the mountaintops awash in burnt sienna and endless shades of green, with shadow below. Once the sun fully set, it would all be shadow.