Liberty At Last (The Liberty Series) (10 page)

I’d never had a shower feel so good in my whole life. I washed my hair four times. When I ran out of shampoo, I called for John. He brought more from the guy’s room. I shaved, for the first time in many weeks, and ran my hands down my legs when I was done. They were so smooth they were like new.

I noticed I was still shaky when I got out of the shower. The mirror was covered in steam, so I used a towel so I could see myself. I inhaled sharply when I saw my reflection. My cheekbones protruded painfully from my face. My collarbones jutted out from my chest; even my neck looked painfully thin, breakable. My head looked too big for my body now. Even my breasts looked small.

I’d managed to hold down half of my meal, but I had a long way to go. I kept drinking cold bottled water and I shivered every time I did — I’d never take clean water for granted again. I made myself look long and hard at myself in the mirror.
Let’s try to move past the stupid part of life,
I thought.
Going to Mexico was stupid. Risking my life to find Catherine was stupid. John would have been completely ruined if I’d died down there. Then he would have lost both of us.

I nodded at myself in the mirror:
no more stupid.
But part of me, a small part, felt triumphant.
I had done it, after all.
Even though Catherine was a disaster, it was worth it.
It was my choice. I did it for John. I did it for me. And I made it back.

I made it back.
Tears sprang to my eyes. I couldn’t believe how incredibly freaking lucky I was.

John came in then, in a tee shirt and sweats, his hair tousled and wild above his head. He must’ve been laying down, watching sports or the news while I’d been in here.

“Hey honey,” he said. “You look like you feel a whole lot better.”

I hugged him to my damp body and let the inevitable tears run down my face. “Oh my god, John, I’m so sorry,” I said, sniffling. “I love you so much. I thought I was never going to see you again.”

He crushed me to him, rocking me back and forth. “I love you, babe. I didn’t want to be any more emotional than I already was in front of the guys — but you have to know. You’re my whole life. I would have died if I lost you.” He kissed my wet hair and wrapped his arms around me.

He stood back a little, taking me in. “You’re so thin,” he said, running his hands down my body. “I can’t stand to feel your body like this. It makes me want to hurt somebody.” He held my hands out and ran his eyes down me — like he was taking inventory of my hurts.
The burn marks. Oh good lord, the burn marks.

He stood back for a second, clenching his hands into fists. Then he reached for both my wrists, taking hold of them gently. He flipped my arms over and gently ran his hands down my inner arms, next to the marks. “Burns,” he said, as he touched me oh so gently. “Burns from cigarettes.
She
did this to you.” He looked up at me, levelly.

“It was a guard,” I said. “I don’t know his name —”

“Don’t lie to me. Not to protect her,” he said.

“I’m trying to protect
you
,” I said.

“Don’t. I don’t deserve it,” he said, releasing me. “I did this to her. I left her there.”

I took the pink pajamas John had brought in and put them on. I watched him as he winced looking at my naked body. He ran his hands down my torso, touching every rib. “What else did they do to you?” he asked. I could hear the absolute fury in his voice. “Did they touch you? Did anyone —”

“No, baby, no” I said, understanding his worst fear. I made sure my clothes were on so he couldn’t see any more trauma. “Nobody touched me. I swear.”

“Still,” he said, smiling at me sadly, “I’m going back to kill them all.”

I looked at him, but decided to save the lecture about how he was never killing anyone ever again for later. I stroked his face. “I’m here, baby, I’m alive. Let’s go to bed and you can tell me how you saved me.”

I started heading out of the bathroom then stopped short. “Wait — are we still alone?” I asked. He shook his head yes and grabbed my hand, leading me to the enormous bed. I felt so bad for him right now. I knew how much he wanted to be with Catherine, but she seemed to want nothing to do with him. It must be horrible, especially after so much time. She was his daughter. Probably the most important person in the world to him.

“Catherine is having her chilled vodka and chain smoking next to the window in her room. The doctor’s already been here and checked her foot. He put in some stitches and gave her crutches, which she swears she won’t use. He gave her antibiotics and a painkiller, so at least she’ll be okay. Sean’s having an espresso and keeping an eye on her. The other guys are sleeping.”

“Are you okay with that?” I asked. “Don’t you want to be with her?”

“Of course I do,” he said quickly. Then looked up at me sadly. “But she obviously doesn’t want to be with
me
right now, which is okay. Because it’s just me and you.” He flopped down onto the bed and pulled me next to him. I snuggled into his chest, feeling the powerful muscles underneath his tee shirt. I never thought that another person’s body could feel like home, but here I was.
Home.

“I love you,” I whispered again. “Now tell me how you saved me, you badass.”

“Well, once upon a time, there was a very naughty young lady named Liberty,” John said, and we both laughed again. “And I don’t mean naughty in a fun way. I mean that she was headstrong, she had ideas of her own, and that she failed, on a regular basis, to follow my instructions. The most important of which was: to let me protect her. To stay close to me. But oh no, she had to have ideas all her own.

“After we caught Ray, and sent him packing up to Canada — without any actual luggage — you were going to take a shower and lie down, if I remember correctly. I came back and you were gone. By the way, Ray hasn’t made it back into the country, not yet,” he said.” He squeezed my hand and leaned over, stroking my hair.

“After you left, I just kept texting you. And you never responded. So I didn’t know if you left because you didn’t want to be with me anymore, or if there was something else to it.”

I sat up and looked at him. “You know — you had to know — that I wanted to be with you. I want to be with you. Always,” I said, and my eyes filled with tears again.

“I hoped that was true,” John said, pulling me back down to his chest. “I sent Matthew after you either way. And then Eva told me that you’d come out there. She told me what you were planning. My dad also heard from the attorney for your father’s estate. He said you’d called, trying to get some of your inheritance.”

“The lawyer said they couldn’t disburse anything without a paternity test,” I said. “So I had to get money somewhere else. Eva gave me some, and so did Sasha.” I looked down when I said this. I was still not ready to deal with Sasha.

“I know. I talked to them both. I already paid them both back. I knew it would be bothering you,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “Thank you,” I finally said. I would have told him that I would repay him, but there was no point in starting that argument right now. I would have some money coming to me, based on what the lawyer said. I wanted everything to be paid for — nothing for free. The rent John had been paying for me in Vegas; the money he’d given to Eva and Sasha. I wanted him to understand that I could, and I would, take care of myself.

“So, once I knew you were going to Mexico, I had Matthew follow you. And made him text me about ten thousand times a day.”

“How did he know where I was, though? How did he do that?” I asked.

“Your phone, babe,” John said. “It had a tracker in it. It was in there since I gave it to you in that backpack.”

“So he —
you —
knew where I was the whole time?” I asked. Now I felt less brave than I had back in the bathroom. I’d had a babysitter in Mexico. No wonder I’d never gotten kidnapped or robbed. Or worse.

“It’s not the safest country right now,” John said. “I wouldn’t even let you vacation there, let alone go looking for criminals. Which, even with us following you, was a whole new level of ridiculous.”

The idea that he’d known where I was made my heart ache.
He’d been so close, and I’d missed him so much. My body had craved to be near him, every second.
But it also made me inexplicably angry. I was a grown woman. Clearly, I’d been out of my element down there, but I didn’t need a nanny.

“Were you there the whole time?” I asked, trying to hide my annoyance.

He shook his head, no. “Matthew followed you in Cabo. But when you went to Matamoros, I came down. It’s so dangerous, it still makes me crazy to think about it.”

“Well, apparently it wasn’t as risky as I thought — I had babysitters,” I said, pouting.

He shook his head and smiled at me. “I knew you would be pissed about that. But you shouldn’t be — you still managed to get into plenty of trouble.” I had to laugh at that, and my anger slipped away, replaced by the warm feeling of being close to him, him holding me.

“When they tossed your phone, I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” John said.

“Me too,” I said, snuggling deeper into his chest. I shivered — with pleasure, because I was so close to his gorgeous body, but also because there were too many men with machine guns in that memory.

And then, of course, there was Catherine.

“Did you know she was there?” John asked. “I keep trying to figure that out.”

“No,” I said. “I had a pretty lame ‘plan,’ if you could even call it that. I met a bartender in Cabo who told me that any girls who’d been kidnapped that long ago were probably dead.” I felt him tense up and mentally slapped myself for being so blunt. “Sorry,” I said, and hugged him closer, kissing his chest through his tee shirt. “But then he told me that sometimes girls like that get kept, the pretty ones. But not in Cabo. They get brought to where the cartels are in charge. So that’s why I went to Matamoros. I was just starting there. I’d read about the
Los Morales
cartel when I was in Los Angeles, about all the violence near the border…when I got to there, I just started asking people where I could find them.”

“Please tell me that’s not true,” he said, clamping his eyes shut.

I laughed. “No, I really am that stupid. Or that crazy. Whatever. I walked around asking people and they looked at me like I had three heads. One lady told me to run for my life. She was right — I got picked up by those guys the same day.”

“The cartel has an incredible network,” John said. “I can’t believe how locked down it is there. Matthew and I almost got picked up more times than I can count. We had to stay hidden — as in invisible — the whole time.”

“All those poor people,” I said. I couldn’t imagine living like that. I thought of the people who paid to try to swim across the
Rio
to try to find a better life. I’d read all about it in
The L.A. Times
. They rarely made it. If they did, they had to pay to have people meet them, take them in groups on foot or in an old truck. They rarely had any food or water. And they had to pay for it, all of it, even if they didn’t make it into the U.S. safely. Because otherwise the cartels would kill them, or kidnap them and ask their families for ransom.

“Tell me more about Catherine” he said. “I want to know what her role was there.”

“Promise me something,” I said, looking up at him.

“Anything,” he said. “Cross my heart,” John said, and he crossed it, kissing his fingers afterwards and then weaving them back into my still-damp hair.

“Promise me you won’t hate me for telling you the truth.” He nodded at me.

“She’s Angel Morales’s girlfriend,” I said, rolling onto my back and staring at the ceiling. He didn’t say anything. I gave him a sideways glance and I could see that he was staring straight up at the ceiling, too. “I’d told the guards that picked me up that I was looking for my friend, an American named Catherine, who’d gone missing down there six years before.

“One of the guards knew who I was talking about. When they brought me to the prison, he sent for her.” I took a deep breath. “It took about a week I guess before she came. She kept questioning me — why I was looking for her, who’d sent me. I could tell right away that she wasn’t happy — but I thought at first it was because they’d been starving me.” John winced. “But it wasn’t,” I said. “It was because she didn’t want to be found.”

He got up, went over to the dresser, and poured himself what looked like a bourbon. He raised the glass, silently offering it to me.

“No thanks,” I said. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

He drank the bourbon in one gulp and nodded. He came back down and sat on the bed. “She’s not the same girl,” he said.

“She couldn’t be,” I said. “Six years is a long time.” Saying it to him made me have a little more sympathy for her. It was a long time, especially for a young girl trying to survive.

“I saw Catherine a lot, but I only met Angel once,” I said. “And she was very quiet then. I noticed it because it was weird: she wasn’t ever like that when he wasn’t around. She was strong, loud. She barked orders at the guards all the time.

“She talked about him — not specifically, but she used the word ‘we.’ Like, ‘we were out of town for the weekend. We’re having lunch soon.’” I hesitated. I knew John said he wanted to know what she was really like now…but did he mean it? Would he really want to know what I knew about his daughter?

When you love someone like you love your child, and then they become a stranger to you…how can you bear it? What if they became a monster?

“It still amazes me that you managed it. She’s here,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with her, but at least she’s alive.”

“I managed it because I was an idiot. I fell into it,” I said, trying to change the subject a little. “I probably would have gotten kidnapped and raped ten times over if you and Matthew weren’t trailing me in the first place. And trust me, if they found you on the street instead of me, and you were asking questions like I was, they would have just shot you. But because I’m young, and I’m female, they figured they could have some fun with me first.”