The Vargas Cartel Trilogy (Vargas Cartel #1-3)(31)

“No,” Evan shouted through the phone. “Don’t you dare give up on me or us, not even for a second. You have to believe you’ll make it out of there.”

“I can’t promise anything. I don’t think he’ll ever let me go home again. I think he’s playing me, breaking me until I’m nothing.”

“No, Hattie, don’t give up. You’re strong. I’m strong. We’ll get through this. I just need you to promise me one thing.”

“What?” I whispered, wiping the waterfall of tears from my face with the back of my knuckles.

“That when I find you, you’ll give me a chance to make things right between us, and we’ll be together again. It’ll be just like old times. You’ll see.”

My mind screamed at me to reject him. How could I promise him a second chance when my fate dangled from a fraying rope? When my body wanted Ryker? But that’s exactly what I did. “Okay. If I ever find my way back, I’ll try to give you that.” I sniffed, lifting my head from the steering wheel, and that’s when I saw him. Ryker stood next to the open driver’s window with his arms folded across his chest.

Clumsy from fear, the phone slid out of my hand, and I screamed as the driver’s side door flung open.

“Get out, now.” It wasn’t his appearance that made him so intimidating. It was the way he carried himself…with the grace of a jaguar. The ancient Mayans, who inhabited this area long before the Europeans arrived, believed their kings and nobles were descended from a jaguar. And when I looked at Ryker, I believed it. He had velvet black hair, flinty predator eyes—watchful yet indifferent—and the sleek grace replicating the legends of the mythical jaguar.

“Screw you,” I hissed through my locked teeth. I shook my head defiantly, but my strength withered under the intensity of his stony, gray gaze. Evan’s voice echoed through the static-filled phone cradled between my legs, but the frenzied pounding of my heart drowned out his words.

Ryker picked up the phone and smashed it against the side of the car, then tossed it back into my lap. Before I could complain, he coiled his hand around my arm, yanking me out of the car with ease. My oversized t-shirt slipped from my shoulder, leaving the top of my breast exposed as he pulled me through the open car door. “Fucking hell,” he said, shoving my t-shirt back up my shoulder. “Tell me who you were talking to.”

“No one.” I refused to make eye contact with him. Eye contact was bad. His eyes had a way of sucking all my hard fought defiance from my tattered soul.

“Look at me.” He grabbed my chin and forced me to look at him. The fine hair on my nape stood on end. “Tell me,” he said with a honeyed menace that chilled me to the bone.

I closed my eyes. The silence stretched, heavy and judgmental, as he waited for me to obey. Slowly, like a gathering storm, tremors erupted in my legs, moving to my torso and then my arms. Within sixty seconds, my entire body shook with rage, fear, and dread. I fisted my hands in my shirt to regain control over my body, but it didn’t help. My sanity dangled from a gossamer thread, and my chest heaved in hysterical gasps.

Ryker tightened his grip on my arm until his fingernails bit into the bruises and scratches covering my skin. “Hattie, I can’t protect you unless I know everything.”

I pried my eyes open, and my lips contorted with disgust. “Protect me? You’re not protecting me. Every time you touch me, you rip me into a thousand pieces that I can never put back together. I’m broken. You broke me.” Panic-stricken sobs tumbled from my mouth. My ears rang with the insanity, pulsing like poison through my veins.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then, why don’t you share what you think you know? Help me to understand,” I begged incoherently as I pounded my fists repeatedly against his unyielding chest.

He captured my hands and returned them to my sides. “The less you know, the better,” he said as he stroked his thumbs back and forth over the inside of my wrists.

“I won’t tell anyone. I promise. If I understand what’s going on, I won’t try to run again. I’ll do whatever you ask. Trust me.”

“Hattie.” His powerful body crowded me, maneuvering me backward until my tailbone pressed into the car. “Don’t try to play me. You won’t win.” He shook his head. “Your life would be so much easier if you stopped fighting me. Haven’t you learned anything yet?” he added tenderly.

Tenderness from him was dangerous. I’d seen it over and over. Any time he’d shown me mercy, I tumbled into a deeper, darker hole. Suffocating under his gaze, I wrenched my hand between our bodies and drew several sticky, damp breaths into my heaving lungs. Each molecule of air glued the pieces of my fragmented willpower back together. “Apparently not,” I finally said when the ringing in my ears muted.

“Nothing is the way it seems. There are layers upon layers of things going on here. This isn’t just about you. Remember that, and you’ll be fine.” The words fell from his mouth—low, malicious, and tainted with muddy secrets.

Already teetering on the knife-edge of control, his words shoved me over the cliff and into a never-ending abyss. Fury raged through me…hot, wild, and unhinged. A red fog tainted my vision. I wanted to kill Ryker, piece-by-piece, limb-by-limb, until he embodied the physical manifestation of my ragged mental state. I didn’t care if I ever breathed another breath as long as I experienced the satisfaction of wounding him.