Defending Zara (Mountain Mercenaries #6)(48)

Zara Layne. Jesus. It was hard to believe she was alive. Everyone had assumed she’d been killed years ago, though her body had never been found.

She’d been kind of a mousy little kid. Not likely to take the lead in anything, content to hang back and follow. She wasn’t pretty, but wasn’t hideous either. She blended into the background.

Back then, her parents had plenty of money, but you couldn’t tell to look at them. Most of the time they’d acted like it wasn’t a big deal, and it probably wasn’t—for them. When Zara had wanted a new toy, she’d gotten it. When she’d wanted a new dress, her parents had bought it for her.

Not everyone had been so lucky.

The person watched the news footage of Zara getting into a big fancy SUV, then talking head after talking head speculating on the Layne fortune . . . and couldn’t help getting more annoyed by the second. More upset about how unfair life was.

Zara Layne wasn’t the only one who’d had a hard life, but she was the one who’d ended up with a shit ton of money.

And why? She’d done nothing to deserve it. Any idiot could get lost in a foreign country. Yeah, her parents had been killed . . . big fucking deal. Everyone in the world had shit happen to them. Why was she so damn special?

She wasn’t. But . . .

Maybe there was a way to get access to some of that money.

Somehow?

It would take a little bit of time, some patience. And hopefully the men surrounding Zara on the news footage wouldn’t be an issue . . .

But it didn’t matter. Manipulating people—or outright scaring them—to do what you wanted them to do really wasn’t all that hard.

Smiling, the person looked around the shitty apartment and thought about how great it would be to leave it behind. Not having to worry if the hot-water heater would work in the morning would be heaven.

Or wonder if a damn turf war would break out in the parking lot at any second.

Mexico . . . that sounded like the perfect place to live. Sun and fun and cheap drugs . . .

It would take some time to set up a plan, and there was no guarantee it would work, but with a little ingenuity and some patience, Zara Layne’s money—at least some of it—could be used for something better than what she probably had planned for it.





Chapter Sixteen

Zara woke up on the floor of the room she’d been staying in at Meat’s house and stared up at the ceiling. She still couldn’t get comfortable sleeping on a mattress. It was nice, however, to have a clean carpet under her instead of the hard-packed dirt she was used to.

It was so quiet it was eerie. Life in the barrio had never been silent. There were always people talking, laughing, shouting; trucks driving by; horns honking; and in the near distance, the frequent sound of gunfire.

But here at Meat’s house, it was so quiet Zara sometimes felt as if she were in another world altogether. The crickets would come out in the evening, and Meat complained about how loud they were, but to Zara, they were fascinating. She’d forgotten the sound. She’d forgotten a lot of things. Things most people took for granted. The sound of a toilet flushing. Of clean water coming out of a tap. The wind rustling in the trees. Birds singing.

She quickly got up and headed for the guest bathroom in the hallway. The master bedroom door was open, and she knew Meat would already be out in his workshop. She knew he wasn’t up to doing much yet, not with his ribs still healing, but he was being very secretive about what he was doing out there, and Zara didn’t feel like she knew him well enough to press him on the issue.

He was also a morning person, which suited her just fine. Zara had never had the opportunity to lazily sleep in. First because she was so scared and hyperaware of everything around her, then because the best chance for her to get food was in the mornings, before everyone was up and about. Sometimes she’d been lucky and gotten a place in line at a shelter; other times she’d been able to dig the stale and half-eaten bread out of the trash cans behind several of the restaurants a few miles from the barrios.

She still took extremely long showers, but Meat never complained. He even told her to take her time, that he had a huge hot-water heater that would accommodate her, and if it didn’t, he’d buy one that would. Zara tried not to feel guilty, and she’d never take being clean for granted again. After more than a decade of having dirt under her nails, having her own body odor disgust her, she was going to take advantage of showering when and where she could.

Zara still didn’t like looking in the mirror, but she forced herself to examine her body every morning. It seemed as if she was gaining a little bit of weight, especially with Meat taking great delight in teaching her how to make as many different meals as possible, but her hair still made her cringe. She’d hacked it off with whatever she could find for so long that it was a complete disaster.

Trying not to worry too much about it, Zara took her time in the shower, then got dressed in the clothes that Chloe had brought over. She was still too nervous to properly meet any of the men’s girlfriends and wives, so instead of being gracious and welcoming, Zara had taken the clothes, thanked her, and then gone upstairs to her room and hidden until Chloe had left.

She couldn’t really explain why she was reluctant to get to know any of them. They’d been nothing but nice, shopping for clothes for her, offering to hang out with her when Meat and the rest of the men got together for meetings having to do with the Mountain Mercenaries.