Dirty Angels

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Luisa

I thought the days leading up to Salvador’s negotiations would take forever. The not knowing, the fear, the anxious anticipation—they all had ways of making the time drag.

Instead, the three days passed by me in a blur of sex and ecstasy. It was naked flesh and intimate fluids, languid limbs and earth-shattering orgasms. It was Javier’s eyes in a million different ways: intense during sex and soft after coming, playful while we were in bed and glacial when we were with others. It was the way our bodies melded together that was absolutely captivating, addicting, and strangely freeing.

I started to feel like I knew his body inside and out as he did with mine. I learned what he liked, what he didn’t like, what he craved. I knew the things to say that would make him fuck me breathless, and I knew what to say when I really wanted to piss him off.

And all this time, these days of mindless passion, I never had the urge to run again. Maybe fucking me was one way of keeping me under control. Maybe me fucking him was doing the same. I didn’t know. But as much as I feared my future, I made myself live in the now. The now was all I had, and I made sure to enjoy every last drop.

I knew very well what Stockholm Syndrome was. I knew it was common. I just didn’t think it applied to me. Because the women who fell for their captors that way, it was considered so strange and unusual that it needed a clinical name. It was an issue that could be diagnosed.

The longer I was with Javier, feeling myself stir, my wings stretch and flutter, I felt as if there was something so terribly right about it. When a woman is captured from her home, she is forced to contend with another man, one who wants to bring her harm. When I was captured from my home, I was forced to contend with a man who was better than the one I was taken from. Bad still, of course. Javier was terribly bad. But he wasn’t the worst. And when I caught him staring at me sometimes, I could fool myself into thinking that he could possibly be the best.

But Javier himself still remained an enigma to me, despite the feelings I slowly found myself needing from him. For all his grace and tenderness that he sometimes bestowed upon me, there was this shield, this wall up around him that, for all my beauty and blow jobs and sweet conversation, I could not penetrate. He kept himself distanced from me and it made me frustrated and a little mad. Not necessarily because I needed to know what he was thinking, what he felt for me, but because I hadn’t done that with myself. The both of us knew something horrible was coming up, and he was the only one who had the strength to protect himself from it.

Me, I knew I was done for. But at least I got to live a little in the process.

At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

“What are you doing out here?”

I turned to see Javier strolling toward me, hands casually jammed in his linen pants pockets. I’d only left his side a few hours ago and had come out to sit on the stone bench by the koi pond.

“Feeding the fish,” I told him, lifting a few pieces of bread I nicked from the kitchen.

He stopped behind me and gazed out thoughtfully at the lotus. A breeze caught a few strands of his shaggy hair, the sun highlighting the gold in his eyes. Times like this I could pretend I lived here and that there wasn’t a horrible world outside the beauty and blooms.

He eyed the bread and ran his hand along his strong jaw in amusement. “You do realize that koi fish need special food.”

I shrugged. “I thought they were like your pigs and they’d eat anything.” The other day he took me down a path that passed through a clump of trees at the edge of the yard and we ended up at a farm of sorts. He showed me his pigs. I’d learned how Franco’s body had been disposed of.

He took a seat next to me. “Not quite.”

Somewhere beyond the flowers, the gardener Carlos, a nice little fellow, started up his lawnmower. The sound was so mystifying. It reminded me of the traces of suburbia and normalness I used to see when driving into Cabo San Lucas.

I glanced over at Javier, wondering if he ever found it odd how normal and peaceful his life seemed to be on the outside when it was anything but. I wondered if he orchestrated it that way, to keep all this beauty and elegance around him in order to balance all the bad. I wondered if he had ever come close to making this place even more domestic than it was, if he ever dreamed about having a wife, having children.

“So what happened between you and Ellie?”

He went rigid for a moment before his gaze settled sharply on mine. “Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know. I’m curious.”

His eyes narrowed suspiciously and he shifted in his seat. “Why are you so focused on my past?”

“Because the past makes you who you are. I want to know why you’re this way.”

“This way?” he repeated with a wry smile. “Luisa, I hate to break it to you, but I’ve always been this way.”

“Then what happened? Humor me.”

He clasped his hands together, his watch jangling.

“In a nutshell,” he said with an exasperated sigh, “I was trying to help her get revenge. I was also trying to show her who she really was, or who I still thought she was. In the end, my help did nothing. She’d changed. She played me. She threw me under a bus so she could be with another man, some dumb fuck, and laughed while I was taken away. I’m sure she knew I ended up in prison. I’m sure it only cemented her decision to be good. That was all the thanks I got for trying to help.” He shook his head, anger simmering in his eyes. “People are so fucking ungrateful.”

“So she broke your heart.”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “Don’t mistake broken pride for a broken heart. No man wants to look like a fool. Because of her, I lost almost everything, and it took years for me to get it all back. That isn’t something you can forget overnight.”

Now I understood the shield.

A few moments passed us by. One white and orange fish did several laps around the pond, eyeing me hopefully every time he came near. I thought about what Javier said, how he saw something in Ellie that he wanted to bring out of her. Her truth.

Finally I looked to Javier and shyly asked, “Will you help me?”

His brow furrowed delicately. “Help you what?”

“Help me see who I really am.”

He smirked. “I think you’re already finding that out. One day at a time.”

“But there are no days after tomorrow,” I said, trying to keep my voice as flat as possible.

Tension broke the surface of his face but he reined it in. “I guess you’re right. So what are we to do?”

Something, I screamed in my head. Anything!

I gulped my thoughts down so they didn’t dare escape from my lips. “I don’t know.”

He eyed Carlos who was now mowing behind a flowering bush then looked back at me. “You do,” he said, his heady gaze trailing to my lips. “What we’ve always done.”

He reached for my shoulder and slipped off the strap of my dress with his index finger. His eyes fastened to mine as he gently eased me back so I was lying flat on the bench. In moments, his pants were unzipped, my underwear was pushed to the side, and my leg was straight up against his shoulder. He pushed into me in broad daylight, while the lawnmower whirred in the background and the flowers perfumed the air with their delicate fragrance.

Even though I felt completely exposed to the living, breathing world that whirled around us, I was absolutely captive to the private one between us. When I came, my nails raking down his back and into the loose linen threads of his shirt, I was holding on to more than just him; I was holding on to the day, the moment, the second.

The time where I was queen.

And where I was free.