Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (30 page)

But that was death. You were rarely ready for it.

He was there
when she awoke, sitting heavily in a chair across the room, gazing out the window, blade on the table next to him. Had he come to kill her in her sleep?

She didn’t have to make a sound; he’d know she was awake. Their eyes met and everything was there between them, terrifyingly clear.

The blade. The betrayal.

The fucking.

It had been the most powerful experience of her life, as if he’d broken through her scars and fucked her clear to her core. She’d wanted to give up everything to him—literally everything—and for a moment she’d felt free.

Finally he spoke. “Eventually, they will come for you, won’t they?” Whether he killed her or not, he meant.

With a lurch in her chest, she nodded. His life here was over, no matter what happened with the plants. They would come for her. Could Dax have sent somebody already?

“How long?”

It was Thursday night. She shook her head. Dax had said Saturday. Could she trust it?

“A day? Less?”

She shrugged.

He gazed out the window, lost in misery. Losing his home. The plants were dying—and he blamed her. Yes, she’d lied. She had been a CIA botanist. But the idea she’d hurt the plants—it killed her that he could think it.

She mumbled, asking him to remove the gag. She wanted to tell him to check her experiments; it was possible the plants had reacted to one of the compounds she and Paolo had tried. She wanted to help—he needed to see that.

He ignored her.

She grunted again, and he shook his head. She growled and glared in frustration.

His whisper, when it came out, was hoarse. “I felt like a family.”

Her heart stuttered. She’d felt it, too. That brief, happy window. She’d felt happy.

“I felt like a family,” he said again. “I thought, this is what a family is, being together. Feeling happy.” He looked out the window. “I’ll tell Paolo that I sent you away. I don’t wish him to think that you left of your own accord. Not for you, but for him. He loves you, I think. It will be better.”

From behind the gag she mumbled that Paolo loved him, too, but it came out hopelessly garbled. The gag bit into the sides of her mouth with the just-right amount of pressure. He was an overachieving killer in every way.

“I’ll play with him more. Try to be lighter. I know to do that now.” He paused, and then dropped his voice to a gruff whisper. “But when I see the hope in his eyes…I do not like it. It makes him vulnerable, that hope. Perhaps it is unfair. The boy is not me.” He stared at the window. “The small puzzle box in the cabinet, it was a gift from my father. One of the few times my father was kind. It filled me with hope.”

Her heart broke as she imagined him as a child, reaching out, full of need and hope, receiving only loathing in return.

He leaned against the wall in front of her. “I didn’t kill his mother—she was dead, a young girl, a child soldier, when I came upon him. I was in my full gear, sent to attack a battalion that had been preying upon the countryside. Somebody had been there first. Rival guerrillas. You know how the war was at its height. The chaos. The bodies, the fires. Paolo was sitting by his dead mother’s side, no more than five, crying. He had gotten hold of her revolver. It was too heavy for him. I went to him and took it from him. His cries grew louder, frightened by the mask, I thought, until I realized he was looking at something behind me. Soldiers coming, presumably the ones who’d killed his mother and her troop. They were not happy to see it was me, of course.”

Kabakas. She nodded.

“Up until then, I had always killed for money. Or an idea. That day I killed for Paolo.” He gazed down at his hands, as though they surprised him still. “I was so full of rage. I wanted to kill every last person who had made him cry. I cut them all down, every one of them. When I turned back to him, he was stretching his arms up to me. I had to keep him. I had no choice. I should have brought him to an agency, but…”

She snorted her dissent. He was being an idiot, and if she had the gag off she’d tell him so. Paolo had a good home with Hugo.

“You are suggesting, perhaps, that he is better off with me? You understand what my enemies will do to him, do you not? Can you imagine?”

She had nothing to say. He was right, of course.

“I should have let him go. Especially after my enemies killed my mother.” He went to the window and opened the curtains. “My enemies worked it out that I owned that little pink house in the Bumcara suburb. Marked money, perhaps, traced in some way, I don’t know. I learned of the danger, but not in time. They set her home on fire.” He paused. She knew what was coming. “I could not save her.”

One simple, pain-laced sentence. Those were the burns.

He turned to her. “What Paolo has never understood was that it could have been me who killed his mother. It’s not as if I avoided child soldiers out there. Nobody could.” He looked back out the window. “I kept him all the same. I couldn’t let him go.”

In movies, villains often revealed their plans to the person they were about to kill. Sometimes they even forced them to watch their triumphant moment. The final explosion, or whatever. A lot of people considered the convention to be ridiculous.

It wasn’t ridiculous.

When afforded the chance to be known by another, if only for a short time, most couldn’t pass it up. The yearning to be known was quintessentially human, and spies, fugitives, and killers rarely got the chance. The person you were about to kill made the ultimate confessional.

She should want him to stop, but part of her needed him to keep going. Because he was Kabakas. She didn’t know which of them needed the fullness of his confession more—him, to be known, or her, to know him. All these years she’d been so full of questions: Where had he come from? Why hadn’t he stepped up to lead when he was at the height of his powers? Why had he turned dark? But Kabakas was giving her something more, something deeper: the love and loss inside him. The true things he wrestled with. The things that drove him.

She’d wanted to know Kabakas. Now she would.

“The way he reached up to me,” Hugo continued, “it was as if he chose me.” He was silent for some time, seeming content to dwell with her. “Hope.” He practically spat out the word. Her pulse pounded when his eyes met hers. “How foolish not to note the fact that of all the shiny things in the cabinet, you selected the Moro rites stick to hold and examine. Or how foolish of you. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” He drew near to her, stood over her. “You needed to take it, didn’t you? You had to touch it. It belongs to that class of things…the class of things that call out. A hunter feels it.”

His eyes crackled that root-beer brown, jewels set deep set against the harsh angles of his face and the midnight darkness of his hair.

“It was as if we were a family,” he whispered again. “It wasn’t real, I know that now, but it felt real.”

She shook her head. It was all she could do.

He searched her face, as though he couldn’t believe her cruelty. “Even the devil doesn’t give people heaven before sending them to hell.”

T
he savinca had
once calmed him, but when he walked the rows in the early morning dew, he felt only rage, and a pain that reached deeper than the pain of his burns. She’d said she didn’t poison them, but how could he believe her? She was a former CIA botanist. The blight had begun with her arrival. She’d been seen creeping around on the mountainside. Of course she’d try to deflect blame to Ruiz.

He should kill her and get Paolo out. The Association was worse than the CIA. Smaller, smarter, and more dangerous because they answered to no one. Run by a billionaire genius and his shadowy partner.

He came to a savinca bush whose leaves had begun to drop. He fell to his knees before it, scrabbling the soil away to expose the white-coated roots. In a rage he grabbed the base and tore it from the ground, throwing it down the mountainside, wild with pain.

She’d done this.

Still, he couldn’t get into the mood to kill her. He’d fucked her like an animal, taken her when she was utterly in his power. He wasn’t so unlike his biological father after all.

He’d taken her like an animal and enjoyed it. It was how he liked to fuck.

He walked the rows. He’d have to pull Paolo out of the only real home he’d known. They could no longer farm, not as hunted men. He’d been so careful. And even if Ruiz reversed the blight, even if the fields could be rescued, without him here, the village was vulnerable to El Gorrion.

Unless he killed him. Paolo would be safe with Julian for the time being. He could go out killing. He could kill Zelda and then kill El Gorrion. Kill everybody. It was what he did.

As he made his way down the side of the field, he heard a Jeep in the distance. Who would be coming up the mountain so early?

He sprinted around the side of the house and out of the drive just as Julian pulled up. Paolo got out, looking small, so vulnerable.

Hugo held out a hand. “Come here.” Paolo went to him and he settled his arms around the boy’s fragile shoulders. Julian watched him grimly.

“I need you to stay with Julian another night,” he said.

“Is everything under control?” Julian asked, coming up behind him.

“Yes,” Hugo said.

Julian nodded, unable to meet his eyes. Hugo couldn’t imagine what was in his mind.

“I promised Liza I’d work on our experiment,” Paolo said. “I can’t miss a day.”

Julian looked apologetic behind him. “He insisted. He would’ve run up himself. I didn’t want him to…”

“You were right to bring him.” Hugo knelt in front of him. “She does not mind if you take a break from your studies.”

“You can’t take a break from the experiment. If I don’t chart the results correctly, it means we are not listening to the savinca, and we could miss a clue for how to save them.”

He exchanged glances with Julian, his heart so filled with rage he could not speak.

“Plants cannot talk,” Julian said.

“Liza says they will. She says they can tell us how to save them if we ask the right questions and listen to the answer.”

So cruel to give the boy such hope! It was then, finally, that he felt he could kill her. Hugo spoke through gritted teeth. “Liza cannot talk to the plants, and she cannot save them.”

“At least she’s trying to!” Paolo screamed. “Don’t you even want to try?”

He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, but he shook it off. “I promised Liza! Where is she?”

Hugo moved to prevent him from going in the front door. “Busy. You’ll go back with Julian.”

“I have to fill in my chart!” Paolo took off running, then, around the house, circling down toward the terraces that way.

Julian cast an alarmed look at him.

“I’ll get him.” Hugo set off in a jog after Paolo; a fast little runner, that kid. He reached the terraced rows and heard something from the direction of the shed. He took off that way. The shed door was open, but Paolo wasn’t inside. He finally found him at the far edge of the bushes he tended, off behind the shed. He and Liza had set up colorful strings and tags marked a row of plants, all dying…except for one. The one circled with yellow string looked nearly normal.

Nearly healthy. The only one on all of the mountainside.

Hugo went to the boy, who was scribbling in a notebook—filling in a chart.

Paolo turned and beamed up at Hugo. “Nines and tens,” he said. “This one whispers a clue for how to save them.”

“What did you do?”

“She made a solution from the Luquesolama stone.” He put aside the notebook and knelt, scrabbling at the dirt, pulling it away from the roots.

Solution
. Such a scientific word, but of course, Zelda was a scientist. He should have noticed.

“Look, Hugo!”

Hugo knelt down next to Paolo. The waxy coating around the root had cracked; in places it was gone. You could see the flecks of it in the dirt. The coating, falling off. “I have to tell her—we have to show her.”

“How did you get it to crack?” Hugo asked.