Trust in Me (12 page)

Tyler pulled back, preparing to strike.

My dad’s arms came up as he spoke quickly. “She ain’t legal. I know she don’t file shit. An illegal hooker’ll get deported as soon as they know her. You say one word against me, and no one will believe you. And you better say goodbye to your mama while you at it.”

Tyler’s arm was frozen, like the freeze frame in a martial arts movie. His whole body was unmoving. “You fucker.”

“That’s right.” My dad stood taller now, like he’d already won. “A whore in Texas is one thing, but it’s still a real life. How long you think she’s going to last in Mexico?”

I knew what deported meant. I’d seen kids disappear from school, deported. Even knowing that, I wanted Tyler to swear at him again, to say he’d protect me no matter what, and his mom too. I could almost hear the words, drifting on the air like a lost melody.

In slow, stiff movements, Tyler backed up a step and dropped his arms. The words wouldn’t be coming. My eyes burned and blurred. He couldn’t do this to me. Tyler couldn’t start a fight with my dad, bring this out into the open,
acknowledge
what was happening, and then leave me to my fate.

It would be so much worse now. Didn’t he know my dad would punish me for this? The way Tyler wouldn’t meet my eyes told me he knew exactly how I would be punished.

He took another step back, retreating farther away.

“That’s right,” my dad pressed. “An old, dried up hag like her. She’d get passed around the streets. Probably bleed out the first week there.”

Tyler didn’t look angry anymore. He looked anguished. Suddenly he didn’t look like the savior I’d wished for but the helpless teenage boy he was. I turned and ran into the house. I would rather be in there, even if it meant pain, than face Tyler. I’d thought there was nothing more humiliating than what my dad had done to me. This was worse.

I silently endured under the hands of my father that night and for the nights after that. Tyler disappeared. Not deported. Enlisted. I refused to ask for help, not ever again.

Then I ran away from home. I was barely surviving when Carlos found me. He really had been a savior to me, no matter how tarnished his armor was.

As I grew older, I couldn’t hold it against Tyler to protect his own family, his mother, over a stranger. He’d tried to do right by me. He’d tried harder than anyone else. It wasn’t his fault that he failed. The irony, that he’d come to claim a used up whore, wasn’t lost on me.

Sputtering out the remainder of the ocean’s leavings, I dragged myself up. My legs wobbled beneath me as if I were a mermaid who’d emerged from the sea, standing on new legs.

Chapter Twelve

I was too late. That was what I thought when I looked over the ridge to see a battle scene. Not a battle fought
—
a battle lost. The men wearing black clothes, face paint, and holsters had clearly subdued the unruly band of mercenaries Carlos hired.

Was Tyler one of the men with their faces pressed into the dirt, cuffed and pinned to the ground? But hope springs eternal, because I frantically scanned the bulky forms of the cops, as if I could recognize Tyler there. Hoping he were one of the good guys after all, that Leo had been wrong.

But I didn’t see him anywhere.

I scrambled over the peak to get a closer look but ended up sliding down the embankment. The scrabble of rocks and limbs roared through the salty air, but no one glanced over. I looked again, and this time I was sure. Tyler wasn’t here.

Someone else was notoriously absent—or several someones. Where were the women?

The cops seemed to be wondering the same thing. I recognized Zachary talking with some of the men, pointing and gesturing, probably organizing a search. Most of the cops corralled Carlos’s men, but several went off in pairs to search.

The slaves were the prize here. Whether Tyler was good or bad, he would go after them.

I had no hope of finding them before these guys. After all, they knew about this island, they’d have access to maps and would have planned their invasion. I’d had no idea a place like this even existed so close to the city. The harbor was mostly used for yachting and hobbyists, not Lord of the Flies reenactments.

Then I realized I did have some knowledge they didn’t. The boat.

After all, Leo had planned some sort of coup with Tyler. So he would have pulled the boat up at an appropriate location. Maybe that was even the meeting site. I raced back up the slope and down the beach where I’d came from. For once, my body was on my side, allowing me to sprint without sluggishness or pain despite my injuries and blood loss. Actually, numbness was more concerning, indicative of scarier things than pain, but I couldn’t worry about that now.

At first I thought I’d been wrong, that there was nothing but more darkness. Then I heard a low moan that raised goose bumps on my skin. Every animal can recognize the sound of deathly misery in another. It was coming from the woods beside the beach, and I crept inside.

There, in a clearing, was a straggling line of women. And herding them along was Tyler.

I blinked, wanting to deny it. The women were bound and bruised, with their heads bent low. Tyler urged them along mercilessly, his face stone cold. Leo had been right. Tyler was one of the bad guys. It didn’t make sense if he’d come here for me, but as I watched him lead a line of slaves away from the police there could be no doubt.

God, I would have thought I’d have learned by now. Hadn’t I made the same mistake with Carlos, thinking he was there to save me when he only wanted to use me? No.
No.

I tried to formulate a logical play-by-play analysis. How had I missed it? List all the facets of my stupidity, both starting and ending with Tyler. None of it could distract me from the soul-clenching pain of betrayal. It was crippling—almost. Because there was still time to do something about it. I’d set out to free these women, and maybe I still could. Besides the fact that if I did, Tyler would lose. He deserved to lose.

I was no better than he was, using these women for my own purposes. But then again, I didn’t think they’d object if it meant they got to be free.

I let the anger grow and roil inside me like one of those burning planets, a tangible fury. How dare he trick me? Lie to me? All he ever had to do was ask. Hell, I’d spent the last several years serving Carlos, and he was no saint. I would have helped Tyler, too, except he hadn’t trusted me enough. He’d never trusted me at all.

I had nothing at all to help me, nothing but a rusty knife and the wrath of a woman scorned. Scratch that. The wrath of several women. There were maybe ten of them on the path, but they stumbled around. It didn’t look like any of them were considering escape. Maybe because they knew they would die out there, tied up and naked. Or maybe the ones interested in escape had already been killed.

One of the women near the front tripped. Tyler went to her, and I took my chance. I yanked the straggler in the back to the ground. She shrieked briefly, but I clapped my hand over her mouth.

“Hush. I’m saving you.”

Her breath pulsed fast against my fingers, but she didn’t squirm or make a sound. We waited in the dirt, both of us heaving, to see if Tyler would have heard us or noticed her absence. When the sound of crunching leaves and crackling branches faded away, I unsnapped the ball gag in her mouth and used the knife to cut away the ropes.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

“The sorriest excuse for a rescuer, that’s who,” I muttered.

“We can’t leave the other women.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.” I held up the remains of the rope that had only minutes ago been wrapped around her wrists. “Care to return the favor?”

We beelined our way out of the woods onto the beach. It was much faster to move that way, and I guessed Tyler hadn’t taken that route to avoid the visibility. We got back to the boat before the rest of the group, and there we set up shop behind a border of brush at the edge of the woods.

The sound of rustling heralded the arrival of Tyler and the other slaves. On cue, the woman burst out of leaves, holding her arms behind her as if they were still tied. She fell to the ground, writhing in feigned pain.

Tyler released the woman he’d been supporting and leaned her against a tree before rushing over. He was greeted with feminine fury in the form of claws and a swift kick to the groin. He fell to his knees, and I, taken over by a crazed madwoman, fell on him from behind.

Even then, even with the element of surprise and two of us against his one, he threw me off and had the woman pinned down. I was furious, furious that he’d won, again. Furious at all the men who kept beating us just because they were bigger and stronger.

Red swathed my vision, blotting out everything except the picture of the man straddling the woman. The knife was in my hand, and then it was stabbed into his side, where he slumped over.

“Oh God, Oh God,” I muttered uselessly. What had I done? So much for my hopes to save Tyler, to
be
with him. I’d just killed him.

Frantic, mindless, I pulled the knife from him, as if I could hit the undo button on my moment of insanity, but that only made the blood spurt. I pushed the edges of his shirt down. He groaned and writhed, but at least he wasn’t dead yet.

The woman ran back to me, though I hadn’t realized she’d even gone. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I think they’re searching down this way.”

I stared at the bloody knife in my palm for a minute. I didn’t know if Tyler was good or bad. I didn’t know if he would live or die. But those women were innocent and they needed me now. Soon enough I had half the women free of their binds.

The other women stared at Tyler’s limp form in a horrified awe that surpassed my own, as if it hadn’t occurred to them that he was human like them. That’s when I realized how well-trained these women were. Whatever their past was, in this moment, they knew themselves as slaves. They even looked at me that way, like I was some sort of Valkyrie warrior instead of just a used up whore.

“Do any of you know how to drive a boat?” I asked when all of them were loose.

Most of them stared back numbly, their eyes not even registering the question. I wasn’t even sure how many of them spoke English, since they didn’t seem to speak at all. The woman who I’d first freed said, “I think…maybe I saw it done…I could try.” I couldn’t detect an accent, although she seemed to stumble over the words.

“Good,” I said, feigning confidence. “We have a captain.”

We crossed the beach. A nervous energy sizzled through the air. The slaves weren’t used to such freedom. I wasn’t used to anyone trusting me for anything.

The women trudged through the water to reach the rope ladder. I directed them up, warning them about the glass in the cabin. The woman who was going to drive the boat went up last. I looked back at Tyler, a dark lump on the sand, trying to figure out how to get him up on the boat.

The smallest splash was my only warning, as slight as a fish swishing at the surface. But it wasn’t a fish. Not the hand clamped on my mouth, trapping my scream and blocking my air. Not the press of a cold metal barrel on my temple.

“Miss me?” Leo murmured beside my ear. I shuddered from the chill.

He pushed me through the ankle-deep water until we reached the beach. But when there was only a dark spot where Tyler’s body had been. I glanced around wildly and found him leaning against a tree at the edge of the beach. He looked casual, when he shouldn’t even have been able to stand. “Let her go, Leo.”

“Don’t come near us,” Leo spat.

Tyler couldn’t come near us at all, not with a gun pressed to my head. His hands were up, and words were coming out of his mouth, words about deals and staying calm and just take it easy, take a breath.

“You think I’m angry?” Leo asked. “I’m not angry. This is perfect. You and your little whore here did all the work for me, rounding up the slaves. Now all I have to do is ride away with them.”

I flicked a glance over the boat. Several pairs of white eyes blinked at us from the shadows. It wouldn’t be hard to figure out the situation here, even if they couldn’t hear our words. They’d know their lives were at stake.

“Just think about it for a minute,” Tyler said. “Ten slaves, that’s a lot to handle. And there’s just one of you. You need another pair of hands. I just want to help.”

“Fuck that,” Leo spat. “You want a cut of the pie. I’m sick and tired of sharing.”

“No, man. Just want to help, that’s all. I want to see this deal go right.”

“Yeah, yeah, like this last deal worked out so great for me, with you and Carlos all cozy, and me in the hallway, babysitting the whore?”

“No, I’m trying to work something out here. That’s all.”

“Work something out?” Leo was shouting and shaking with what I recognized as fear. “We’ve got a boatload of fucking girls, and the cops are on their way.”

“Calm down. Just calm down. I can talk to them.”

“Fucking dirty cops—can’t trust them! I think you and your cop friends want my girls, then you’ll make me take the fall.”

I didn’t get to hear Tyler’s response to that, because a rumble came from the boat as it came alive. In slow motion it shuddered in the water and turned out to sea with all the slaves.

“What the
fuck
just happened?” Leo asked incredulously.

“They were untied,” I whispered, thinking that they’d signed our death sentence, thinking I was glad they were safe after all. I had done it. I had helped.

But then Leo wasn’t behind me anymore. Tyler had him on the ground where they grappled to be on top. The gun glittered in a wide arc, reflecting gray moonlight at me, and landed a few yards from them. I went to grab it, but Leo and Tyler were in constant motion, flinging sand, and it was impossible to see. They rolled into the shallow water, but the moonlight was too little to judge Tyler’s life by.

I held the gun with shaking hands, trying to get a shot. A hard grip grabbed my forearm, and I froze. Oh God, I hadn’t noticed anyone sneaking up behind me. The cops? They’d arrest us all.