a criminal genius probably. He ran a huge empire that reached to the highest levels in the government from this remote rancho. Army comandantes came to visit him on a regular basis. They strutted around his mansion and barns and he let them take whatever they wanted. Always, they left laughing with thick wads of pesos stuffed in the bulging pockets of their uniforms. Politicians from Mexico City came, as well. When they drove away in the stolen trucks he’d given them, he cursed them for being so greedy. Then he bragged to her, usually in front of an audience, that he had protection at the highest levels in Mexico.
Tavio was responsible. He took international phone calls on his various phones. He worked hard, sometimes day and night, as he had for the last three days and nights, taking pills and chain-smoking those crack-laced cigarettes she hated because they made him edgier and less predictable. He was a highly sexual man, and she was increasingly unnerved by the way his eyes followed her.
He bought her beautiful clothes, including French lingerie, but she refused to wear them. She never smiled at him, either, for fear of charming him.
He wore a gold-plated semiautomatic in a shoulder holster and had a habit of shooting at targets that took his fancy.
Despite his kindnesses and obsession to have her, Mia never forgot that he was a vicious, notorious drug lord, who claimed to be the most powerful man in all of northern Mexico. He said he was linked with another powerful cartel headed by Juan Garza in Colombia, and she believed him.
Terrible things happened here. Hostages were brought here, some of them girlfriends of Tavio’s men, girls whom the men said had cheated on them. Sometimes she heard screams and then gunshots. She had watched men carrying heavy sacks out into the desert and feared the worst. Tavio had touched her red hair once and told her she would be smart to love him because there were many graves in his desert.
“Women you have loved before?” she had whispered.
He had laughed with such conceit she’d known there had been countless women before her. She’d sensed how his awesome power had corrupted him.
“Are you threatening me?” she’d asked.
“No, my love. But I am not a patient man.” His soft voice had been deadly.
“You are married to Estela.”
“This is different—you and me. For you—I send my wife away. This make Chito, her brother, very mad, and that is a dangerous thing to do. I am not like other men. I bore easily. I live for danger. Still, I cannot divorce my wife, the mother of my sons. Not even for you. I am Mexican. Catholic.”
Mia had been amazed that he, a notorious drug lord and addict, saw himself as a religious person. Estela had had such jealous fits of rage when he’d brought Mia home, throwing pots and pans at Tavio, that Tavio, to preserve the peace, had personally driven her and their two sons in an armed convoy of jeeps to another walled and heavily guarded mansion he owned in Piedras Negras.
If only Shanghai could ever have been half so fascinated by her as Tavio, none of this would ever have happened. When she’d gotten pregnant and had tried to tell him, he would have listened and believed her. She wouldn’t have thought she had to marry Cole. She wouldn’t have been in that plane crash.
Suddenly her eyes stung. What was wrong with her that the men she’d wanted, first her father and then Shanghai, hadn’t loved her, and a criminal like Tavio did?
The wind was picking up. Rocks hit the fuselage like bullets now. Gusts made the plane shudder. Where was Marco?
Wrapping her arms around herself and bending over, Mia swallowed.
She had to get out of here!
Suddenly she heard shouts outside. The cockpit door was slammed open. Then Chito yelled, “Angelita, come out! We know you’re in there.”
Tavio didn’t know her real name because she’d been afraid to tell him. When she’d pretended she suffered from amnesia, he’d nicknamed her Angelita.
“Tavio, he send me. The peasant, Ramiro, he tell him hours ago where you are. Tavio pay Ramiro. Then he break many things with his gun. He say to surround the plane until you get so hot you come out. But you don’t come out, and he’s scared you’re dead. And we have to fly.”
When she didn’t answer, Chito yelled at his men to unload the plane and drag her out. It took them less than ten minutes to unload enough of the heavy bales to reach her. They shouted to Chito when they found her, and he then climbed inside. As always he had a gun in his belt and a knife, which she’d seen him throw with deadly accuracy, in his cowboy boot.
With a low growl, he crawled toward her, grabbed her wrist and yanked her from the plane. She fell to the ground so hard, she lay there stunned for a minute.
“Get the hell out of here,” he told his men, who at his gruff tone, sprinted toward the high adobe walls of Tavio’s desert fortress.
When she would have run from Chito, he grabbed her hand and tugged her unwillingly behind him until they reached the compound. She thought he would take her to Tavio’s mansion in the middle of the compound. Instead he headed for the forbidden buildings that lined the north wall. Opening a door of one of the low dwellings, he threw her across the threshold. The tiny room was dark and dank and reeked of urine and feces and vomit.
He screwed a low wattage bulb into a socket. In its dim light she saw chairs, ropes, a cot, slop buckets, whips, handcuffs and electric cattle prods.
When she gasped, he grinned.
Did he intend to torture her, rape her? Had Tavio given her to Chito? With a cry, she turned to run.
Laughing, Chito slammed the door and barred her way.
“You run from Tavio,” Chito said, his thin smile chilling her, as he fingered the irregularly shaped bone fragments strung on a gold chain that Delia said came from Pablito’s skeleton, a fellow drug dealer Chito had shot for double-dealing and dragged behind his jeep in the desert for hours while he drank tequila. “Maybe you want me instead?” He leered at her.
“Go to hell!”
He laughed, but his black eyes were as cold as ice chips as he leaned down and placed a wedge of wood beneath the door. “Who are you, bitch? Who hid you in that airplane?”
When he lunged for her, she kicked him in the shin and then kneed him in the crotch.
He doubled over, grunting in pain. He tugged the knife loose from his boot. “Now Tavio will realize how dangerous you are.”
Adrenaline pumped through her as she raced for the door. He picked up a pair of handcuffs, shook them so they clinked and laughed at her when she pulled at the door and it didn’t budge.
“He has killed many for less, gringa. But you very sexy. I see why Tavio like you. If you are nice to me, maybe I put in a good word for you, so he don’t kill you. Now—who helped you?”
She hesitated and watched him warily, her gaze flicking to the white chunks of bone at his throat. He was small, only an inch taller than she was, but he was strong and muscular. He could kill her in an instant if he wanted to.
He had black hair and dark skin and a sullen mouth. He had a hair-trigger temper and suffered from paranoia. He didn’t get along easily with anybody. Not even Tavio.
