I could see she was taking aim at a spot right beside my head, perhaps to scare me, perhaps to kill me. “Easy!” I yelled at her quickly. “If you let that gun off, everyone in the house will be up here and I won’t be able to protect you from them.”

A venomous expression came across her dark eyes. “You didn’t protect me before.”

“And I have been paying dearly for it,” I told her sincerely, taking one more step so I was almost at the foot of the bed. “Luisa, please, put the gun down and let me get back to fucking you.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I need to go. I need to make sure my parents are safe and then I’m going to disappear.”

“How are you going to do that?”

Her lips pinched together for a moment. “I have a friend, Camila, she’s in Cabo. I could call her and—”

“No,” I stated, imploring her with my eyes. “You can’t. You won’t get to her in time, and she won’t get to them in time.”

“Please just let me go,” she said. Her tone was weaker now, as was the look in her eyes. They seemed nearly lost and hopeless.

There was a peculiar hollow feeling in my chest.

“I can’t do that,” I told her gently. “You know I can’t. I must keep you here until I hear from Salvador. If I let you go, it would ruin everything for me.” I gave her a pacifying smile. “Besides, don’t you know I’ve grown kind of fond of you?”

She swallowed. “You just want to use my body,” she said, her voice dropping slightly as well as the barrel of her gun.

“And I’ve grown very fond of doing so.”

As soon as I said that, I moved quickly. I lunged forward, hitting the gun out of her hands and it went clattering to the floor, then I tackled her into the bed, pinning her arms above her. Her eyes were filled with a mix of anger and desperation as she writhed under me.

I held her arms tighter, my face bearing down on hers. “I can’t blame you for trying, Luisa. And I was the fucking fool who was thinking so hard with his dick that I didn’t realize I left you alone when I shouldn’t have.” I lowered my head so my lips lightly grazed hers. “But you know what,” I said huskily, “I don’t regret any of it. Because that was the hottest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. And you, my darling, you’re really starting to be a queen.”

I bit her lip and tugged on it for a moment. “Now, if your adrenaline is pumping like mine is and you’re done with gunplay for the day, I say I flip you over and fuck your brains out.”

“You can be so heartless,” she sneered against my lips, but she didn’t turn her face from me.

I sucked her lower lip into my mouth and felt her body respond underneath me. “My dear, you don’t need a heart to fuck. Just a big dick.” I thrust my erection against her stomach for emphasis and grinned.

Her eyes widened appreciatively.

She was a goner.

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.”