Chris shot Valeria a look, but for what, she didn’t know. So, she shrugged as a non-response. He didn’t seem to mind.
Using the keys he’d brought along, Jorge unlocked the metal doors at the end of the corridor. It took an effort for him to pull the doors open to showcase what rested behind. Once he did, Jorge stepped back with a smile and a nod at the dank-smelling, dark tunnel the metal doors kept hidden.
Chris made a noise under his breath. “How is it ventilated?”
“A couple of different ways.” Jorge shrugged. “A few pipes here and there that come out of the ground, and when someone is working in the tunnels, we force air through them.”
“And this is the closest one to the American border?”
“We’re still quite a ways away, but sí.” Jorge gestured at the dark hole, asking, “Care to inspect?”
“Not particularly.”
That earned a chuckle out of Jorge.
“Don’t blame you, amigo. I won’t go inside them, either.”
“I take it this isn’t where I will sleep for the weekend,” Chris said, his attempt at a joke flying way over Jorge’s head when the man gave him a pensive look at the other end of the hall. “I’d like to relax. It was a long drive.”
Jorge nodded. “One of my men will show you which rooms you can use for the weekend. Find one and ask.”
“Thank you.”
Chris gave Valeria a quick smile, but didn’t linger. If Jorge witnessed the exchange between the two, he didn’t say. The receding footsteps echoed up the stairwell until a door opened and clicked shut. By the time she turned around to wait for Jorge to lock the doors back up, he was already down the hall and coming her way.
The doors at the end?
Closed.
That was how distracted Valeria became whenever Chris was in the picture. She knew, without a doubt, that wasn’t a good thing for either of them. It would likely get them both in a world of trouble.
It scared her to death.
Jorge, though?
He terrified her more.
“I would like to call Maria,” she told him, “once we’re settled in.”
Her husband chuckled, his arm coming to snake around her waist. To someone else, that hold might seem affectionate, but to her ... it felt like another kind of prison. One she would never escape.
“No,” he said.
“But—”
“Maria is fine where she is for the weekend, Val.”
“I want to tell her goodnight, and to be a good girl while we’re away.”
When she couldn’t get what she wanted from being honest, then she had to try another route. What she really wanted to do was make sure her daughter was being treated fairly by that bitch he forced her to leave Maria with.
“Come on,” Jorge said, his arm tugging her up the stairs with him, “let’s get settled in, and have something made to eat. I am starved.”
“And then I can call Maria?”
“No.”
“Jorge—”
In the stairwell, Valeria found herself slammed into the wall. Her spine ached from the force of her husband shoving her before he was quick to crowd her with his presence. She stared into his cold, dark eyes as his lips pulled down into a scowl that would rival the devil’s. It frightened her, sure, but she refused to show it.
“You’re too close to her, I think.”
Valeria sucked in a sharp breath. “She’s my child. I raised her.”
“Yes, without me. Because what did you do, hmm?”
She refused to entertain that conversation. It always ended the same way, and that wasn’t a game she wanted to play with this man today. One person lost every single time—her. That loss came in the form of a sore body, and bruises she needed to be creative to hide. She wasn’t in the mood for it.
Her silence was not what he wanted though.
Jorge leaned in close, baring his teeth as he spoke in a hissed tone. “You spend far too much time filling that girl’s head full of shit about me, Valeria.”
“I do not.”
On that, she wouldn’t budge.
Valeria never told Maria anything bad about her father. Why would she when she didn’t need to? Jorge poisoned his daughter against him all on his own, and with little to no effort on her part. If he couldn’t see that, then how was that her problem?
“I think it would do her—and you—good to spend time apart.”
“What does that mean?”
Jorge smiled. “Behave this weekend, Val, or she won’t be there when you get home. The tutoring works well enough for her, doesn’t it? I can’t say how long that’ll last, and there are quite a few private schools she can attend instead. Ones that will keep her away for weeks at a time. Do you hear me?”
Valeria swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. “I hear you.”
“Make sure.”
• • •
The crack of a gunshot slicing through the air had Valeria jerking on the spot. She glanced upward in just enough time to see a skeet fly into the air by a mechanical arm before it exploded into shards of ruined ceramic. This little game of Jorge’s and his men was now getting tiring, but she knew better than to go out there and tell him to knock it off.
Not that it mattered.
The sky was darkening as Valeria could see from her position on the bench seat at the large bay window in the sitting room. Soon, they would drink—let’s be honest, they already had—and that would take importance over playing stupid shooting games with their rifles.
“You seem annoyed.”
Valeria gave a look over her shoulder, and a small smile when her sister-in-law joined her at the window. “Decided to come along, did you?”
Abril waved a dainty hand. “Someone needs to keep you company, no?”
“Oh, was that it?”
“I had nothing better to do back at the ranch.”
“Did you see Maria with—”
Abril’s smile grew cold in an instant. “Carla knows what will happen to her should she step out of line with my niece.”
Of course.
No question, Abril was just like her brothers. They didn’t realize it, which was their mistake, Valeria supposed.
The raucous laughter from outside drew their attention to the window again. Valeria didn’t wonder for long what had caused the men’s uproar when she found her husband pawing at a woman while he stuck his tongue down her throat.
Valeria blinked.
The woman, wearing a gray dress with white buttons down the front, was a servant at the house. She couldn’t be any older than twenty, if that, but she didn’t seem to have a problem with the way Jorge groped her in front of a crowd of men while he licked the goddamn taste right out of her mouth.
She made a noise in the back of her throat, unsure of how she felt about the entire scene happening outside. Annoyed, maybe, but only because if the woman was bothered by the attention, she was far better at hiding it than Valeria.
“Better her than you tonight,” Abril murmured beside her.
“That’s cold, don’t you think?”
Abril sighed. “I have learned that we all have to sacrifice to survive in this world, Val. And that means sometimes, thinking about yourself and what is best for you, even if that means someone else must hurt for it. You have too caring of a heart—you worry too much about people who wouldn’t give a damn about you, and that’s why you’re an easy target for him, and whoever else wants to break your back on the way to the top.”