“Let’s go! We don’t have time to fuck around in here!”
One of the two guards that had been waiting out by the stable doors came around the corner just as Valeria turned to tell her sister-in-law to hurry. She saw the way Abril bent down, her fingers sliding into the leg of her riding boot—she had already been dressed to ride, although Valeria only noticed it now—before standing straight with a knife in her hands.
That blade swung around and embedded deep into the neck of the guard. Valeria sucked in a sharp breath, her arm swinging around to cover Maria’s eyes as the man dropped to the ground, and Abril yanked the blade out.
Blood sprayed.
The man choked.
Abril looked her way. “Go.”
“Not without you,” she said just as fast.
“What the fuck was that back there?”
Abril’s attention flew around the corner of the stable, the knife in her hand flipping around so she had a good grasp on the hilt. “Valeria, go.”
“But—”
They already had the two horses ready for her, and Abril to ride. Standing in the stable’s middle floor, the horses tacked up, and edgy because of the noise of gunfire and shouting men outside the building, but ready to go.
Ready to run.
Abril reached out and slapped the thigh of Valeria’s horse with a loud crack. “Heeyah!”
She had time to grab hold of her daughter, and the reins before the horse reared back from the slap, and jerked forward. They came out of the stable doors in a full gallop, the man coming back toward them barely got out of the way.
Valeria looked back in just enough time to see Abril kill that man, too. Which meant no guards would follow them off the ranch, she realized. It was just them, and the horses, now. Abril was quick to jump on the horse waiting for her, wasting no time coming out of the stables at full speed.
Her horse was fast, but skittish from the noise. She managed well enough to get the animal steered toward the fields behind the house that would take them further away from the chaos behind them. It took Abril no time at all to catch up with Valeria, her horse coming alongside hers as she glanced over.
“We’re going to the cliffs,” Abril said, her voice faint, the words almost disappearing in the wind. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Why is that where we have to go ... or how do you kn—”
Abril smiled. “Who do you think helped to start this war, Val?”
“But why?”
She was so grateful.
So much.
Was this her freedom?
It seemed like it.
Tasted like it.
“Why?” Valeria asked again.
Abril would have sacrificed so much for what she did here tonight. Most certainly.
“I needed to be free, too,” Abril said. “Just differently than you.”
What could she say to that?
“Mamá,” Maria whispered before the girl peered up at her mother. “I smell fire.”
She did, too.
Whispering in the wind.
What was burning?
Her arm tightened around Maria’s waist, and her heels pressed hard into the horse’s hind end. “Keep looking forward, niña.”
Because they weren’t ever going back.
Not now.
18.
Someone slammed a Kevlar vest into Chris’s chest, and he barely caught the item before it fell to the ground. His mouth opened to thank the man who had given him the protective item, but Alessio Sorrento had already turned to move onto the next waterproof storage crate they had brought along for this assault.
The tension in Alessio’s back—his twin’s lover, one of two people that Corrado spent his life with—said the man wasn’t in the mood to talk. On a good day, Alessio’s moods regularly swung one way or another. Today, however, he was swinging toward the bad side of things, and it all had to do with Chris.
Or rather, the plan Chris and Corrado came up with over the phone during a late night call after the morning Abril told him what she would do to help. Chris had to figure out the rest, how to get in the ranch without coming in through the front—the cliffs would be the only way, he knew. Then, he needed people. He couldn’t do this alone, and so he called his twin, who made more phone calls. Amid all that, Corrado thought switching out the two of them—because his twin was far better in an assault-type situation one-on-one than he was—would be a good idea.
Alessio did not agree.
“Les,” Chris said.
“Just get fucking dressed. We don’t have time.”
The man’s sharp order wasn’t just for Chris, and it slithered through the small crowd that had gathered on the edge of the cliffs. It was a handful of men—the three that The League spared for this mission, a couple from his father’s organization that had skills in retrievals or assaults, and the handful Andino Marcello gave to them to use.
It wasn’t much.
Still a team though.
Dressed in tactical gear, with assault weapons that would mow down a crowd, if needed, this job should be easy. Get in once the girls were out, clear the ranch, and hightail it back to the cliffs where they would all leave like this had never even happened.
Simple, right?
Yeah, Chris hoped so.
This all came down to a prayer.
Down below, three boats waited. Speed boats that one of their guys had got a hold of when he called through to a contact he had in Mexico. Alessio scaled the wall, his years of rock climbing coming in handy when they needed to secure a rope ladder with metal steps down the cliffs.
There should be only one way into the ranch.
Just one.
They were wrong.
Someone just needed the means and the mode.
His means were Valeria and Maria.
His mode was The League.
Two days.
That was all he had to put this plan together, get these eight men into the country and here, and make this fucking shit work. It had been a toss-up whether they pulled it off. No one would say it might work, and but for the grace of God, they were here.
Now, it was Abril’s turn.
Half of this plan had been Chris’s. The other side of things belonged to her. None of it would work if she didn’t get her part of the plan in order, and so now he waited beside cliffs and water that made his heart race. He’d just come up from there, and one way or the other, he was going back down those cliffs to get in a boat before the night was over. That fear of water would never leave him.
Of that, he was most sure.
Chris had never been more grateful for his father forcing him to get in water after the almost drowning incident, and making him learn to swim because you have to learn, Chris, you have to. Never had he thought he hated his father more than he did when Gian dunked his head under water at only aged seven, apologizing because he knew it scared his son, but still determined to make him work through the terror.
He had.
It still made him fucking edgy.
Chris turned to the readying men, wanting to go over the plan just one more time—everyone needed to be on the same page, and while The League members likely already were, it was the men who came from outside of their organization that concerned Chris. No one needed to be a fucking hero here. It wouldn’t help.
His speech stopped at the galloping in the distance. The unmistakable clip-clop of hooves hitting soil hard. With the sky a blank canvas of black, it was hard to see into the dense stretch of forest that separated a small portion of the desolate land before one came out to the cliffs.