Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 88918 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88918 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
So he said it out loud.
He told Badell his final wish.
CHAPTER 32
Three months later…
“Stop the car.” Lucia grabbed the binoculars, her pulse hammering and her mouth arid dry.
As Cole Hartman rolled the jeep to idle on the dirt road, she adjusted the focus on the lenses and scanned the parched horizon.
There weren’t any big trees to provide a canopy in this part of Venezuela, and with the blistering temperatures, wavy heat lines distorted the landscape.
Where are you, Tate? I know you’re out there.
Woody-stemmed shrubs dotted the salt-crusted earth. Between the widely spaced out cacti with their spiny slender arms, there was nothing but rocky sand and bare dirt as far as she could see.
“According to the old man,” Cole said, leaning forward with an elbow propped on the steering wheel, “the monastery is supposed to be twenty kilometers the other way.”
They’d already driven twenty kilometers in every direction, chasing one of the hundreds of possible locations where Tiago might’ve been holding Tate.
“This has to be it.” Sweat beaded on her brow as she shifted the binoculars and dialed in on an obscure formation in the distance.
“What are we doing, Lucia?” He grabbed a bottled water from the backseat. “We’re wasting time on the musings of a senile man.”
“He said there was a gate, and I’m not moving on until I find it.”
With a scowl, he snatched the stack of papers from her lap and held them up. “There are two-hundred and seventeen places with gates. We’ll never get through all of them.”
Her desperation to find Tate might’ve pushed her past the point of insanity, but she wasn’t stopping, wasn’t budging. She would find him, dammit, and he would be alive. She refused to accept any other outcome.
“This one feels right.” She glared at Cole’s cocky aviator sunglasses and held her ground. “It’s a hunch.”
“You said that the last three times. This whole damn operation has dissolved into a hunch.” He gulped back the water and tossed the capped bottle onto her lap. “This isn’t how I do things.”
Her chest constricted with pressure and insistence. “We spent three months doing things your way.”
Three months chasing dead ends and all they knew was Tiago had left Caracas the day she attacked him. How he survived the head injury, where he went, and what he was doing—all of it was one big fat mystery.
Meanwhile, Tate was missing and alone, his body beaten and susceptible to infection. She couldn’t stop obsessing over it, couldn’t eat, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think straight. Every second without him was another second he spent in misery.
Cole had hunted down the cops who had apparently tossed Tate into the trunk of a car. But the corrupted police didn’t know where he’d been taken or who’d been driving. Any clues leading to Tate had been so thoroughly buried not even Cole could bribe, threaten, or wrestle the information into the light.
But she knew Tiago, knew how his unshakable mind worked, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the night Tate was tortured. It had been a trial, a disgusting experiment that put Tate’s love to the test.
Over the past few months, she wondered if this was her test. Tiago wouldn’t just throw her in a prison to die. His god complex demanded that he challenge, control, and weigh everyone around him, including her. He’d challenged Tate, and now it was her turn.
So many times, she replayed her conversation with Tiago right before she attacked him.
You have the power to give him what he wants most.
His survival is up to you.
There had been a lot of mumbo jumbo twisted into his words, including his suggestion that she move on. But there was something deeper at play. He never eluded to it, but he’d left her a clue.
He’d carved an image into Tate’s back.
For her.
He tortured countless men that way, leaving scarred welts on the arms, chests, and legs of those who lived. But his designs tended to be more primitive—geometric lines, whorls, and simple shapes. What he’d sliced into Tate’s skin was altogether different. It was a detailed illustration. Hours of gruesome cutting that painted a place with gates and a human-like figure floating through them.
Tiago had given her a way to find him. A depraved challenge to test her determination and love. Yes, it was just a hunch, but it sat heavily and deeply in her gut, howling and bucking and refusing to be ignored.
Then she met the old man.
She and Cole had comprised most of their list of gated places by talking to people, such as historians at universities and locals in small villages. They’d traveled the breadth of the country, and that was how she met the elderly man in an impoverished town an hour’s drive from here.
In thick Spanish, the man had told her about a monastery called Medio del Corazón. Translation: Middle of the Heart.