your wife’s name, sir.” Lin looked to me and Ramon squeezed my hand.
“Yes, I thought maybe you might remember darling? Not to worry if not, we can access it another day. The most important item is in box eighty eight.” He smiled at me like he had a secret and I frowned. What important item?
Lin tapped something on his iPad again then passed it to me. “Please just enter the numbers and we can proceed.”
I stared down at the screen, dumbstruck and then an awful sequence of memories ran through my mind from my time with The Five. What’s the code? What’s the fucking code?!
The numbers came back to me in a blazing trail of fire through my brain. Three – nine – eight – four – four - seven.
My heart went haywire, but I kept my features neutral as Ramon and Lin waited patiently. I could type those numbers in. Maybe they were to do with this, maybe they weren’t. Either way, this little white box on the screen had triggered them at long last. The code The Five had tried to beat and batter from me. And that made it the most precious thing in the world. The reason for my scars.
I didn’t know what this meant. But Ramon must have had enemies everywhere in Sinners Bay. Men who would have gladly tortured his wife for this number. Was this the code they’d been trying to pull from my lips all along? And if it was, did Ramon know that? Did he want to move whatever was in that box and hide it from the men who sought to steal it from him? But how could he know?
“Darling?” Ramon pushed, his brows arched.
I shook my head, feigning ignorance. I wasn’t going to give this vile man the numbers which I’d bled for. There was only one person in the world worthy of those if he asked for it. And Nicoli wasn’t here anymore.
Ramon looked to Lin, pushing the iPad back towards him. “Her memory is foggy at the moment. Perhaps next time.”
“Okay, follow me to box eighty eight.” Lin stood up and Ramon went with him, leaving me with Carlos who was as silent as a covert fart, but just as impossible to ignore.
I glanced over my shoulder at the guy who was built like a basketball player on steroids and raised my middle finger at him. He grunted in irritation.
“Ramon will hear of this,” he growled in his heavy Spanish accent and I rolled my eyes before offering him my back again.
My husband finally returned and Lin clapped excitedly as Ramon held out his hands, showing me a choker necklace which was an inch tall with a ruby at the centre of it.
“For you, my darling.” He moved up behind me in the chair and clipped it around my throat without permission.
I instantly despised it. It was heavy and felt like a dog collar rather than a necklace. But maybe that was what he wanted me to feel. Like I was owned. And as he trailed his fingers down over my shoulder, I started to fear that if I didn’t get away from him soon, he would try to possess me in other ways too.
I lay awake in my bed, staring through the window at the moon with my fists bunching and goosebumps lining my skin. But it wasn’t the temperature that had me cold. It was the dull ache in my heart that wouldn’t quit. It was the place beside me where my savage girl should have been. It was the way I had nothing and no one to hold close and the way I was failing her so completely.
Three weeks since I was drugged in that bar. Three weeks of fuck knows what happening to her fuck knows where. I’d even tried to follow up with the police, thinking they’d have had to interview her over her abduction, but their investigations were stalled too. That motherfucker Hernandez had gotten his lawyer to block their attempts to contact her for her official statement, claiming she wasn’t of sound mind to give it. Who knew how long it would be before he allowed her to speak to them about what had happened to her up on that mountain? And it certainly didn’t seem like they had any intentions of following it up.
I knocked my head back against the pillow and tried to remember how it had felt to hold her in my arms. I thought I’d had