treating all her spider bites, removing the bullet, and stitching her up with tiny thread.
Speaking of stitches, the man who accompanied Picar wore a smile that had been sewed shut with heavy black thread. Add in his frizzy fluff of black hair, stark white complexion, and dark smudges around his eyes, and the man looked downright ghastly.
Luke had referred to him as Frizz and assured her that he deliberately sewed his own mouth closed.
She tried not to stare.
“All done. You need rest,” Picar said in Spanish, straightened—as much as he could with his crooked spine—and waddled toward the front of the cabin.
She wished her sister was here. But since La Rocha had been looking for Tula, she’d been forced to stay in Colombia.
Romero seemed to relax now that he was on the plane and away from La Rocha. He sat on the other side of Luke, talking through the events leading up to the interrogation room.
“If you had access to all the cameras,” Luke asked, “how did you not see her enter your room?”
“I was asleep.”
“And I only had to dodge two cameras between the pond and his quarters.” Vera shifted on the couch, seeking a more comfortable position with a better view of Romero, Luke, and his friends. “I know the location of every camera and their blind spots. It took me a long time to skirt around them undetected. But once I reached Romero’s door, I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with the cameras again.”
“I woke with this woman straddling my hips.” Grimacing, Romero scrubbed a hand over his black short-cropped hair. “She jabbed the barrel of a gun under my chin, with her eyes all feral, clothes and hair soaking wet, and—”
“It was an empty beer bottle, not a gun,” she said.
“I didn’t know that at the time.” Romero dropped his hand. “She started making demands and screaming in my face. I knew immediately she was the girl who won all those fights. I thought for sure she was going to kill me.”
Luke’s hand never left her, his fingers tickling her neck and gently working the tangles from her curly hair. She drifted into a peaceful place, listening to Romeo explain the rest.
He was the hero, after all. Without him, she wouldn’t have been able to enter the armory or move through the compound undetected. He’d manipulated each camera they’d approached so that the guards in the monitoring room wouldn’t suspect a breach.
“I’ll be honest,” Romero said. “Her plan scared the shit out of me.”
“It was reckless.” Luke gave her hair a scolding tug.
“Shut up,” she mumbled. “It was brilliant.”
“You saved us a lot of time.” Cole leaned forward, arms braced on knees.
The vertical frown lines between his eyes were more prominent than the downturn of his lips. His thick brown beard did a good job of hiding the subtleties in his expression, which was probably a calculated effort. But no amount of hair could conceal the beautiful symmetry of his features.
“When you contacted us,” he said, “we were at least two or three days away from isolating your location. You saved a lot of innocent lives.”
“And ended a lot of evil.” Luke’s fingers tightened in her hair.
“It was all her. I was just doing what she asked.” Romero blushed, looking sheepish. “She was pretty convincing once she started talking about how I could earn back my freedom by joining a movement against human sex traffickers. When I got involved with La Rocha, I knew they were criminals, but I didn’t know about the girls and the slave buyers and everything that went on at the compound. I really had no idea what I was getting into until it was too late.”
He told them about his family in Mexico, their poverty and sickness, and his desperation to help them. He’d been naive, just like her, and they’d both paid the price.
Romero had been imprisoned in his concrete room at the estate for two years, designing and maintaining the proprietary technology that secured the property. Only Silvia and her brothers had access to his room.
Vera would bet her last dollar that Silvia had raped the poor kid. Frequently.
“They threatened to butcher my family,” he said. “I left my parents two years ago, promising to send them money. They haven’t heard from me or seen a single dollar since I left.”
“We’ll take care of them, kid.” Lucia looked up from her laptop and winked. “You’re one of us now. Tu familia es nuestra familia.”