Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 95049 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95049 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
The room is already an inferno, but I can make out the woman screaming in agony as the blaze surrounds her, licking up her body. She’s trapped.
And then I look closer and find she’s sitting in a chair, not even bothering to move. Another look, and she’s tied up.
This doesn’t make any sense.
I step forward to try to save her, needing to know why she’s given up, when the fire intensifies, forcing me to take a step back. Leysa’s face disappears in the flames, and since I won’t risk my life for answers, I run out of the house, voice-texting my men to get away because the house is burning down.
I’ve only just made it out of the house when an explosion hits, causing the ground to shake. Windows blow out, glass flying everywhere.
“What the fuck happened?” Kaleb barks, damn near as invested as I am in finding Leysa.
“She set the house on fire.”
“You saw her?”
“In some makeshift basement. Looks like it was a suicide mission.”
Kaleb’s eyes go wide. “You sure you saw her?”
“Yeah!” I bark, watching as the house burns to the ground. “I locked eyes with her.”
“What about the guy she was with?”
“I didn’t see anyone but her.”
“Why the hell would she do this?” he asks, shaking his head. “And where the fuck is the guy she was with? We’ve had eyes on the house, and nobody’s come out.”
“I don’t know. Maybe she thought, with her being framed for the mayor’s death, she was done for. I only saw her in the fucking basement.”
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I press play on my earbud.
“Incoming text message from … Unknown: I handled your little problem. Now you owe me. I’ll be in touch.”
Sirens sound in the distance.
“We need to go,” I say to my men. “We can’t be here when the fire department arrives.”
They nod, and we take off down the back street, away from the direction the fire trucks are heading. While I drive, I call Eddy, asking him to pull up the cameras since we have access to all of them.
“Fuck!” he barks. “Someone is trying to override them.”
I can hear him typing away on his keyboard, but my mind is stuck on the text message I received.
“I handled your little problem. Now you owe me. I’ll be in touch.”
It doesn’t make any sense.
Unless the guy that was with her turned on her?
I call Hughe, the DA.
“Antonov.”
“The mayor’s house is going up in flames.”
“Shit,” he hisses.
“There’s a woman in the basement—”
“Florida homes don’t have basements.”
“This one fucking does,” I bark. “And there’s a woman in it. I think it’s Leysa Santiago, but I need proof.”
“On it.”
We hang up, and I drive around, trying to wrap my head around what the fuck just happened.
After an hour or maybe longer, Hughe calls me.
“Yeah.”
“You were right. A woman was in the basement. The firefighters pulled her out before I called, trying to save her, but they were too late.”
“Anyone else in the house?”
“Not from what they found.”
“Is it her?” I ask.
I sent him a picture of Leysa weeks ago, when I told him that she was coming after my family because we wouldn’t allow her to traffic women through our port, and he assured me that he would have his men keep an eye out for her.
“We won’t know for sure until a DNA test is run, but it looks like it could be her.”
“And how the hell do we test the DNA of a dead person who’s never lived in the US?” I ask.
“Shit,” he says, clearly not having thought that one through. “We need something with her DNA.”
I think back to when Kaleb visited her mom in Colombia, trying to see if she might know where we could find her eldest daughter, only to learn that Leysa had allowed her to believe she’d been dead this entire time. Shit, according to Kaleb, the woman even keeps a shrine of her things in her old room.
And then it hits me. “We can get her things from Colombia. Something has to contain her DNA. My guy said her mom has kept her room as is.”
“Perfect,” Hughe says. “Come by and see the picture of her. I really think it’s her. The photo you gave me damn near matches the woman who died in the fire. But if we can get a DNA sample, we can run it to confirm.”
“I’m on my way.”
Ten minutes later, I’m standing in the DA’s office, looking at a picture of the same woman I saw in the basement. She’s got burns all over her face, but there’s no denying she resembles the woman in the photograph.
I don’t know who did this—and based on the text I got, it’s someone who wants me to be indebted to them—but for now, I’m going to take it as a win.