Iron Cage Read online

  Iron Cage

  Francesca Baez

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Javier

  2. Selina

  3. Javier

  4. Selina

  5. Javier

  Interlude

  6. Selina

  7. Selina

  8. Javier

  9. Selina

  Interlude

  10. Javier

  11. Selina

  12. Javier

  13. Selina

  14. Javier

  15. Selina

  16. Selina

  17. Javier

  18. Selina

  19. Javier

  20. Selina

  21. Javier

  22. Selina

  23. Javier

  24. Selina

  25. Javier

  26. Selina

  27. Javier

  28. Selina

  29. Javier

  30. Javier

  31. Javier

  Iron Cage © 2020 Francesca Baez

  * * *

  www.francescabaez.com

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the reproduction or use of this work in any part is forbidden without the express written permission of the author.

  * * *

  Nispero Media, LLC

  nispero.media

  About eight years ago

  * * *

  “Don’t ever fall in love, Lina. Promise me.”

  Max rolls back onto his side on the bed, setting the nearly empty bottle of red wine on the nightstand. I mirror him and roll onto my side to face him, forcing myself not to wrinkle my nose at the smell. He hasn’t showered, barely gotten out of bed even, since the breakup three days ago, and the sheets reek of it. But he’s my brother, and I love him, and he needs me, so here I am.

  “I promise,” I say somberly, and I might mean it. Max is cautious in everything, except when it comes to romance. He’s always giving his heart away, and always getting fucked over for it. Well, that’s what he says. Sometimes, I think he looks for problems, pokes at weak spots in his relationships and flings until they crumble. Because Max and I, pain is all we’ve ever known. We don’t know how to be happy.

  Me, I’m in no danger of love, let alone heartbreak. I’m too damaged to be loved. Guys figure that out pretty easily, and eventually, I learned not to give them another chance to hurt me. I keep them around for a couple weekends of fun, then cut them loose. It’s easier that way. Less messy in the end. Less getting drunk on red wine in the middle of the day and sobbing into your pillow for three days straight.

  “The guy from the office called,” I say gently. “Again. He says there’s a board meeting tomorrow that you can’t miss.”

  Max groans and rolls onto his back, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Fuck him. I’d fire him if he wasn’t so damn good at that business shit.”

  “You’re good at that business shit,” I tell him, poking his side with my forefinger. He lets out a half-hearted snort and jerks away. Honestly, I don’t know if what I said is true or not. All I know is that I’m glad I’m not the one who got saddled with running the company after our parents died. All that I’m good at is holding my liquor and looking pretty in a dress.

  “Fine, fine,” Max says, tossing the covers off his body, releasing another blast of heartache stench. The second he’s in the shower, I’m getting Kate to change these damn sheets, and light a candle or three in here. “I’ll go to the fucking meeting tomorrow. But only if you watch Legally Blonde with me tonight.”

  “Deal,” I say, starting to sit up, but Max grabs my shoulder and holds me down, staring intently into my eyes again.

  “I mean it, Lina,” he says, and under the haze of wine, I know that he does. “When you love someone, it’s like you hand them a gun, loaded and pointed right at you. And they always pull the trigger, even when they say they won’t. Even when they promise.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say, and I mean it too. “I’m never going to love anyone, not like that.”

  No one will ever stick around long enough to give me that chance, anyway. If Max was more sober, less caught up in his own feelings, he might have done the brotherly thing and followed up on that statement. But he just lets it go.

  Before I leave the room, though, he speaks again.

  “You will, Selina. You will.”

  * * *

  Shit.

  Shit shit shit.

  I roll back the video footage from the security cameras in my study and watch it again, just to be sure. Yes, that’s Selina, my captive wife, opening the bottom drawer of the desk that was once her father’s, and somehow cracking the code to my safe. How could she have known the combination, the date of my mother’s death? I haven’t told her anything about my parents, not even their names. But my princesa is opening the safe, and pulling out stacks of paperwork. I don’t have time to watch more, don’t have time to witness her discover what she’s inevitably about to discover, to see the horrifying realization play out on her face in pixelated black-and-white.

  When I married Selina Palacios in the courthouse last year, essentially at gunpoint, we didn’t bother making any vows. To have and to hold, ‘til death do us part… I’ve had her and I’ve held her, but the death that could forever part us happened long before she’d even seen my face.

  Five years ago, I killed Selina’s brother.

  I shot him in the gut, leaving her alone in the street, watching helplessly as her brother bled out.

  I did it to save her life, but I know that fact will offer little comfort once she finds the one piece of evidence connecting me to the crime, hidden at the bottom of that safe.

  In a second, she’ll discover I’m the one responsible for the worst thing that ever happened to her.

  There’s absolutely no way to stop it, but I’m still sprinting out of the Café Palacios headquarters, literally shoving past a few employees in the halls.

  “Sir—” my newest assistant—Edgar? Edward?—begins in confusion as I storm past the front desk, but the glass doors are already swinging shut behind me. The Hummer is conveniently parked out front, and I rev the engine and jerk into the road without even checking the mirrors, causing a symphony of angry car horns around me. It’s not difficult to ignore the chaos, as I snap a voice command at my phone to call Miel, my oldest friend and partner in crime.

  She finally picks up the phone as I turn onto the highway.

  “Find Selina,” I bark, cutting off her greeting. “She should be in the study. Find her and… just find her. Get her out of there. Now.”

  If I stay on the line any longer I’ll just be keeping Miel from carrying out my orders, so I hang up, knowing that the urgency of the matter has been duly expressed.

  With some nearly suicidal driving stunts, I pull up to the Palacios estate in record time.

  “Where is she?” I snap at Miel as soon as I walk through the door. The panicked look in her eye tells me the answer before her mouth does.

  “I don’t know,” my right-hand woman says, running to keep up with me as I march down the hall with purpose. “She wasn’t in the study, and we can’t find her anywhere. We searched every room—”

  “Keep looking,” I say, and slam the study door shut behind me. The room is empty, like Miel said, but the bottom drawer is still open, the safe’s heavy door ajar. I kneel and riffle through the contents quickly, but I already know that the necklace will be missing. The necklace I yanked off Selina’s delicate neck, a moment before pulling the trigger on her brother.

  She knows.

  My heart, which had been pounding in
my chest since I left the office, stops. I knew this day would come eventually, though I hoped somehow it wouldn’t. I hoped I could keep this secret until the day I died. And I could have, maybe, if I hadn’t held on to the damn necklace. But I couldn’t let it go. Even when I finally possessed the girl herself, I needed the necklace to remind me. To remind me of the spark of hope I felt that night five years ago, the first moment I laid eyes on Selina Palacios.

  To remind me that, no matter how warm I feel when she’s curled up against me, or how many times she says that she loves me, I still am, and will always be, a monster.

  Selina is here, somewhere. She couldn’t have left the estate, not without one of the guards noticing. So where is she hiding? I pace around my study for a few minutes, focusing all my mental energy on finding her, and trying very hard not to think of what will happen once I actually do.

  But all I can see is the way my wife’s fragile body shuddered with sobs, bending over her brother’s grave almost a year ago. The conviction in her voice as she begged a dead man for forgiveness, claiming responsibility for a crime I committed. The steel in her spine when she stood again, wiped away smeared mascara, and turned to me with the composure of a woman who hadn’t been shattered to pieces just a moment before.

  That was the first time I saw the real Selina. It was just a glimpse, the morsel of truth she offered me over sangria later that day. I had been obsessed with the idea of Selina Palacios for half a decade, but I’d never realized that the person buried under that thick shell of poise and Prada could be just as enticing. Splitting that shell open and carving out every last, painfully real, piece of my princesa over the past year had been so much more satisfying than I could have anticipated. And that day, after the cemetery, had been the first taste.

  And then I know.

  I know where Selina is.

  * * *

  The closet in the guest suite isn’t as roomy as it was when I was a kid, and the floor isn’t as comfortable, but it’s not like I give a shit, after the shattering truth I just discovered.

  It was Javier.

  My captor, my husband, my lover.

  He’s the one who killed my brother.

  I always knew Javier Vega was a killer, had come to terms with that, but…

  My insides twist, and I think I’m going to throw up again, but I close my eyes and fight the urge.

  The man I share my life and my bed with, the man I fell in love with, the man I’m tethered to for life, killed my brother.

  Is that why he took me captive, forced me to marry him? Is this all some horrible, twisted, sick game to him? I don’t understand.

  I’ll never fucking understand.

  I hear the bedroom door open, and heavy, familiar footsteps pad toward me. I jerk upright and press my back against the wall in the dark. When he pulls the closet door open, I scream and kick out blindly, feeling my bare feet connect with a shin, maybe a knee.

  “Fuck,” Javier grunts, but still tries to come closer.

  “Get away from me,” I shriek. I can’t see him clearly; my eyes are still adjusting to the light from the bedroom, or maybe they’re just blurred with emotion. It doesn’t matter. My body acts on instinct, trying desperately both to fight and flee from the enemy that’s been under my nose this whole time.

  I’ve hated Javier from the start, but not like this.

  This goes beyond hate, beyond anything I’ve ever felt before. I don’t know how to feel, how to cope with this horrible new paradigm I’m living in. Everything in me burns red, everything in me aches for this man to be punished somehow, but at the same time, all I want is to fall into him. He’s the one whose arms I feel safe in, the only person that’s ever felt like a home. I need him, and I loathe him. I love him, and I want him dead.

  “Okay, okay,” he’s murmuring gently, stepping back from me, lowering to a crouch so he can look me in the face.

  I won’t look him in the face.

  I’m afraid of what will happen to my already fragile heart if I do.

  He sinks back into a seated position, leaning against the wall across from the open closet, holding his hands up as if to show he’s not going to hurt me. It’s a useless gesture. We both know that if he wanted to, he could kill me right here, with his bare hands. As always, I’m powerless in his presence, and any semblance of control he gives me is just a hollow pretense.

  There was a time when he couldn’t truly hurt me, couldn’t break me, but then I gave him my heart. I set my beating, bleeding heart in his hands, asked him to protect it, and then he crushed it anyway.

  I should have seen this coming.

  I never could have seen this coming.

  I still don’t quite believe it.

  “It was you,” I say quietly, though I know that he already knows I know. He wouldn’t be here otherwise. “You killed Max. You were the guy in the mask, the one who pulled the trigger.”

  “Selina,” he begins, trying to move toward me again, reaching out to touch me, and I shrink back. I can see the pain flash across his face, a vulnerability I’ve never seen before, but I don’t care.

  I don’t fucking care.

  “Princesa, I had to do it,” he says, his voice pleading and genuine in the way I’ve always wanted him to be, but not at this cost. “El Sombrerón—”

  “I don’t care if you were just following orders. You still did it, you killed the last person I loved and… And you never even told me.”

  My voice breaks at the end, but I swallow back the sob that threatens to escape. Crying won’t help. Nothing will help. Nothing will ever help again.

  “I did it to save you,” Javier tries again, eyes desperate, hands shaking as he holds them back from reaching to me. “I was— I was supposed to kill you, Selina. But I… I couldn’t do it. That’s why I killed him. It was to save your life.”

  “You should have just killed me,” I say, emotionless. I don’t even have to think about it.

  “You didn’t deserve to die for your brother’s mistakes,” Javier says.

  “And he didn’t deserve to die for our parents’” I counter. I’m crying now, I realize. Silent, cold tears trail down my cheeks, drip off my chin. I let them flow unhindered. “The only person who deserved to die that night was you. You’re a killer, a monster, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”

  That, that shuts him up. He flinches back from my words as if I’d physically slapped him, and his eyes… I don’t even recognize the man sitting across from me. The Javier I know always has his guard up, is always playing the part of who he wants the world to see. This man, he’s raw, stripped bare. I did that. I broke Javier Vega, if only a little bit. It should make me feel better. It doesn’t. Not at all.

  He moves toward me again, and this time I let him. I’m too tired to fight. The gunshot wound in my side is killing me, throbbing more than it has in days. My body had finally stitched itself back together, and now it’s tearing itself apart all over again. But that pain is nothing compared to the crushing agony that pulses through me. My entire body is a raw nerve, my soul an open wound. Javier’s mere presence exacerbates the ache, but I still have to fight the urge to sag into him when he touches me, cups my face in his palms.

  “Selina, I—” he begins, and I know what he’s trying to say. It’s what he knows I’ve been dying to hear, the one thing that could bridge this cavernous gap of pain between us. The one thing that, even now, could still break me completely. The lie I’m desperate to believe. “I…”

  Even now, he can’t say it. He can’t force it, can’t pretend to feel anything but animalistic possession over me. I watch him struggle to form the words, words I know he’s never said to anyone before, and I can’t help it. I begin to laugh. Hysterical, unhinged, completely humorless giggles pour out of me, and Javier just watches, brows furrowed in confusion.

  I thought I’d been through the worst of it, time and time again. When I lost my parents, when I lost my brother, when I lost my freedom to Javier. Every damn time, I
thought, this is it. It can’t get any worse than this. And every time, I was wrong. But this time, it really can’t get worse than this. I wouldn’t survive it.

  What didn’t kill me never made me stronger. It just sank deep into my bones, soaked into my marrow, spliced into my DNA. I’m made of suffering, born of the darkness, and all I’ll ever be is broken. There is no happy ending for me. I don’t fade into the sunset holding the hand of the man I love. I go through hell and back again, over and over, a lost soul walking in circles and waiting for the devil to take pity.

  I sag into the floor, the weight of my hopelessness pressing down on my shoulders. My eyes are dry now, the laughter over, my head pounding.

  “I need to get out of here,” I say, half to myself. “I just want to go to bed.”

  “Here, I’ll help you upstairs,” Javier says, moving to stand, eager to have something to do other than sit here in this hellish moment.

  “No,” I say, meeting his eyes. “You don’t understand. I need to get out of this house, away from you.”

  There it is again, that flash of pain in his eyes, but it’s gone faster this time. He’s pulling his mask back on, pulling away from me even as he begs me to stay.

  “You know I can’t let you go,” he says. Not a threat, just a statement of fact. “And we both know that you couldn’t leave even if I let you.”

  Fuck. I flash back to the night in Paris, me sobbing in his arms on the hotel floor. He’s right, but I can’t deal with that right now.