Finally he screamed, “Fuck!” and turned around kicking in the bathroom stall door. He spun around. “Where is he? Huh? Where is that tattooed motherfucker?”
I rubbed at my jaw, cowering away from him. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t fucking know!” he marched over to me and placed his hands at my throat, pressed me up against the wall. “How can you not know?!”
I took my hand and dug my nails into his palms, driving them down, making him bleed, staring right back at him, trying to fight through the air I was losing again. I would not lose again.
His eyes twitched as they searched my face, searching for the truth. When he realized he was already getting it, he released my neck and let me breathe again.
I took a moment to recover, swallowing painfully, and then said. “I don’t know where he is. And that’s the truth.”
He walked away, shaking out his shoulders, going in a circle around the room. The bathroom door jingled and he lifted his head and yelled, “Fuck right off!” He then turned to face me and instead of anger, his face was slack with something else … bitterness. Heartache, if he had a heart that could ache.
“Did you sleep with him?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
“What the hell is it with you men and sex?” I said. “Like who gets to fuck who really means anything. No, I didn’t sleep with him. Are you happy?”
He laughed caustically. “Am I happy? Oh, angel, my dirty, rotten, lying angel! No I am not happy. I won’t be happy until you do as I’ve told you.”
He came over to me and quickly put his hands around my neck. I thought he was going to try and strangle me again but he just put the angel locket around me then delicately straightened the pendant so it was resting on my collarbone.
“You have no idea,” he said, soft and hard all at once, eyes focused on the angel wings, “how badly I want you to hurt right now. Because I didn’t think you could ever hurt me again, not like you once did. But you have.” He lifted his eyes up to me. “You betrayed me when all I’ve done is give you my heart and promise you a new life.”
I couldn’t say anything to that bout of crazy. He pressed the pendant into me and walked away, shaking his head, holding up the razor blade necklace in one hand.
“Your Camden will be tracking me now instead of you – he’s going to get quite the surprise. And you’re going to do as I’ve told you. You’re going to go for dinner with Travis. You’re going to kill him.” He put his hand on the lock, then turned his head to the side, eyeing me. “Or I’ll kill your Camden, for real this time. I’ll deliver his head to your doorstep.”
He unlocked the door and stepped out into the café, leaving me alone in the bathroom, wondering how the hell I was going to get us all out of this alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CAMDEN
After Ellie had gotten ready for her meeting with Javier, and I’d spent a few minutes grappling with the urge to scream, I got out of the closet and very slowly, very carefully made my way back into the main part of the hotel.
Gus was in the room looking like utter shit. For once I got to tell him that. He hadn’t slept at all, waiting up all night for me. I think he thought for a moment that perhaps Ellie and I were making up for lost time but he figured out pretty quickly from my expression that it wasn’t the case. I had to say, he looked a bit disappointed, as if the crotchety old man had been rooting for us as a couple that whole time. I guess I had been rooting for us too.
I couldn’t dwell on that, I couldn’t think about it. I just had to keep going and stick to the new plan. We activated the tracking device on Gus’s phone and were able to see where she was on Google Maps. It was actually pretty relieving to follow that flashing blue dot as it made its way through the streets of Veracruz to the café.
“So she’s just meeting Javier?” he asked, after the blue dot had been immobile for quite a while.
I nodded. “As far as I know. She should be coming back here after to get ready for her dinner with Travis. I guess we should get going just before six. That way we can be out and ready to follow her.”
“I agree,” he said, his eyes on the flashing light. He frowned. “Hmmm.”
“What?” I leaned over and he showed me the screen. The blue dot was moving away from the café, in the opposite direction of the way she came. She was heading north and fairly fast, in a car, not on foot.
“What do you think that means?” I asked. “Do you think Javier is taking her somewhere?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it wasn’t Javier that asked her to meet him.”
I looked at him sharply. “Who, like Travis?”