Derek and Javier came over to the back of the Escalade, Derek with only a small backpack. Javier opened the trunk and Derek quickly slid inside.

I smiled at him but he didn’t smile back. Instead, he nodded curtly and then lay down, still as death, staring up at the ceiling.

I exchanged a nervous look with Camden. Our little team was growing bigger, each new person adding an uncertainty that wasn’t there before. But worrying wouldn’t do me any good. This was out of my hands. If I wanted to get Gus and my mother back, we had to go through with it. I laid myself bare last night – no use being guarded now.

We drove for a bit until the city was far behind us along with its overgrown trees and layer of smog. Este finally stopped at a small diner where we all got coffees and churros to go. It was stinking hot out, waves of heat rising from the road, the sun bearing down relentlessly.

“We’re closer to the equator now,” Este had said, watching as I wiped the sweat off my brow as we stood around the car, waiting for Dom to get out of the restroom. “It will be cooler in the jungle.”

“So how is this going to work exactly?” Camden asked, shoving the last remaining bit of the churro in his mouth.

Este looked to Javier who was on his cell phone, talking to someone in Spanish. Javier ignored him and turned around, slowly walking to the other side of the car. Este shrugged at Camden. “Well I have the coordinates on my iPad, picking up from Satellite feed, it will take us straight there.”

“iPad?” Camden asked, almost laughing.

Este gave him a look. “Why mess with a good thing? You’d be amazed at the apps that the cartels have floating among them. You can’t buy them on iTunes but they can save your life. And your money. I’ve made a few myself. The one we’ll be using, we can almost watch our own selves going through the forest in real time.”

Este went on about the mission, how the six of us would go in until a certain point and then split up. There were the people who would need to go in silently, and the ones who would go in blazing. They weren’t quite decided yet on who would go where. I guess that remained to be seen.

While he chatted to Camden some more, Derek listening and staying silent, I decided to go and look for Javier.

He had just hung up the phone and put it in his pocket, facing away from me. I walked over to him, carefully, like he could attack at any minute. He seemed wounded and like any animal, ready to defend himself against predators. In this case, the predator was me.

“Javier,” I said softly.

He turned slowly and I stopped where I was, dust flying up from my boots and settling in the air around us like spilled flour. His mouth was set in a hard line and his eyes were even harder like that, glinting like golden stones. He appraised me, taking me in, not sure what to do or say or feel. I could tell half of him wanted to hate me, hit me, make me bleed. And the other half, well that was the sadness I could see masked far beneath. I knew him well enough to know when he was burying shit deep inside.

I reached out for him, slowly putting my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t flinch but he eyed my hand like I carried some disease. I left it there for a second, hoping the weight of it would translate the weight in my heart, before I took it away.

I stuck both my hands in my back pockets and looked at the ground. “I’m so sorry.”

He breathed in sharply through his nose, his eyes cutting into me with curiosity. “About?”

“Violetta.” Even saying her name hurt.

He looked away for a moment and tilted his head to the side. “It has happened. It is done.”

“I gave her the car keys,” I said, fighting the stiffness in my throat. The terrible guilt that festered inside me, the guilt that wouldn’t go away.

He nodded once and quick. “It wasn’t your fault. I didn’t realize soon enough what was going on. I played it too safe.” He exhaled and checked the time on his phone. “No point dwelling on it though. If she had left right away back in Mexico City, none of this would have happened. She chose to get involved. She made her choices when she friended the Zetas.”

He was making it sound so simple. But, like Violetta said, maybe there was no point in making things complicated if they didn’t need to be.

“She’s dead,” he said with finality. “That’s the cost of doing business sometimes.”

And just like that, whatever vulnerability, whatever hurt and pain I thought I had seen beneath the surface, was all gone. Wiped clean. All that was left was Javier Bernal a drug lord with only one thing on his mind – his own rise to the top. He was steel and hard lines and ice in the middle of the tropics. He was the only thing that would never melt, no matter what pressure was applied to him. He was a human, a machine, a man who I knew had lost his soul forever. He lost it somewhere far away and it was no longer my job to get it back for him. Maybe it never was my job.

I swallowed hard and said, “Well, just so you know. I liked her.”

“And that was your problem,” he said, giving me a dry smile. “If you hadn’t gotten close to her, you wouldn’t care so much. Let that be a lesson to you, Ellie. Don’t get close to the people you know will die. Don’t get close to anyone. We’ll all die at some point.”

Dom appeared at the front of the car, slamming back a coffee and climbing into the driver’s seat. He eyed us over his aviators. “Time to go.”

Javier left me standing there, slightly dumbfounded, going around to the passenger side of the car. I shook my head when Dom slammed his door shut and I got in the back.

It turns out we were close to the Honduran border, which proved to be an easy checkpoint. I don’t know what the guards would have done if they had searched the car and found stacks of weapons in the back with Derek, but from the giant wad of cash I saw Dom hand them, I had a feeling it wouldn’t have mattered. Money went further than honor here and we certainly paid our way.

Once in the country, it was another five hours of driving through piss-poor towns, crumbling roads and rampant wildlife like monkeys who liked to dart from the overhanging canopies, until we finally reached Catacamas for our last dinner in civilization. Of course knowing how wanted we all were, we sent Derek out to get questionable food from a street vendor and we all ate in the car, without the air conditioning on.

I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Camden yet and every time we were alone for a few moments, he would suddenly busy himself with questions for Este. I don’t know if he just wanted to be on top of everything and be a man with a plan or if he was avoiding me. Part of me was feeling ashamed for opening myself to him last night but the other part was glad I did it. It was out on the table. He knew how I felt and that’s all I could do. I was a woman born of lies, but here I was being honest even when it hurt me the most.

When we were all done, Dom took us out of the city and toward a tiny village that consisted of a post office, a gas station and a feed store. It was sleepy, quaint, and the place we were to ditch the Escalade. He pulled the car into an empty and abandoned barn and turned off the engine.

“You’re ready for this, yes?” Este asked me as we climbed out of the car.

I shook my head. “No way in hell will I ever be ready for this.”

We all gathered around the open trunk as Derek and Dom started distributing stuff. They handed me a backpack which I had already crammed with some of my belongings, another gun, a change of clothes. Then they handed out miniscule walkie talkies that resembled a Bluetooth earpiece to each of us and made sure that I was carrying the first aid kit.

Dom slapped the car affectionately and I felt a funny little pang in my gut for the loss of Jose. I know it was just a car and it was Violetta who died, but Jose had been with me for the last six years. He’d almost become a friend when I didn’t have any.

“If we see this car again,” Dom said, “you’ll know we’ve done good.”

“That said,” Javier added, “if you do get back here without anyone else, my advice is to take the car and go. It’s every man for himself out there, I hope you know that. You don’t win wars by saving each other. You only get killed that way.”

Well that wasn’t exactly the encouragement we needed before we started hiking off into the jungle on a rescue mission. I looked across at Camden, dust motes dancing in the barn light that shone between us. He looked right back. We were the only people here who would risk life and limb for each other.

I was forever on his team.

“Javier has never been one for speeches,” Este said, shaking his head in amusement. “But all I’ll say is, we can get in and get out. We can make this happen. Travis Raines is ours. What he has is ours.”

“You mean Gus,” I spoke up quickly.

Javier grinned. “Gus, sure. And the cartel.”

I frowned, feeling a rush of nerves down my back. “You said you were doing this for me.”

He let out a laugh to which only Este joined in.

“Dom is doing this for you,” Javier said, gesturing to him with his gun. “And, if you’re lucky, Camden is doing this for you. Derek just wants his paycheck, the gringo doesn’t care who does what, fucks what, gets what. But me, Ellie, angel, dearest, I’m going in and I’m taking over.”

“This wasn’t supposed to be a coup,” I said.

Suddenly Javier was in my face, the veins pulsing in his head, spittle flying out of his mouth as he screamed at me, “And they weren’t supposed to kill my sister!”

Camden was at my side in a second, ready to push Javier back but the barn filled with the sound of three guns being drawn and I didn’t have to look around to know that Dom, Este and Derek all had guns trained on Camden.

The madness in Javier’s eyes was quickly reined in and he stepped back. He wiped his mouth and smiled. “As you can see, Travis has hit yet another nerve. You’ll get your Gus back, your mother back, whatever you want and whatever is left is mine. And if you step in my way, I won’t hesitate to kill you. Both of you.” He turned around and clapped his hands together, the sound giving me a jolt. “Now, let’s head off into the jungle, shall we?”

Camden and I stayed behind for a moment while they all walked out of the barn and into the last remaining sunlight. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it and I was warmed where my insides had turned cold.

“Just focus on Gus,” Camden said.

I nodded. Squeezed his hand back. And followed the drug lords out into the light.

CHAPTER NINE

The journey started off easy enough. The six of us, backpacks in tow, walked down lonely, dusty streets that wound their way through fallow fields and past shanty houses. Eventually the last signs of humanity gave way to the jungles of the Sierra de Agalta National Park, an imposing wall of vegetation and darkness.

We paused right before the foliage swallowed us, hesitating before the belly of the beast.

I looked up at the sky, now bruised purple from the twilight. “Are you sure we shouldn’t camp out here for now?” I said, my arm sweeping out the valley below us. “You know, while there’s still light and shit.”