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I’m remarkably calm as the guard pushes me through the side door. My mind has slowed down, a thousand thoughts sifting through my head. Rodrigo Cardenas will never know it, but he’s given me the one thing I’ve been missing all these months: hope.

I’ve been afraid of it because I know how fucking dangerous hope can be.

Instead, I’ve let myself stay stuck in regret. Trying to accept that there’s no way out, that nobody is coming for me.

And so what if nobody is coming for me? Hope rips through me, bringing strength with it. I’ve survived worse than this. I survived the fucking El Buen Pastor and lived to tell the tale. I will find a way out of this, too.

The door closes behind me, and Rodrigo turns around, his poisonous smile licking fear through me despite my newfound resolve.

“Abby Chalmers.” He pours himself a drink from the bar.

His hands, as soft and finely polished as ever, make my skin crawl.

“Tonight’s invitation promised me a special gift.

I never imagined it would be you.” He raises his glass to me.

“But I certainly plan to enjoy the moment. And several of my men are here with me.” He lights a cigar, holding my eyes.

“I’ll let them fuck you when I’m done. They weren’t happy when you managed to escape in Bogotá.

” He gestures around the room with a nasty smile.

“Not that escaping worked out too well for you, it seems.”

Ignoring the threatening way he waves the cigar, I return his smile.

“I was sorry to hear about your father, Rodrigo.” I cross the floor and pour myself a drink, impressed when my hand doesn’t shake. “Juan was a good man.” I turn back to face him. “Even if he did fail to keep his promise to me.”

Rodrigo’s eyes narrow. “Don’t bother with the lies, Abby. We both know you never met my father.”

“I did, actually. In El Buen Pastor prison, back in Bogotá.” I sip my drink, almost enjoying the look of confusion on his face. “In fact, your father is the reason I escaped Bogotá in the first place. He wouldn’t be happy if he knew you were here, you know. Juan hated the man who runs this place.”

He stares at me. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Take a seat, Rodrigo.” I walk over to one of the leather chairs and sit down, gesturing to the one opposite. “Before you let your men in to rape me, you might want to listen to what I have to say.”

El Buen Pastor Women’s Prison

Bogotá, Colombia

Six years ago

I wake on the concrete prison floor to a hard nudge in the ribs from the woman next to me, trying not to disturb the other ten occupants of what is supposed to be a two-person cell.

The woman elbows me again, nodding to where a guard is peering through the small barred window in the iron door.

He pokes the muzzle of his gun through the bars and nods at me to get up.

I do, the other girls grumbling when I tread on them to get to the door. It isn’t like I have a choice. Every spare inch of the floor is taken up by sweating bodies.

During the daytime, we’re allowed out of the cells and can sit in the courtyard below.

But the nights are a sweating, stinking mass of tightly packed flesh.

I’d say the guard’s interruption is welcome, but I’m not stupid enough to think he comes with any kind of good news. Especially so late at night.

Please don’t let it be that my parents have discovered I am here.

It’s the only coherent thought I have as I stumble along the concrete walkway overlooking the courtyard, three tiers below us. No matter what becomes of me in this place, I can’t stand the thought of my parents seeing me here. I especially can’t imagine them trying to save me.

I don’t deserve saving.

The guard opens a heavy door and leads me out of the prison center, then down a deserted corridor. He halts at a closed door, looking in both directions before he opens it. He holds a finger to his lips.

“ Entrar ,” he hisses, shoving me inside.

The door closes behind me with a click, but I notice he doesn’t lock it.

The room is small and bare, lit by a lone light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

There’s a desk at the center of it with two plain metal chairs on either side.

A man is sitting in one of them, a bag resting on the floor beside him.

His dress is casual, but unmistakably elegant: silk shirt, tailored trousers, Italian shoes.

Cartel , I think dully. Oh well.

There are worse deaths. I knew someone was going to come for me, sooner or later .

“Please,” the man says, in accented but courteous English, gesturing at the chair opposite. “Sit.”

I do, keeping my eyes trained firmly on the table.

“Cigarette?” He pushes a packet across the table.

I’d like to decline, but I’m not an idiot. Cigarettes are currency, and in here, currency is all that matters. I take one and slip it into my pocket.

The man laughs quietly. “Smoke it. I will leave you the packet.”

The man holds out his lighter, and I draw on the cigarette, almost fainting with pleasure at the nicotine rush.

“Senorita Chalmers.”

My head jerks up in surprise. It’s been so long since I’ve heard my name spoken aloud that it feels like it belongs to someone else.

“Ah.” The man’s smile widens. “Perhaps I should have introduced myself earlier. My name is Juan Cardenas.”

The world spins around me.

This is how I die.

It seems strange, now that the moment is actually here.

I stare at him dumbly, my cigarette burning down in my hand.

“I’m not here to kill you, Abby.” He reads my mind easily, his smile not moving at all. “Quite the opposite, in fact. Although I am the reason you find yourself here.”

“You?” The word is barely audible, my voice weak and cracked from long months of staying silent. “You’re the one who had me arrested?”

“It was the easy option at the time.” He sits back in his chair, crossing one leg over the other.

“The police found your boyfriend dead on the floor of a Bogotá hostel and you cowering in a closet, too scared to even speak. I thought it was my son’s handiwork, of course.

I was... unhappy, to say the least, to be left cleaning up after his mistakes. ”

I shudder, trying not to see Nico’s lifeless body, the blood seeping across the floor.

Trying not to remember the complete lack of emotion on Jacey’s face as he pulled the trigger.

I’ve met many dangerous men in my life, both before and after that moment.

But Jacey is the only true psychopath I’ve ever known.

The blank emptiness in his eyes will haunt me until my dying day.

“Why didn’t you just kill me?” I ask the question that has had me confused ever since the doors of the prison closed behind me. “I stole a shipment of drugs from you.”

“I thought putting you in here was killing you.” Juan tilts his head with a rueful smile. “Gringos without friends or money don’t usually last long here. Had I been a betting man, I would have laid down good money that you’d disappear within a week. A month, at most.”

He holds my eyes across the table.

“I wasn’t aware, at the beginning, of the extent of your crimes.”

He taps his fingers on the table, still staring at me with that unsettling smile.

The longer I look at him, the more I can see the resemblance to his son.

But where Rodrigo’s face is mean and hard, Juan’s is angular, his forehead high, his deep-set eyes gleaming with intelligence.

Apart from a certain tilt to the mouth and a basic similarity in facial structure, the two men could not be more different.

“When Rodrigo finally told me he’d managed to lose such a significant amount of product, I was rather surprised to learn he believed you had escaped Colombia with it, and that you were now sailing, carefree, around the world with a stolen yacht filled with cocaine.

I, of course, knew differently, since I’d put you in here.

Even so, I still wasn’t overly concerned with your fate.

Frankly, Abby, I had bigger problems than one troublesome Australian girl.

I assumed you’d die in here, sooner or later, which would save me the trouble of dirtying my own hands.

But then, quite recently, a contact advised me that the stolen yacht had turned up in a Thai port.

” Something hard flashes in his eyes. “It was empty, of course, the cocaine long gone. But there was something else inside it that made me take a much more personal interest in your welfare.”

What the hell does that mean?

I can’t imagine it’s anything good.

“Let me explain.” Juan leans forward. “Two years ago, the daughter of a good friend of mine was backpacking through Asia. Her last post mentioned that she was going to see a temple in northern Thailand.” His eyes settle on mine. “Her parents never heard from her again.”

The hard light in his eyes strips away his suave mask to reveal the ruthless killer he is, a man who has ruled the Cardenas cartel with an iron fist for over thirty years.

“I did what I could to find my friend’s daughter,” he says quietly.

“I’d supplied the triads for years, so I had good contacts throughout Asia.

I wasn’t happy when it became clear that my questions were being stonewalled.

I applied some pressure. A few months later, the girl’s parents received their daughter’s hand in the mail. ”

I try not to react, but my stomach is churning.

“Perhaps I should have heeded the warning.” Juan lifts a shoulder.

“But I am a proud man, and I had a reputation. Instead, I cut off supply to the triads. It didn’t go down well, of course, but I was angry.

” He gives me a speculative look. “This brings us to where your world and mine collide, Abby.”

Great. I do not have a good feeling about this.

“I told you the yacht had something inside it.” His face tightens. “It was the severed head of the missing girl.”

Oh, fuck. The prison swirls around me. I couldn’t speak if I wanted to .