But it wasn’t Frank Jordan’s voice on the other end of the line. “Jake?”
“Reese.” He sat up, glancing over at the clock beside the bed. Two-fifteen in the morning. What was Reese doing calling at this hour?
“Do you have Isabella Montenegro and her daughter with you?” Reese said without preamble, his tone hurried.
“Yes, what—”
“Jake, you’re in danger.”
He almost laughed. He’d been in danger since the moment he took this assignment.
“You need to get the woman and child to us as soon as possible,” Reese was saying. “Tell me where you are and I’ll send—”
“Reese, what’s going on?”
“Jake, you’ve been set up. The woman isn’t Abby Diaz. Your life is in danger as long as—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded.
“The fingerprints you sent us from the handcuffs,” Reese said. “They aren’t Abby Diaz’s.”
He felt the blood rush from his head, the earth drop beneath him as if he were suddenly marooned in outer space. He glanced over at her, lying beside him on the bed. She looked up at him, fear in her eyes.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“That’s not possible,” he said into the phone.
“Abby’s dead, Jake. We exhumed the body. It’s her. There’s no doubt. You’ve got to bring the woman in. And the kid. And you have to hurry.”
He fought for breath, his mind screaming, no!
“Jake, it’s a trap. Don’t be a damned fool. Wherever you are, get the hell out of there. Now. Before it’s too late. I’ll send men to meet you. Just tell me where—”
He closed his eyes. “I’ll take care of it myself,” he said and clicked off the phone, dropping it to the floor.
“Jake,” she whispered beside him. “What is it?”
He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. He got up and pulled on his jeans. “It was Reese Ramsey. I sent him the handcuffs you used to cuff me at the station. He checked the prints.” He turned then to face her. “He says they aren’t Abby Diaz’s prints.”
She stared up at him, looking stunned, confused, then dropped her gaze to the crumpled bedsheets.
“The body they exhumed from the grave,” he continued. “It’s been positively identified by the FBI as Abby Diaz’s.”
She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears as her gaze rose again to his. “The person who called, he’s the one you said you trusted?”
Jake nodded, sick at heart. And scared. He tugged on his shirt, his flesh still alive with the feel of her, his body already aching for her.
“Of course, it’s a lie,” he said quietly. “Someone falsified the report. There’s no other explanation.”
She nodded, her eyes on him. “Frank?”
“He’d have the authority.” He stood, fighting the need to flee, fighting the question that haunted him. If he didn’t believe what Reese had told him about Abby, then why did he believe the part about the trap, about being in immediate danger?
“I think we’d better get out of here,” he said, feeling the weight of his words, the implications weighing on him.
“I’ll get Elena.” She rose and dressed quickly, no longer looking at him.
He watched her leave the room, his heart hurting, the pounding too loud. Reese had to be wrong. About everything. He hadn’t even realized how hard he’d been listening until he heard the sound outside. A sound as distinct as a heartbeat and as ominous as a gunshot. Someone tried the back door.
If we aren’t safe here, we’re not safe anywhere. His words had come back to haunt him.
Moonlight made a silver path on the tile floor as she padded quickly across the hall to Elena’s room. She felt numb. All except her heart, which seemed to struggle with each labored beat. Not Abby Diaz.
Jake’s words had stunned her. Not Abby Diaz? Just when she’d finally found herself? Just when she’d found Jake and the passion she’d remembered from before?
It was one thing to want to take away her new-found strength, to take away her identity, to take Jake and the love she’d once shared, but to take her child, to make her believe the babies had been switched and that Elena wasn’t hers—because Elena was so obviously Jake Cantrell’s daughter.
She looked down at her daughter. Elena lay curled in the narrow bed, burrowed deep in the blankets, only the top of her dark head showing. Anger made her weak. Who was playing with her life like a puppeteer, pulling her heartstrings? If only she could remember the past. The answer had to be there. The person behind this. The person responsible for trying to destroy her.
But what made her heart ache was what she’d witnessed in Jake’s eyes. She’d seen that moment of doubt. That moment of distrust.
As she reached down to pick up her daughter, a shadow moved across the window on the other side of the curtain. She froze as the outline of one man, then another, crept along the side of the house. Hurriedly she scooped Elena up, covers and all.
Elena’s eyes widened as she came awake.
“Shhh,” she whispered to the child. “Not a sound.”
She started out of the room, desperate to get back to the bedroom and Jake. But as she reached the hall, Elena in her arms, Elena cried out. “Sweet Ana! I dropped Sweet Ana!”
Then the air exploded with the crash of shattering glass and splintering wood as the house was breached.
She looked up to see Jake framed in the bedroom doorway across the hall, a gun in his hand. She heard him call a warning. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught movement. Shielding Elena, she ran toward him.
Jake got off one shot before he took the bullet. She felt it whiz past her, saw it strike him, his head jerking back, and watched in horror as he went down.
She lurched toward him but was grabbed from behind before she could reach his side or the weapon he’d dropped to the floor next to him. Elena was pulled from her arms and she was dragged backward. The last thing she saw was one of Ramon’s men kneel beside Jake and shake his head.
She started to scream. But a hand closed over her mouth and nose, the cloth wet and cold, the smell strong and blinding. Her knees gave way beneath her. And she fell, dropping into blackness as if falling down a deep, dark bottomless well.
Abby woke to the dark and the silence and the pain. So much like six years ago when she’d awakened in the Mexican hospital. Only this time, she knew what she’d lost. This time, she remembered too much.
“Elena?” she whispered as she sat up and felt around on the cold floor for her daughter. “Elena?”
She felt nothing but the rough adobe of her prison. Panic seized her as she stumbled to her feet, windmilling her arms in the blinding blackness. “Elena!”
Her knuckles scraped the wall. Pain shot up her arm, but her real pain centered in her pounding heart. She took slow, deep breaths, but they came out as sobs. Where was Elena? Her baby? What had they done with her?
Elena was gone. Jake was dead. Shot dead. Jake. Oh, God. Jake. Had he died believing her an imposter? Part of a plot to get him killed?
She closed her eyes against the thought. Someone with the FBI had falsified the fingerprint and autopsy reports. It had to have come from the top. Frank. But why?
She fought the urge to scream. But screaming wouldn’t bring Jake back. Hysteria wouldn’t help Elena. She had to think of her daughter now. She dropped to her hands and knees, her legs too weak to hold her, her head hurting too much to think of anything but her child.
She felt her way around the room. It was small, no more than a cell, and completely empty. The walls were adobe like the floor, rough and cold to the touch. On one wall, she found a door, thick and made of wood. She put her shoulder to it. It didn’t budge.
She sat back down on the floor, dizzy from the darkness and the chloroform or whatever they’d used to knock her out. She felt cold and nauseous, sick soul-deep. Jake was dead. Elena lost. Defeated, she wrapped her arms around her knees, laid her head down and cried.
The sound of the bolt scraping in the lock on the other side of the door made her lift her head. Hurriedly, she dried her eyes, wishing she had something to use as a weapon. The door slowly swung open, bringing with it the night breeze. And light. She blinked. A man stood silhouetted in the doorway, holding an old-fashioned lantern. He shone the light into the room, blinding her. She heard his sharp intake of air.
“Get her out of there,” he ordered in Spanish.
His voice was at once familiar—and frightening, because she couldn’t place it. She got to her feet, pulling herself up the rough wall, shielding her eyes from the light. Two men came into the room and, taking her arms, dragged her out into a hallway of sorts. Some of the walls had eroded away, leaving dark holes open to the night.
She only half feigned the weakness that made it hard for her to stand. They held her up in the light of the lantern. Slowly, she lifted her head.
He stood only inches away, studying her. When she dared look up into his face, she was afraid she’d know him and afraid she wouldn’t.
He was tall, with brown hair and a kind face. But his angry expression and the intense look in his dark eyes made her recoil inwardly. She told herself she’d never seen him before. But the look in those eyes assured her it was not mutual.
“My God,” he said in English. “Abby?”
“Where is my daughter?”
He seemed taken back by her tone. “Don’t worry about her. She’s fine. Being well cared-for.” He shook his head, his gaze studying her face with astonishment. “Jake must have been shocked when he saw you.”
Something in his words... A memory dropped into place. A flash of knowledge she didn’t question. As sure as the shots she’d fired from the pistol. “Isn’t that the way you planned it, Frank?”
Jake woke to an unbearable sense of loss that blunted his physical pain.
Death, he realized, came in many forms. He felt the crease where the bullet had grazed his head. He was weak from loss of blood. It took all of his strength to crawl into a sitting position. He leaned back against the wall. Blood ran down into his left eye. Images moved across his memory, dark and debilitating. Abby. He swallowed and tasted blood. A trap.
His, it seemed, was a death of despair.
Slowly, he shrugged out of his shirt and, balling it up, pressed it to the shallow ditch-like wound that started at his forehead, ending just over his left ear.
The breeze flapped at the curtains of the broken window. The front door stood open at an odd angle. It had been a trap, all right. And he’d walked right into it.
He felt too weak to move, too heartsick to know what to do if he did. He knew now that he’d been fighting an uphill battle against a power much stronger and more far-reaching than himself. Even if he knew who’d taken Abby and Elena, even if he could find them, he wasn’t sure he could save them. He wasn’t even sure he could save himself at this point.
Then in the shaft of moonlight that spilled across the tile floor, he saw something. His heart constricted. He rolled over onto his right elbow and scooted along the floor, still holding the shirt to his head, still unable to stand, barely able to see.
When he was close enough, he sat back against the wall again, sucked in hard breaths, and slowly pulled the object he’d spotted to him. Sweet Ana. He pressed the worn rag doll to his face. It smelled of lilac bubble bath. It smelled of Elena.
Emotion choked off his throat. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, wanting to howl like the coyotes in the night. He’d lost so much. He couldn’t lose any more. He crushed the doll in his hands, the way he wanted to crush the people who’d done this.
With all sensation centered on the pain in his head and heart, at first he didn’t feel the tiny, cold, stabbing pain in the palm of his right hand. Slowly he opened his eyes and focused on the doll and his large sun-browned hands gripping it.
He opened his fists. The soft fabric was forgiving. He brushed his fingers over the handmade dress. It matched the one Elena had worn just yesterday. He stared down into Sweet Ana’s face, for the first time noticing her stitched eyes. Cantrell green. And with a cold chill, he realized how Julio had planned to get out of Mexico with the money—and his life.
He tossed aside his bloody shirt and struggled to his feet, moving as quickly as he could before blood blurred his vision again. Stumbling into the kitchen, he set the doll down on the counter and dug in the drawer for a sharp knife. Lifting the hem of the doll’s dress to expose the stitching along the right side of the stuffed body, he carefully cut through the threads until he saw the sharp edge of the key hidden inside.