Chapter Twenty-one: John Wayne Cowboy

Emiliano

JOHN WAYNE COWBOY

Performed by The Trishas

I looked at the pictures Juliohad sent me of the little girl walking out of the barn, holding the hand of another child and Hatley’s youngest sister. My niece looked so much like Natalia at that age that it made my chest ache, and I felt the fury of my sister’s betrayal all over again. She’d betrayed me and slid into this simple-minded rancher’s bed—a man who had little to offer her or the child. I could have given them the world, and I would have.

I would still give the girl everything.

She would be mine.

She’d take her place at my side in the way Natalia should have.

She’d be the princess in my kingdom.

A kingdom she’d never escape the way her mother had.

I would decide whether she lived or died. What she did. Where she went. Who she saw.

“I will have my revenge for your treachery, hermanita,” I said, putting down my phone and picking up the last remaining picture I had of my sister. I’d burned the rest after she’d left the first time, but I’d tucked this one away in my nightstand in a frame made from the hardwood floors that had captured our father’s blood as he died. It was a weakness I’d recognized even back then, just as it had been a weakness to let Natalia flit around the globe as if she wasn’t bound in chains.

I would never be that weak again.

I swiped my phone to another image Julio had taken, my finger tapping on my niece as she went up the steps into the farmhouse. She was shouldering a beat-up, black backpack that had my intuition flaring. I zoomed in on it and smiled, recognizing the gold NL stitched onto the front pocket. I’d had the backpack made for Natalia during her last year at MIT. Inside it had been the sculpted gold box I’d commissioned for our special code, giving it to her along with my latest instructions.

That idiot, Vito, had been wrong. He’d left more in the hotel room than a suitcase.

He’d left a child and a backpack that both belonged to me.

I would retrieve them.

It would be easy enough to do so.

Then, a plan formed in my mind. A way to exact vengeance against Hatley as much as make Natalia squirm from the heavens.

Ryder Hatley had stolen from me more than once.

He wouldn’t live to do it again.