Page 25 of Vicious Savage

I never knewwhy he did it. He never brought it up, and any time I tried to open the subject with him, he would shut me down so quickly, he’d make my head spin. I was nine at the time, and nothing in the years between then and now had done anything to diminish the pain that I felt.

After that, he found reasons to disappear for long stretches of time, leaving me alone with Maria. She did a good job of looking after me, but she wasn’t my mother. He all but ignored me. As though I was there but I wasn’t. If faced with my presence, he would look through me, instead of at me. Like he couldn’t stand the sight of me. And as he spiraled out of control and continued on his descent into the depravities of hell, I continued to be just another burden on his wicked soul.

26

ATTILA

Luna has four brothers. She’s the youngest child, the only girl in a family of men. This is what The Jekyll tells me now. I don’t know why I never stopped to ask before, or maybe it was that I didn’t care. Or I wasn’t listening, which he accuses me of now before he launches into a full scale information dump.

“Enzo, Franco, Danielo and Coyin Junior.”

He rattles off the names of Coyin Castillo’s sons, then tells us that he lost sight of them a while back and that’s how he ended up watching Luna. She was the only Castillo he could get eyes on.

“You don’t think it’s strange that no one has seen nor heard from them in a while?” Dante asks. The Jekyll shrugs and tells us he doesn’t know what to make of it.

“My interest lays more in how you were able to find the girl if you can’t get a bead on any other family members,” I say, looking at him curiously.

The Jekyll sucks in a breath and bites the inside of his cheek. There’s something he’s not telling me. Something that could probably turn this whole thing on its head.

“I can’t tell you my source.”

“I don’t want a name,” I tell him. “I want what you’re not telling me.”

He pauses for the longest time, before Dante breaks the showdown between our eyes as he clears his throat. The look he sends The Jekyll tells him he needs to talk and he won’t settle for anything less.

“If we’re to work together, all our cards need to be on the table,” Dante says. “That means no secrets.” He turns to me. “That means you can’t touch anyone that led us to the girl or now to the father.”

“He had to have known something for him to go to the trouble of securing a tracking device. What are you not telling us?”

“I only got this far in my search by not telling anyoneanything,” The Jekyll explains. “Every little scrap of information I got I held securely until I verified it and the pieces fell into place.”

“I don’t want justifications for anything you’ve done. What do you know that wedon’t?”

The Jekyll wipes a hand down his face and shakes his head like he’d rather not be doing this. There is an internal battle going on when he pulls and pushes at the idea of revealing his source.

“I’ve got the Castillo maid,” he finally reveals.

“As in…”

“The maid who’s worked for the Castillo family for years; she’s also the one who led me to Luna.”

“Why would she give her up?”

“She didn’t. I fed her some half assed story about wanting to help the girl and she fell for it. Turned out the woman knew the girl needed all the help she could get.”

“Help from what?” Dante asks.

“She helped Luna escape the night of her engagement,” The Jekyll tells us. “And she did a good job of tipping her off anytime Castillo got a whiff of where she was.”

“Why did you put the tracker on her?” I ask him. He’s done everything but answer the question that’s been searing my skin, itching to get out. I need to know what he knows.

“Luna was honest with us when she told us the story of how her father was forcing her to marry Nestor Gamboa. I spoke with the maid; she verified everything. And when I went to get her clothes, I called Maria; I wanted to know what Castillo was really capable of doing to her daughter.”

“And?”

The Jekyll sighs and lets out a strangled gasp before he curses. His intention was to never betray the maid’s confidence. But now he realizes he has to.

“Whatever he intends to do with her, it’s not good.”

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