Chapter 7 - THE GHOST
“Sarah?” I whispered, the phone slipping from my fingers.
“Bring me the chip, Emily,” my sister’s voice echoed through the speaker, crisp and entirely devoid of the warmth I remembered. “Bring it to the main courtyard. Or they execute Gabriel’s mother, and then they burn the house down with my daughter inside.”
The line went dead.
I couldn't breathe. Two years ago, I had identified a body in the morgue. It was bloated, traumatized by an overdose, but it had Sarah’s butterfly tattoo on the wrist. It was her. I buried her.
“She faked it,” Gabriel said, his voice a low, horrified rumble as he forced himself off the medical bed. “The cartel helped her fake her death.”
“Why?” I cried, panic making my hands shake uncontrollably. “Why would she abandon her own child? Why would she leave Maya with me to starve?”
“Because she didn't just run from my family, Emily. She joined the cartel.”
Gabriel pulled on a clean shirt, hiding his bandages, and strapped his shoulder holster on. He looked at me, his eyes filled with a terrifying, absolute resolve.
“Sarah used the information your father found to buy her way into the Juarez cartel,” Gabriel explained, his mind working rapidly. “She didn't want to destroy them. She wanted to lead them. And a child was a liability.”
Everything I had sacrificed for the last two years—my youth, my education, my sanity—had been to protect a child that my sister threw away for power.
I looked at Maya, sleeping peacefully on the cot. She looked so much like her mother. But she didn't have Sarah’s coldness. She had Gabriel’s quiet strength.
“I’m going up there,” I said, picking up the silver watch and the microchip.
“No,” Gabriel barked, grabbing my arm. “You take Maya and use the tunnels. Get out of the city.”
“They won't stop hunting us, Gabriel!” I yelled, pulling my arm free. “As long as Sarah knows we exist, Maya will never be safe. I’m ending this tonight.”
I didn't wait for his permission. I marched out of the medical wing, ignoring the searing pain in my chest.
When I pushed through the heavy wooden doors into the grand courtyard, the rain had started to fall.
Dozens of armed men in tactical gear stood in the downpour.
In the center of the courtyard, Clara was on her knees in the mud, a gun pressed to the back of her head.
And standing in front of her, holding a black umbrella, was Sarah.
She looked immaculate. Expensive clothes, flawless makeup, cold eyes. She didn't look like the broken addict I remembered. She looked like a queen.
“You look terrible, Em,” Sarah smiled, tilting her umbrella.
“You let me grieve for you,” I spat, clutching the microchip in my fist. “You let Maya cry for you every night for months.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Maya is better off with you. You always liked playing house. I prefer playing God. Toss me the chip.”
I held my hand out over a storm drain grate at my feet.
“Let Gabriel’s mother go, and tell your men to stand down,” I demanded. “Or I drop it into the sewer.”
Sarah laughed. It was a cruel, hollow sound.
“Do it,” Sarah challenged. “Drop it. I don't care about the chip, Emily.”
I froze. “What?”
“I already memorized the accounts years ago,” Sarah sneered. “I didn't come here for the ledger.”
She lowered her umbrella, her eyes locking onto the heavy doors behind me.
Gabriel stepped out into the rain, his gun lowered, blood seeping through his shirt.
“I came here,” Sarah said softly, “to kill the man who broke my heart, and the mother who ordered the hit on our father.”
Sarah raised her own weapon, aiming directly at Gabriel’s chest.
May you like
“Say goodbye, Gabriel.”
Before Sarah could pull the trigger, Clara, still on her knees in the mud, lunged upward.
