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Coffee shrubs crowded the higher bank to my left beneath taller shade trees. Banana plants had taken over the other side, their broad leaves hanging into the ravine and smacking my shoulders and face as I shoved through them.

Isabella stayed ahead of me.

Sometimes I caught the dark swing of her hair or the pale flash of her shirt around a bend. Then the ravine twisted, and she disappeared again.

Every time she disappeared around another bend, I thought about how little I really knew about what she’d survived before I ever heard her sneaking in from the hidden passage. Isabeast’s version was poison, but there was still so much about her I didn’t know.

I didn’t give a shit that Isabella had first looked at me and seen a possible way out. We’d both started with something we needed from the other. That part was old news.

What I wanted to know was everything that had happened in the years before I ever landed in Ciro’s dungeon.

What exactly had Isabella lived through inside that place?

Had any of those bastards put their hands on her because they knew she couldn’t complain? Had Ciro ever handed her over to someone to punish her or prove a point? Had she been forced to do more than just listen to the torture beneath her bedroom? Had she ever been ordered to participate somehow, to clean up somebody else’s cruelty, or keep quiet about a woman who disappeared because refusing would have put her on the other side of the dungeon door?

And right now she was tearing down the side of a mountain so lost in her own head that I wasn’t sure she even remembered I was behind her.

What bothered me was the possibility that I could lose her before I ever got the chance to hear any of it from her.

That mattered a hell of a lot more than whether Marcela had managed to lace a few truths through all her poison.

I wanted the answers because I wanted to know Isabella. The ugly parts too. The things she was ashamed of. The things somebody had done to her. Even the things she might have done herself, because surviving Ciro Delgado had demanded them.

I could decide what I thought about those answers after I had her somewhere safe enough to give them.

Right now, I needed to catch the woman before grief did something her enemies hadn’t managed to do.

The ravine curved hard to the right and deepened.

The little ribbon of runoff joined a narrow stream cutting across the bottom of the slope. It wasn’t much—maybe eight inches deep where it passed beneath us—but the water had worn a shallow rocky gully into the mountainside. The compound’s outer security fence crossed directly over it.

Years of wet-season runoff had eaten away the soil beneath the lowest wire, leaving a gap where water and debris could pass under the fence rather than damming it.

Rafael and Isabella had known exactly how to get out of this place.

She didn’t hesitate when she reached the stream. Isabella splashed straight into the water and headed for the section of fence crossing the narrow gully. Water covered her boots and climbed partway up her shins before she stopped beneath the wire.

She pulled the backpack off her shoulders.

For one hopeful second, I thought she might wait for me.

Instead, she shoved the bloody knife into the side pocket, grabbed the backpack by one strap, and threw it over the fence.

It landed on dry leaves several feet beyond the water.

Smart.

At least some part of her was still thinking clearly enough to protect the supplies. Just not calm enough to wait for the enormous injured bastard trying to keep up with her.

She dropped to her hands and knees in the shallow stream and flattened herself into the eroded gap. Water soaked the knees and lower thighs of her jeans and splashed over her forearms as she wriggled beneath the lowest wire.

By the time I reached the gully, she was already crawling out on the other side.

I stepped into the stream.

“Isabella, hold up.”

Cold water filled my boots immediately.