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Wonderful.

My mouth was dry enough that seeing running water made every part of my body demand that I drink it, but the stream ran downhill through coffee fields and God knew what else. Spending the night shitting myself to death on a Salvadoran mountain would be a particularly humiliating ending after everything else that had failed to kill me this week.

Besides, Isabella had surely packed water in that pack she was holding onto so tightly.

Assuming I ever caught her.

I pulled Rafael’s pistol from my waistband.

The gap under the fence had been plenty big enough for Isabella.

Me?

Not a fucking chance.

I pushed Rafael’s gun across the wet rock beneath the wire, then Ciro’s, far enough that I could reach them from the other side. After that, I dropped into the stream and turned onto one shoulder.

The first attempt got me nowhere except wet.

I shifted lower, flattened myself as much as a six-foot-four man built like me could reasonably flatten, and shoved forward, praying I wasn’t going to have to dig out this stream with my bare hands.

The wire scraped across my bare back, and my left leg caught briefly between the bottom of the fence and the slope of the rocks.

I twisted, freed it, and scrambled forward.

A fence was not putting me back in that fucking compound.

And a few ugly seconds later, I planted both hands on the opposite bank and dragged the rest of myself through.

I grabbed the pistols and got to my feet.

The backpack was gone from where Isabella had thrown it, and so was Isabella.

Below me, the mountainside disappeared into rows of coffee shrubs, towering banana leaves, and darker patches of forest.

I couldn’t see her anywhere.

For one terrible second, all I heard was my own breathing and the thin stream trickling beneath the fence.

Then a branch snapped somewhere downhill.

Another followed farther to the left, accompanied by the unmistakable crash of somebody forcing their way through brush without giving a damn how loud they were.

I caught sight of her rushing ahead. At this rate, she was going to take another decade off my life before sunset.

I tucked Rafael’s pistol securely into my waistband at my left hip and kept Ciro’s in my right hand as I went after her.

The late-afternoon light barely made it through the canopy. Banana plants crowded this steeper section of the mountain, their broad leaves hiding roots, loose rocks, and sudden drops in the ground. Every wrong step hurt somewhere, but none of it mattered while Isabella was still ahead of me.

I couldn’t see her, but thank God, I could hear nearly everything she touched.

Branches broke. Leaves thrashed. Something large enough to be a sapling snapped back into place after she barreled through it.

The noise could lead every armed man searching this side of the mountain straight to us.

Yelling could bring company, but losing her would be worse.

“Isabella!” I shouted.