Page 101 of South of Justice

Her nerves fired in waves, heat flaring along her thighs, her back, her wrists. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. The room still smelled like her own burnt flesh.

She blinked but saw nothing. Her eyes were open. It just didn’t matter. A second later, light stabbed through her skull. The overhead bulb. Still on. Still humming.

She was still in the chair.

Lucía turned her head a few inches and screamed. Just once. Short. Sharp. The sound of her skin tearing away from the hot metal where her shoulder had fused to the backrest.

Then silence again. Her heart hammering in her chest. Her breath coming fast.

She looked down. The sides of her thighs were blistered—burned in the shape of the metal where the heat had radiated through. Her left hip bore the ugly red kiss of the frame. Her wrists were raw, the skin slick with blood where the zip-ties had bit into them during the convulsions.

He’d only been gone a few minutes. Or an hour. She didn’t know. There was no time here.

Lucía pressed her head back and closed her eyes.

Through the fog of pain and thirst and hunger and exhaustion, she saw Ryan. His handsome face, his strong jaw. Eyes so blue they were almost clear. He didn’t smile often, but the few times he had had been breathtaking.

He’d nearly been hers. Just like Mateo had. But for a trick of fate, a quirk of the universe, ayou go left and I go rightmoment. If only she could have had one more go-around, onemore chance to see him, she’d tell him she loved him, and that she’d known it since he’d first kissed her.

But there were no go-arounds. Real life didn’t get a replay. All she could do was picture him in her mind, her Mills and Boon cowboy, and say it in her head.

I love you, Ryan Inglis.

In her head, he spoke back, but what he said wasn’t what a Mills and Boon cowboy would say. Nothing like that at all.

In her head, he said,Plastic weakens in heat. It gets brittle. A little leverage, it pops.

She jerked upright in the chair as the memory hit her. A tremor ran through her arms as she tested the tie on her left wrist. The plastic stretched like hard taffy but it didn’t give. She didn’t have the leverage that Ryan had, nor the brute strength. She rotated her hand, slow and deliberate, grinding blood and sweat into the tie. The pain was so intense it was almost hallucinatory. But it wasn’t everything. Not anymore. Not when rage was simmering behind her ribs, hot and clean and merciless.

Her fingers clenched. Twitched. Moved.

“Come on,” she whispered.

With a final twist and pull, her left hand slipped free with a sick, wet sound. Her forearm flopped forward, nerves screaming as it fell slack.

She bit down on her own shoulder to keep from crying out.

Then the other hand. Then the feet.

By the time she collapsed to the floor, it wasn’t victory she felt. It was ignition.

She lay still for a second, cheek against cold concrete. Her lungs burned with every breath. Her body wept from ten different wounds.

When she looked up, she saw her laptop sitting open on the dirty table, its screen dimmed but still alive.

Lucía dragged herself toward it, inch by inch. Every scrape of her palms left smears of blood on the concrete. Her body was an instrument of pain—burned, blistered, trembling—but her mind had gone diamond-sharp.

When she reached the table, she clutched at the edge and pulled herself upright, using her good arm. Her breath came in gasps. The scent of scorched skin and hot metal clung to her.

The screen flickered awake at her touch.

Lines of code shimmered faintly across the monitor: encrypted strings, her old algorithms looping endlessly, waiting for the final key.

Lucía’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. They were shaking, slick with sweat and blood, but she found the keys by muscle memory. The phrase came to her all at once, like breath returning after drowning:

Tr3mbl_n0_c41g4_s0la.

She typed it slowly, carefully, each keystroke a small act of rebellion. Then she hit Enter.