Page 111 of Chris

That was a lie.

This was a huge thing.

“Sometimes, let me watch your back,” Corrado said. “It can’t always be you looking out for me, man. That’s all.”

Chris nodded. “Sometimes. We have to wait, now.”

“For what?”

“The white flag.”

A false surrender.

“Alto—para!”

The command cut through the air when a figure, womanly in her shape with a white rag held high, emerged through the smoke in the middle of the dirt road. With her head tilted down, the darkness behind her form made her quite a sight with the gray cloud lingering in the air.

The shouts for the firing to stop came again, louder the second time. Through the broken windows of the house, the men of the García cartel passed verbal orders between them, one at a time.

Stop.

Stop the firing.

Halt.

Repeatedly until the bullets stopped flying, and a silence settled over the ranch. Oh, there was still noise, sure. Hooves clattering in the distance, and the crackle of flames from buildings that were still burning to the ground.

The war, though?

All at once, it stopped.

“Where is Samuel?” Chris asked.

Corrado glanced his way. “What?”

“The other brother—Samuel Lòpez.”

“Never saw him.”

Chris wasn’t even sure his brother knew what the man looked like, but perhaps Jorge had been so distracted in the gunfight he’d forgotten about his other sibling. It didn’t matter as he had other things to focus on right now.

Like the woman outside.

Abril kept her head tilted down low as she walked the road, one slow step at a time. Still, she kept her hand and that white rag high, a clear signal that the Lòpezs were giving up. During his time in the house, he pinned down where the leader of the other side had been hiding out—in a barn that didn’t burn—because the García men flanked the structure from all directions, never turning back to retreat, but only facing forward to keep anyone from getting too close.

Chris hadn’t been wrong.

The man that emerged from the barn, hands free of a weapon, dressed differently than the rest. He carried himself differently even in his steps—confident and sure. A war had been raging all around him, and yet the man’s suit looked tailored to his form and without even a speck of dust on the dark fabric.

He tipped his head back as he came closer to Abril, a pleased smirk curving his lips as though he just caught his prey.

“Abril,” the man—Roberto García, the man Abril would have to marry through an arrangement made by her father—called about thirty feet away from the approaching woman, “Thank you for helping me.”

Abril said nothing.

She kept walking.

“What’s happening?” Corrado asked.