Page 61 of Chris

“I’ll see you soon. Love you. Behave.”

“I will.”

Once Maria had disappeared back inside the house, Chris stood up straight again. Valeria climbed into the back of the Jeep without a word.

He followed her lead.

Whenever he saw a Jeep in Toronto, Chris always wondered what in the fuck their purpose was for their owner. They almost always had mud on the tires, too. Where in the hell had they even found mud in a city?

Now, driving in a Jeep as Jorge’s driver took a sharp turn onto a dirt road that took their vehicle down a winding path, deeper into a forested area with little population, Chris understood the appeal. The Jeep handled the terrain just fine, and with the doors and top pulled off, the wind kept them cool.

Beside him in the back, Valeria sat quiet and still, her gaze drawn to the blur of trees at their sides, instead of Chris. He would much rather have her gaze on him, but that was perilous territory that neither of them needed to play in at the moment.

Especially not with her husband sitting in the front.

“Have they caught up?” Jorge asked, his laughter disappearing into the wind.

Chris peered over his shoulder, seeing the front of another Jeep coming over the hill behind them as they reached the end. “Almost.”

“Ah, have to make this fun for them. It’s a long drive, amigo.”

Apparently.

They had been driving for two hours now.

“You will enjoy this tunnel we’ll show you,” Jorge explained, his attention going back to the dirt road ahead of them. “My father had the tunnel built in first, but when the authorities became suspicious over the activity out this way, he had a permit made for a house.”

Chris blinked. “A house?”

Jorge smirked over his shoulder. “Yes.”

Valeria sighed beside Chris, as though she had heard this story a million and one times before. If Jorge took note of her annoyance, he said nothing. The sunhat in her lap hid the clenching of her fists from her husband’s view, but Chris saw the action given she had to hold on to the item to keep it from flying away.

Was there something else on her mind?

Something other than her husband’s conversation?

“And so,” Jorge continued, his voice bringing Chris back to the present, although he didn’t think he had missed much from the conversation, “my father had the tunnels built into the basement. Or rather, he built the home around the tunnel with no one any wiser. They simply assumed the work we had been doing before was us digging the basement out of the rock and then pouring cement. Brilliant, hmm?”

“Smart, yes,” Chris agreed. “And they have never found the tunnel.”

“Once, almost. We had to dynamite a connecting tunnel when aerial surveillance found the entrance, and we didn’t want it leading back to the house a few miles away. The vacation home tunnel is still the closest one we have to the border, and while we don’t use it as much as we used to, well …”

“It’s good to have.”

“Just in case,” Jorge said, nodding.

The man’s attention went back to the road ahead of them, but he continued talking. Chris had no interest in a lot of things Jorge had to say, but he listened because the man gave details that sometimes helped him along here in this plan to get Valeria and her daughter out.

“I brought Val along for the weekend,” Jorge said, even though no one had asked, “because it’s good for her to get out of the house, and she needs a break occasionally. Isn’t that right, hermosa?”

Valeria’s jaw tensed, but she forced a smile—a fake one—on her face when she turned to nod at Chris. “Sí, that’s what they told me.”

Told, he noted.

Not wanted.

“And our daughter gets to stay at home with the nanny, to keep her out of trouble,” Jorge added after a moment.