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CHAPTER NINETEEN
SONIA
Present Time…
I’m so focused on the door of the panic room, I’m surprised I don’t burn a hole through it. I’m not sure how long I’ve been in here, but it has to have been hours.
Oh my God. He’s really not coming. No one is coming.
“Don’t leave me again!” I cry.
Almost as if I will it to happen, the door swings open. Santos is standing there looking worse for the wear, with cuts on his face and rips in his clothes but alive.
Tears roll down my cheeks as the emotion of seeing him alive and well overcomes me. I push to my feet and walk to him.
“Sonia,” he says, reaching for me. But before he can touch me, I let loose on him.
I throw myself on him, scratching, slapping, and pounding his chest as hard as I can.“¡Pendejo!Do you know what you’ve put me through? You left me again!”
He grabs my wrists in an attempt to stop my assault, but my feet are still free. I kick him in the shins, and he releases me. “Fuck! Woman, calm yourself!”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! You left me, Santos. You fucking left me again.” I’m panting as I begin to pace the small room. “This is exactly why I can never be with you. You will leave and I’ll break again.” I cover my mouth with my palm as I realize what I’ve just confessed.
Santos’s steel gaze softens. “You’ve told me this before.”
“What did you say to me then? What could you possibly have said that I would forgive you?!”
“That I didn’t stand you up.” He takes a step toward me and I take one back. “That I didn’t make it to the bus station because your father had me beaten to near death. I didn’t go, because I couldn’t. I wasn’t even conscious. I woke up to broken legs and the news that you’d married Diego Arcos.”
“My father beat you?” I shake my head in disbelief. “But he sat beside me as I waited for you. He said that if you showed up, he’d take us to the church himself!”
“Only because he believed I was going to die! If it hadn’t been for de la Cruz, I would have. He scraped me off the riverbank where your father’s goons dumped me.”
Suddenly, everything becomes crystal clear. My father showing up at the right moment. His willingness to let me be with Santos. “I didn’t know.”
“But you did. You knew I loved you. That I was willing to break the promise I made to my father on his deathbed for you. But I wasn’t gone a month before you were happily shacking up with Arcos.”
The way he says it has my hackles rising. “I did what I had to so that your child could have a father! I was thinking about the baby.”
He rears back as if I slapped him, then drops his eyes to my belly. “You were pregnant?”
We stare at each other, both of us seeming equally confused.
“I didn’t tell you?” I ask, sure this is a bit of information I would have shared by now.
His jaw works furiously as he comes closer. “Where is my child?”
My mind races through all the possibilities of how I could have been with this man for five years and never mentioned why I married Diego in the first place. As I stand here watching the emotions that flit across Santos’s face, I damn the fates for putting me in this position. Why can’t I remember?
If only I could talk to the other me buried deep inside my brain, I’d slap her for her stupidity before I asked why in the hell she kept this from Santos.
“Where is my child?!” Santos demands again, coming to stand so near that he towers over me, and I have to look up to hold his gaze.
“After I lost the baby…” I stop, unable to speak through the ache that will never lessen.
I can hardly breathe as I force myself to dredge up the words, the pain that almost killed me years ago threatening to end me now. “I lost…” I gasp, almost doubling over as I feel as if the wind has been knocked out of me.
Santos wraps his arms around me, holding me tight while I weep. It’s as if it’s happening all over again. The pain of losing him followed by the agony of losing our baby.
