It had been over a week since the blow-up, since the unstamped white envelope with proof of Carlos’s crime had shown up in their mailbox with just her name-Jolee Mercier-

scrawled onto the front. She’d thought things had gone back to normal, that Carlos had forgotten, that they could live out their lives as they always had, separately together. How could she have let herself sink so low? How could she have believed for one moment that the man she married wasn’t the monster he’d been revealed to be?

But she had found that living with something, day in and day out, numbed you to its power. Now she was going to pay for that denial, with her life.

“No!” She didn’t know where she found the strength. Maybe it was the thought of Carlos telling his next conquest that, sadly, his last wife had run off on him. Maybe it was the injustice of being interred beside her father somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a mass grave for Carlos’s enemies-men who had defended the union, women who had turned him down, people who had made Carlos’s life uncomfortable. How many bodies were buried out there, she wondered? If he would order his own wife killed-who hadn’t he gotten rid of?

Jolee wiggled around in the trunk. There was nothing back there-made more room for bodies, she assumed dismally-just a tire iron and a jack and a set of jumper cables. All great weapons if she could have gotten her hands free, but the zip ties were drawn so tight behind her back the circulation had long ago disappeared from her fingers. She could still feel her feet though, and that was what she used, slamming both of them against the latch of the trunk.

There was no way to disguise what she was doing. She knew the guys would hear her.

The music stopped blaring almost immediately. She was probably denting the hell out of Carlos’s car. The thought, he’s going to kill me, crossed her mind and she gave a strangled, crazed half-laugh, kicking again, again, again.