TAKEN - Rocky Mountain Bastards (Part 2)

One day later

Cara

Snow swallowed the world outside my window. It fell in thick sheets, white on white, until the trees blurred into ghosts and the mountains vanished completely. From here, high above the valley, it looked peaceful. Pure. Clean.

It lied.

This house was anything but clean.

I leaned my forehead against the cold glass, letting the chill sink into my skin. I needed the temperature difference. Something sharp. Something real. Because my brain was still back in the interrogation room, under bright lights, staring at photos that should not exist.

Liam had dropped them on the table one by one, his voice low, controlled, careful. Like a surgeon with truth instead of a scalpel.

Dates. Locations. Transactions. Faces.

My family. My brothers.

He should not have had that kind of access. Not to them. Not to the Navarro network. Not to things we buried so deep that even our own people spoke of them only in code.

But he did.

I closed my eyes for a second, just long enough to see the details again. Ink on paper. Grainy angles. Someone must have been close to take those shots. Too close.

I opened my eyes before the panic could rise.

They want my secrets.

I knew that when they dragged me off the operating table and into this safehouse. I knew it when I woke up with an IV in my arm and four strangers measuring every heartbeat. That part was not new. Governments always wanted an angle. Men in suits had been trying to cut pieces off our empire since before I could walk.

What I had not anticipated was this. Questions instead of threats. Quiet instead of shouting. Coffee on the table in front of me while Liam slid evidence across the wood like we were colleagues at a briefing instead of enemies at war.

He had not raised his voice. Not once. He had not called me a liar, though I lied to his face three times in ten minutes. He had just watched me. Patient. Unmoving. A predator that did not need to snarl.

His eyes had been the worst. Dark. Focused. Seeing too much.

I know what loyalty looks like, Cara, he had said softly. I also know what it costs.

I pushed away from the glass now, irritation prickling under my skin. I did not like that his words lingered. I did not like that the neat stack of photos in the interrogation room felt heavier than any chain.

Maybe that was the point.

The Ashfords were tightening the net around me. Not with restraints. With logic. With intel. With relentless proximity.

And heat.

I moved back from the window and paced the length of my room. Twelve steps from bed to door. Eleven and a half back, because I always stopped short and turned before I reached the window again. Habit. Control. Small parameters I could own when everything else was monitored.

The room itself looked like something from a luxury retreat. Big bed. Thick blankets. Shelves half filled with books Damien kept bringing me “just in case I get bored.” A wide window overlooking the mountain slope and the valley below. The kind of place people paid obscene amounts of money to escape to for the weekend.

For me, it was just another cell with softer edges.

Liam had walked me back here after the interrogation. No hand on my arm. No shove. Just that measured stride at my side. When we reached the door, he had paused.

“If you need more pain meds, ask Ryan,” he had said.

“I am fine.”

“You are stitched together in six places and your body is still flushing out sedatives. You are not fine.”

He had looked at me then, a long, assessing sweep of his gaze. Not clinical. Not leering. Just… seeing. Cataloguing.

“I know you think you can carry this alone,” he added quietly. “But isolation is a choice. Not a strength.”

I had smiled at him then. Slow. Sharp.

“Funny,” I had said. “I was about to tell you the same thing.”

His mouth had twitched, like he wanted to smile and did not trust himself with it. Then he had left, closing the door behind him with a soft click that still sounded like a lock.

Now I sank onto the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, fingers laced together so tightly my knuckles whitened.

Maybe my brothers are not coming.

The thought slid in, quick and cold, before I could slam the door on it.

I breathed out slowly, counting the exhale in my head. One, two, three. I had learned this trick years ago, watching a man bleed out on my father’s rug. If you could control your breath, you could control your mind. If you controlled your mind, you controlled the room.

I had built an empire on that principle. I am Cara Navarro. Daughter of war. Sister of kings. I did not become queen of South America’s deadliest cartel by folding under pressure.

Snow whispered against the pane, soft and relentless, like someone erasing the world and redrawing it clean.

Behind me, footsteps approached in the hall. Steady. Familiar.

One of the brothers. Coming back for another round. Another question. Another push.

They were getting close. Too close.

And if I was not careful, part of me would not survive them. Not the part they thought they could break.

The part I had never given to anyone.

Not... yet.