Chapter 10 Chapter 10: The Guard on the Payroll
I woke up to a message from Carla.
Laurita, I got home safe. Love you. If you get tired of taking care of the CEO, come over to the apartment. I’ve got beer and TV shows.
I replied with a heart emoji and put the phone away. At seven thirty, Gloria came upstairs with coffee.
“Laura. Mr. Manuel wants to see you in the study at nine.”
“What for?”
“She didn’t say. But he’s wearing the face he makes when decisions have to be made.”
At nine, I walked into the study. Manuel behind the desk. Derek standing by the window with his arms crossed. The two of them together meant the conversation wouldn’t be short.
“Laura, sit down.”
I sat. Manuel didn’t waste time.
“We have the guard. The one Marcelo was paying.”
“Which one?”
“Ramón Esparza. Seven years in the house. Used to be my driver before moving to the east wing night shift.”
“How did you confirm it?”
“Derek tracked his bank account. Three deposits in six months, all from a shell company traced back to one of Marcelo’s branches in Mexico. Five hundred thousand each.”
I let out a low whistle. That was four years of my ER salary.
“Where is he now?”
“In the basement,” Derek said. “We picked him up last night.”
He said it with the same casual tone someone uses to say in the kitchen. I remembered my contract had a clause about security directives. I was starting to understand what kind of directives those were.
“Manuel, did you bring me here to ask if I want to attend the interrogation?”
“I brought you here to ask whether you want to be present for the conversation I’m having with him this afternoon. As Ethan’s wife, it concerns you.”
“I’m a nurse, Manuel. If Ramón comes out of that basement hurt, call me and I’ll patch him up. If he comes out dead, call somebody else. But I want nothing to do with the interrogation.”
Manuel looked at me for a long moment. He didn’t get angry. He made a small gesture with his head, almost approving.
“Good.”
“One thing, Manuel. I need him alive.”
“Why?”
“Because seven years in this house means he knows names. And you don’t get names out of a corpse.”
Manuel and Derek exchanged a glance. Manuel nodded.
“Alive. But talking.”
“Talking. Sounds fair.”
I left the study. In the hallway I crossed paths with Derek. He held my gaze for a second without saying anything, then gave the slightest nod.
For the first time, I felt like he and I were on the same side, even though neither of us had asked for it.
I went back upstairs to the suite. Checked Ethan’s vitals. Heart rate eighty-five. Climbing slowly, day by day.
I sat at the foot of the bed.
“Cavalier, I’ve got news for you. Your brother was paying one of your guards five hundred thousand every six months. They caught him last night. He’s in the basement.”
No movement.
“Your grandfather invited me to the interrogation. I said no. But I asked him to keep the man alive. Your brother didn’t get only one person into this house, that’s for sure. And the others come out with patience, not corpses.”
No change.
“Well, I’ll leave you to think about it. I’m going downstairs to eat.”
I had lunch with Marcela. I told her about the guard. She didn’t flinch. She was a woman who’d spent thirty years married to a Cavalier and could eat chicken while discussing basements.
“What did you tell my father-in-law?”
“That I didn’t want to attend the interrogation.”
“Good.”
“Good according to who?”
“According to me. And according to the woman you’ll become in five years, Laura. The wives in this house who go into the basement lose their way back out. You still have yours.”
“Marcela.”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever gone into the basement?”
“Once. Twenty-two years ago. Don’t ask me anything else.”
She lowered her eyes to her plate. I didn’t ask anything else.
At five, Derek came upstairs to the suite. Two knocks, then he entered without waiting. He looked more tired than usual.
“Ma’am.”
“Derek. Did he talk?”
“He talked.”
“Tell me.”
“He’d been taking money from Marcelo for eighteen months. It started with letting him into the house twice a month, then once a week. The last time was yesterday morning, when Marcelo came upstairs with the syringe. He got a message at six twenty a.m. on a phone he kept hidden in his locker, not his regular one.”
“And the others?”
“He gave us two more names. One day-shift guard, and a maid who quit a month ago. We’re looking for the maid. The guard’s already out of the house.”
“And names higher up? The people financing Marcelo. His contacts in Mexico. Anything.”
Derek shook his head.
“Ramón only dealt directly with Marcelo. He’s the last link in the chain, ma’am. He’s already told us everything he knows.”
“You sure?”
“I left him alone for twenty minutes after the first round. If he had more, he would’ve given it up in those twenty minutes. People remember everything they forgot when they’re alone in a basement.”
I nodded.
“What do we do with him?”
“Mr. Manuel is asking the same thing, ma’am. That decision is yours now, not his. You asked us to keep him alive.”
I looked at him. It was true. The old man had passed the ball to me.
“Derek, one question. If we let him go, will he tell Marcelo he talked?”
“He’ll tell him.”
“And if we lock him up?”
“Manuel doesn’t have a private prison, ma’am. What he has is a basement.”
“And if we hand him over to the police?”
Derek smiled faintly. Short, professional.
“Ma’am, in this family, we don’t hand people over to the police. The police are for enemies. Family matters are handled at home.”
I thought for a while.
Ramón had driven the car that let Marcelo into the house to kill my husband. He’d spent seven years collecting money from the Cavaliers and eighteen months collecting from both sides. I didn’t pity him.
But I also didn’t feel like sending him into the garden at night.
“Derek.”
“Yes.”
“Keep him in the basement. Until Ethan makes the decision himself.”
Derek raised one eyebrow by a millimeter.
“Until Mr. Ethan wakes up?”
“Until Mr. Ethan wakes up.”
I said it while looking toward the bed, without turning around. Knowing perfectly well the man in the bed could hear every word.
“Yes, ma’am.”
He left.
That night, before turning out the light, I sat on the edge of Ethan’s bed.
“Cavalier. You spent the whole day thinking, I know. I heard you breathe harder than normal three times. Three extra beats on the monitor when Derek mentioned the maid. I wrote that down, in case you ask me about it tomorrow.”
No movement.
“I’m leaving a man alive in the basement so you can decide what happens to him, not your grandfather. When you wake up, you decide. Until then, he stays there. Eating whatever Derek feeds him.”
Pause.
“And one more thing. Your brother didn’t enter this house alone. Ramón, the day guard, a maid. Three already. And that’s only what we know. There are more.”
I turned off the lamp. Lay down on my side.
“See you tomorrow, Cavalier. Hurry up with the official waking-up. This house is starting to outrun us.”
A few minutes later, I heard him take a deep breath on the other side of the mattress. A breath slightly longer than a man in a coma should have.
I stayed awake for a while afterward—not because of insomnia.
Out of habit.
Chapter 11: Physical Therapy
Laura had spent ten days bathing Ethan Cavalier without looking at his face twice in a row.
Not out of shyness. Strategy.
An ER nurse learns early that when the patient is too handsome, staring too long means losing your professionalism. And she’d lost too many things that week already to lose that too.
But that morning she had the full session.
Vargas had written it clearly in the chart the afternoon before: daily passive therapy, upper limbs, lower limbs, torso. Muscle tone preserved, stimulate to prevent atrophy.
He’d underlined daily passive therapy twice, as if it were impossible to forget.
Laura understood the order.
What the order didn’t explain was how exactly you perform daily passive therapy on a man who’s six-foot-three, weighs two hundred pounds, and looks like a Greek god with a fresh surgical scar.
She pulled the blanket down to his waist.
“Cavalier, I’m about to manhandle you for forty minutes. If you wake up at any point and catch me doing this, don’t look at me weird. I’m doing it because it’s in the chart. Vargas ordered it in writing.”
No movement.
Of course not. She knew he wouldn’t move.
She started with his left hand. Took his wrist, flexed his fingers one by one, rotated the elbow, lifted and lowered the arm. Thirty repetitions. Same thing on the other side.
Then she moved to his chest. Gentle compressions, massage to stimulate circulation, careful around the scar because it was still too early to touch it directly. Laura’s hands moved over Ethan’s skin with the same precision they moved over any patient’s body. No trembling. No hesitation. Professional.
“Cavalier, just letting you know, I’m moving on to the legs.”
She bent his right knee, lowered it slowly, rotated his ankle, flexed his foot. Did the same with the left.
Then she moved higher.
“Now for the part that’s probably making somebody up there laugh at me.”
She rotated his hip. Slowly. Gently. Professionally. One hand braced against his thigh to stabilize the knee, the other supporting the weight of his femur.
She’d done this a thousand times with bedridden patients.
Twice with attractive patients.
And both times had gone fine.
This was the third.
Thirty seconds in, she felt her ears getting hot.
“Oh no.”
At forty seconds, she laughed at herself.
“Thirty years of hard work just to end up groping a comatose billionaire under contract. Mom, if you’re watching this, forgive me. But laugh a little too.”
She finished the rotation. Pulled the blanket back up to his waist. Straightened up, wiped her hands on her uniform, brushed sweat from her forehead with her wrist.
“Cavalier, let me tell you one thing. When you wake up, don’t get smart with me. I touched you when I was allowed to because it was my job. Once it stops being my job, don’t you touch me without permission. Clear?”
She walked out of the suite to get water.
Inside Ethan Cavalier’s body, after the door shut, something happened that hadn’t happened in ten days.
He opened his eyes.
Just for a second. Long enough to look at the ceiling.
Then he closed them again.
Opened them. Closed them.
He couldn’t keep them open for two reasons.
First: the muscles in his eyelids hadn’t worked in seven months, and they burned like sand had been poured into them.
Second—and more urgently—the woman who’d just spent forty minutes doing physical therapy on him could walk back in at any second, and if she found him awake, the little performance he’d spent ten days carefully maintaining would collapse immediately.
But there was another reason.
The third one.
The one he didn’t want to think about.
That woman had just spent forty minutes with her hands all over his body, and his thirty-year-old post-surgical body—with a foreign heart beating inside it—had reacted exactly the way a thirty-year-old man’s body reacts when a woman touches him for forty straight minutes.
He looked down.
Pulled the blanket over himself.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath, speaking to himself for the first time in a week without Derek present. “Shit, shit, shit.”
He closed his eyes. Took three deep breaths, slowly, carefully regulating the new heart. Because if the new heart sped up now, the monitor would betray him, and if the monitor betrayed him, Laura would walk in and understand everything in two seconds.
He waited.
The heartbeat slowed.
Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. Seventy-nine.
Stable.
Good.
He waited another full minute until his body obeyed him completely.
Then he opened his eyes again. Looked at the ceiling.
It was the first time in ten days he’d allowed himself to look at the ceiling in daylight with fully open eyes, and he realized something he’d never noticed before:
The ceiling in the east wing suite had a thin crack running from the chandelier to the window.
A crack he had never once noticed in thirty years of living in that house.
The things you notice when you’re finally looking.
He closed his eyes before she came back.
That same night, at eleven twenty, Ethan Cavalier left the mansion for the first time in seven months.
He came down the east wing staircase barefoot again, robe thrown over a pair of loose pants Derek had left at the foot of the bed. He crossed the back garden, no guards visible because Derek had rotated the shifts for that half hour.
At the far end, beside the stone wall, a metal service door led down into the basement.
Derek was waiting at the bottom of the concrete stairs.
“Boss.”
“Derek.”
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
The basement hallway smelled like dampness and old oil.
Three doors.
Derek opened the middle one.
Inside, tied to a chair by the wrists, head hanging low, lip split from the morning’s session, sat Ramón Esparza.
When he heard footsteps, he lifted his head.
And what he saw was Ethan Cavalier—the man supposedly in a coma two floors upstairs—standing in front of him alive, awake, with a new heart beating in his chest.
Something inside him gave way.
He pissed himself without realizing it.
“Ramón.”
“Mr. Ethan…”
“Don’t say Mr. Talk.”
“I… I didn’t know you were…”
“That part doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is this. This afternoon you told Derek everything you knew about my brother. I believe you. But I brought you down here for one reason only.”
Ramón swallowed hard.
“My wife kept you alive. Do you know who my wife is?”
“The nurse, sir.”
“My wife, Ramón. Learn the word. And my wife kept you alive because she thought a corpse isn’t useful for giving names. I respect my wife’s decision.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But I’m going to ask you one question. Just one. And your answer determines whether I continue respecting my wife’s decision—or revise it. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ethan stepped closer. Rested a hand on the guard’s shoulder with the softness of a man greeting an old friend.
“The maid who quit a month ago. I want the name, the address, the bank, the amount, and the family. If I’m missing even one thing, my wife loses. Understood?”
Ramón was crying from fear.
“Beatriz Linares, sir.”
Ethan went still for one second.
“What did you say?”
“Beatriz Linares, sir. Your brother got her into the house seven months ago through the same agency, along with the other one. Both of them worked for him.”
“Who’s the other one?”
Ramón closed his eyes. Wondered whether it was worth it.
Decided it was.
“I don’t know, sir. Only Beatriz knew. And Beatriz is already dead.”
At eleven forty, Ethan went back upstairs to the suite. Derek behind him, silent.
“Boss.”
“Yes.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I did.”
“And the other one?”
“The other one is in this house, Derek. And my wife is sleeping on top of her.”
Derek didn’t answer. He stayed standing at the bottom of the service staircase while Ethan climbed upstairs.
In the suite, Laura slept on her side of the bed—the left side—without touching him.
Ethan lay down carefully on the right side, not touching her either.
Before closing his eyes, he looked once more at the crack in the ceiling.
“Not yet, Laura,” he whispered softly, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “Not yet. But soon.”
He closed his eyes.
A few minutes later, from the left side of the mattress, she shifted slightly toward him in her sleep.
He didn’t move.
But the new heart jumped three beats before he managed to calm it back down.
This time, he didn’t care if the monitor gave him away.