Chapter 16: The Red Carpet and the Assault
The car door slammed, sealing them into a sudden, pressurized silence. The roar of the crowd, the shouting, the frantic flash of cameras—it all cut off like a severed wire. Inside the black SUV, the world was muted, leather-scented, and cold. Cymra stared straight ahead, her left arm cradled in her right hand where the man’s fingers had dug in. She could still feel the imprint, a ghost-grip of panic.
“Drive,” Pedro said, his voice low and rough. The car pulled away from the curb, smooth and swift, leaving the chaos behind as a glowing, receding diorama.
He turned to her, his hands hovering, unsure where to land. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” She uncurled her fingers, looked at her forearm. In the passing glow of streetlights, faint red marks were already visible. Not a wound. A brand. “He just… scared me.”
“Hijo de puta,” Pedro hissed, the words explosive in the quiet cabin. He punched the seat beside him, a dull, frustrated thud. “I should have—”
“You should have done exactly what you did,” Cymra interrupted, finally looking at him. His face was pale, his eyes dark pools of a fury so deep it looked like pain. The perfectly styled hair from the carpet was now ruffled where he’d run his hands through it. His tuxedo jacket was twisted. “Getting into a fight on the red carpet? That’s what he’d want. That’s the story.”
“He touched you.” Pedro said it like it was a sacrilege, a fundamental rewriting of the rules of his world. “He screamed his name at you.”
“He was a message.” Her own voice sounded disturbingly calm, detached. The shock was metabolizing into a cold, clear certainty. “A delayed one. Probably hired days ago, just to wait for us. To remind you he can reach out, even from there.” She didn’t say Buenos Aires. She didn’t have to.
Pedro leaned forward, rapping on the partition. It slid down. “Change of plan,” he told the driver, a new man Leo had vetted. “We’re not going home. We’re going to the place. You have the coordinates.”
The driver, a man built like a stump with a neck that strained his collar, nodded once. “The gate code, sir?”
“We don’t have one yet. We’ll figure it out when we get there. Just drive.”
The partition slid back up. Pedro sank back, undoing his bow tie with a sharp tug. The limp black silk hung around his neck. He reached for her again, this time his hand covering hers on the seat between them. His skin was fever-hot. “You’re shaking.”
She was. A fine, constant tremor she hadn’t noticed until he said it. She laced her fingers through his, clinging to the heat. “Adrenaline. It’ll pass.”
“I want to kill him.” Pedro said it simply, staring out at the neon smear of Sunset Boulevard. “Not a figure of speech. I have this… clear image. I’ve never had that before.”
A chill that had nothing to do with the car’s AC crept down Cymra’s spine. This was new. The Pedro she knew wielded charm, deflection, quiet pain. Not this grim, specific violence. “That’s what he’s trying to turn you into,” she whispered. “Don’t let him.”
He brought her hand to his lips, pressed them against her knuckles. A tremor ran through him too. “When he grabbed you… for a second, I was back there. In that hotel room in Madrid. The feeling. The powerlessness.” He shook his head, as if to dislodge the memory. “It’s not going to stop, is it? The blocked numbers, the hired hands. It’s just the opening move.”
“Probably not,” she admitted. There was no point in soft-soaping it now. The facade was in the rearview mirror, literally. “But our move isn’t to stand there and take it. Our move is the gate. The long driveway. The house with the terrible kitchen.”
He managed a fractured smile. “The avocado tomb.”
“Exactly.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. The city lights blurred past. “We’re doing the thing. We’re leaving. He can send all the messages he wants to an empty stage.”
They drove in silence for a while, the only sound the hum of the tires on asphalt. Cymra closed her eyes, not sleeping, but replaying the moment. The blur of the dark hoodie. The spit flecking the man’s chin as he screamed Rafael sends his love! The animal wildness in his eyes. It wasn’t a fan. It was a paid projectile. A human shout.
“My phone is buzzing,” Pedro murmured after twenty minutes. It was in the inner pocket of his discarded jacket, a persistent, muffled vibration against the leather seat.
“Leo,” Cymra guessed.
“And every outlet on the planet.” He made no move to get it. “The kiss was a good move. Deflective. But the attack… that’s the lead now.”
“Let Leo handle it. That’s his job as your PA with Sharyn, your agent. Our job is to see our crumbling hacienda by moonlight.”
He laughed, a short, exhausted breath. “You’re terrifying. You know that?”
“I’m practical.” She sat up, smoothing the silk of her dress. The elegant emerald gown was now a costume from a play that had turned into a nightmare. “We have the bag in the trunk. We have a tank of gas. We have a driver who looks like he chews nails. This is the plan. We’re executing it.”
An hour later, the city’s grip loosened. The bright commercial strips gave way to darker, winding roads climbing into the hills. The driver’s GPS emitted soft, decisive tones. Cymra watched the world shrink from sprawling metropolis to vague shapes of chaparral and shadowed canyon.
“It’s up here,” the driver said, his voice gravelly through the speaker. “Road gets rough.”
The paved surface gave way to packed dirt and gravel, the car’s suspension groaning as it navigated potholes. Overgrown oleander branches scraped against the sides like insistent fingers. They rounded a final bend, and there it was.
The gate.
In the headlights, it was even more massive than in the photos—wrought iron, ornate with scrolling fleur-de-lis now crusted with rust, strung with old, woody vines. It was chained and padlocked, a prehistoric creature slumped across the road. Beyond it, the driveway disappeared into a tunnel of untamed oak trees.
“Told you,” Pedro said, a thread of genuine awe in his voice. “A monster.”
He got out of the car. The night air was cool and smelled of dust, sage, and distant eucalyptus. Cymra followed, the fine gravel crunching under her heels. She hugged herself, suddenly aware of the vast, quiet dark surrounding their small island of light.
Pedro walked up to the gate, grabbed two of the bars, and shook. The whole structure rattled with a sound like grinding teeth, but it held. Solid. He peered through the scrollwork into the absolute black beyond. “We’re climbing it.”
“In this?” Cymra gestured to her floor-length gown.
“We have clothes in the bag.” He was already walking back to the trunk, popping it open. He pulled out their duffel, unzipped it on the hood of the car, and tossed her a pair of jeans, a sweater, and her trusted sneakers. “Change behind the car. I’ll keep watch.”
The mundane urgency of it—changing out of a designer gown on a dirt road at midnight—felt surreal. She shimmied out of the silk, the cold air raising goosebumps on her skin, and pulled on the soft, familiar clothes. The sneakers grounded her. When she emerged, Pedro had changed too into dark jeans and a hoodie, his tuxedo stuffed unceremoniously into the bag.
He looked at the driver. “You should go back. We’ll call you when we need a pick-up. Probably tomorrow.”
The man nodded. “You’re sure? This is… remote.”
“That’s the point,” Pedro said.
They waited until the red taillights vanished around the bend, leaving them in a darkness so complete it felt physical. The only light came from Pedro’s phone flashlight. He pointed it at the gate. “You first. I’ll spot you.”
The climb was inelegant and brutal. The rust flaked off in orange flakes, staining their hands. The ornate points threatened to catch and tear. Cymra hauled herself up, grateful for the sneakers finding purchase, her heart pounding from exertion, not fear. At the top, she swung a leg over, hesitated for a second looking down into the deeper black of the other side, and dropped. The landing was soft in a patch of dry weeds.
A moment later, Pedro landed beside her, breathing heavily. He swept the flashlight beam down the driveway. It was a strip of broken asphalt swallowed by vegetation, leading into the belly of the property.
They started walking. The night sounds emerged now that the car was gone: the scuttle of unseen animals, the sigh of the wind in the oaks, the distant, maddening buzz of a single cicada. The beam of light caught the glittering eyes of a possum frozen in the undergrowth before it vanished.
After five minutes, the trees thinned, and the house emerged.
It was a silhouette against the starlit sky, low and spreading, the clay tile roof sagging in the middle. The courtyard wall had crumbled in one section. The fountain was a dark mound. It was a ruin. It was perfect.
Pedro’s light traveled over the cracked front door, the boarded-up window. “Well,” he whispered. “We’re here.”
He tried the door. It was locked, but the wood around the old lock was rotten. He put his shoulder to it, once, twice, and with a splintering crack, it gave way. The sound was shockingly loud in the sleeping stillness.
The inside was a museum of dust and abandonment. The flashlight beam cut through the dark, revealing the sad green kitchen, the living room with a collapsed beam, the Saltillo tiles cracked and missing like broken teeth. The air was dry and still, thick with the scent of decay and old plaster.
They didn’t speak. They walked room to room, their footsteps echoing in the emptiness. Pedro’s light lingered on the arched fireplace, on the intricate, cobwebbed corbels holding up the ceiling. In a small back room with a relatively intact window, moonlight streamed in, painting a silver rectangle on the floor.
Cymra stood in it, bathing in the cool light. She looked out the window at the wild, overgrown garden, the skeletal lemon tree. “This is the room,” she said. “For the writing nook. Right here.”
Pedro came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder. He was solid and warm against her back. “We can fix the beam. We can replant the garden.” He nuzzled into her hair. “We can be safe here.”
It was a hope, whispered into a ruin. A declaration against the evidence of crumbling walls.
Suddenly, his body tensed. His head came up. “Did you hear that?”
She listened. The wind. The cicada. Then, a new sound—the distant, muffled crunch of gravel. The faintest glow of light, wavering through the trees from the direction of the gate.
Headlights. A car, moving slowly up their long, private driveway.
Every muscle in Pedro’s body locked. Cymra felt his breath stop. The message hadn’t just been for the red carpet. The message had follow-up capabilities. The quiet they’d driven two hours to find was already broken.
Pedro let go of her, moving quickly. He snapped off his flashlight, plunging them into near-total darkness save for the moonlight. He took her hand, his grip vise-tight, and pulled her back from the window, into the deeper shadow of the hallway.
“The back,” he breathed into her ear. “There’s a broken wall in the courtyard. We go out that way, into the hills.”
The headlight glow grew brighter, painting moving shapes on the walls of the empty house. The engine cut off. Doors opened, then closed. Not one. Two.
Footsteps on the gravel path outside. A beam of a powerful flashlight swept across the boarded-up windows.
Cymra’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drum matching the rhythm from the red carpet. The escape had lasted less than an hour. Pedro’s hand found hers in the dark. His touch was no longer just an anchor. It was a fuse, and the night was a match.
The footsteps stopped near the shattered front door. A beam of light stabbed into the living room, dancing over the fallen beam.
“Place is a dump,” a man’s voice said, flat and unimpressed. “You sure this is it?”
A second voice, higher, tighter. “Gate was forced. Recent. They’re here.”
Cymra’s blood went cold. They knew. Pedro’s hand tightened on hers, then released. He pointed toward the back wall of the hallway, to a jagged hole where the adobe had crumbled away into the courtyard. His expression in the slivered moonlight wasn’t fear anymore. It was calculation. A cold, sharp clarity.
He leaned so close his lips brushed her ear. “Not the hills. They’ll expect that.”
He moved, silent in his sneakers, guiding her through the hole. They were in the courtyard now, the ruined fountain between them and the house. The headlights of the idling car washed the far wall, but this corner was deep shadow.
“Pedro Valenzuela!” the first voice called out from inside the house. It echoed in the empty spaces. “Just want to talk! Your friend Rafael is concerned.”
The lie was so blatant it was an insult. Cymra felt a surge of something hot and acidic wash away the last of her shock. Concern. The red carpet, the grabbing hands, now this violation of their ruin. A plan clicked into place in her head, simple and brutal.
She yanked on Pedro’s sleeve, pulling him down behind the bulk of the fountain. “The kitchen window,” she breathed. “The one that’s boarded up from the outside.”
He understood instantly. The old green kitchen shared a wall with the living room. If the men were searching the front rooms, they could loop around.
They scurried, hunched low, along the courtyard wall. Every crunch of their feet on broken pottery seemed deafening. They slipped through another gap into the narrow side yard, thorns from an untamed rose bush catching on Cymra’s sweater.
The boarded kitchen window was just ahead. One plank was loose.
From inside the house, the beams of light swept wildly now. “Check the back! He said the bitch would run.”
The word was a spark. Pedro didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the loose plank and pulled. The rusty nail gave with a shriek of protesting wood.
He froze. The footsteps inside halted.
Cymra didn’t. She was already moving, scrambling through the low window frame, tumbling into the pitch-black kitchen. Her hands landed on the gritty floor. She remembered the layout. The doorway to the living room was to her left.
Pedro tumbled in after her, pulling the board mostly closed behind them.
The flashlights were in the next room, probing the hallway they’d just vacated. Cymra stood up. Her hand found the chipped enamel edge of the old counter. Her fingers closed around something heavy and cool. A cast-iron skillet, left behind in the decay.
She hefted its weight. It felt solid. Final.
Pedro saw it. His eyes widened, then narrowed. He looked around, his own hands searching the darkness. They closed around the long, smooth handle of a fire poker, leaning in a corner near the dead stove. It was flecked with rust and old cobwebs.
They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. The two men were muttering to each other now, their voices moving closer, back toward the kitchen doorway. The beams of their lights swept the floor ahead of them.
Cymra flattened herself against the wall beside the doorframe. Pedro took the other side. The rotten smell of the house filled her nose. She could hear her own pulse in her ears. She watched Pedro’s profile. He was still. Not the frozen stillness of fear, but the coiled stillness of a decision made.
The first man stepped into the doorway.
He was just a silhouette, backlit by his own flashlight held in his left hand. His right hand was empty. He took one step into the kitchen.
Pedro moved.
It wasn’t a wild swing. It was a hard, efficient thrust. The fire poker connected with the man’s flashlight hand with a sickening crack of plastic and bone. The man howled, the light clattering to the floor and rolling, sending lunatic shadows spinning up the walls.
The second man shouted, rushing forward.
Cymra swung.
The skillet connected with the second man’s shoulder as he charged through the door. The impact jarred up her arms, a satisfying, metallic thud. He grunted, stumbling sideways into the first man.
It was chaos for three seconds. A tangle of curses and scrambling limbs in the strobing light from the fallen flashlight.
Pedro didn’t stop. He grabbed the first man by the jacket, shoving him hard back into the living room. The man tripped over the collapsed beam and went down hard.
The second man, gripping his shoulder, looked from Pedro with the fire poker to Cymra, who was already raising the skillet again. Her face was set. Her breath came in sharp gusts. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t pleading.
“You tell Rafael,” Pedro said, his voice low and thick with an accent he usually hid. “You tell him the message was received. And the answer is no.”
The man on the floor scrambled back. The one in the doorway backed up, hands raised. “Jesus, man. It was just a job.”
“Get out,” Cymra said. The words didn’t sound like hers. They were ground out from somewhere deep and newly uncovered. “Before I forget I’m not a violent person.”
The two men didn’t need convincing. They stumbled back through the house, a blur of panic, out the broken door. The car engine roared to life a moment later, tires spinning gravel as it reversed wildly down the drive.
The red taillights vanished.
Silence rushed back in, deeper now, absolute. The only light was the solitary flashlight on the floor, its beam pointed at the wall, illuminating a streak of swirling dust.
Pedro was breathing heavily, still gripping the poker. He looked at Cymra. She slowly lowered the skillet. Her arms were trembling now, the adrenaline bleeding out, leaving her weak.
He dropped the poker. It rang against the tile. In two steps he was across the room, his hands coming up to frame her face. “Are you okay? Did they touch you?”
She shook her head, the movement slight against his palms. “No. You?”
He nodded, his eyes searching hers. Then a laugh broke out of him, a shocked, ragged sound. “You swung a frying pan.”
“It was a skillet,” she corrected, her own laugh bubbling up, hysterical and light. “There’s a difference.”
He pulled her to him, crushing her in an embrace. She could feel the frantic beat of his heart against her cheek. They stood like that in the dark kitchen, holding onto each other, the weapons at their feet.
After a long moment, he spoke into her hair. “They’ll be back. Or he’ll send others.”
Cymra leaned back, looking up at him. The rolling flashlight beam carved his face in light and shadow. The charming actor was gone. In his place was someone older, harder, utterly certain. “Let them,” she said. “This is our place.”
He kissed her then. It wasn’t like the red carpet kiss for the cameras. This was desperate and grateful and fierce. A seal on a pact written in rust and cast iron.
When they parted, he picked up the fallen flashlight. He took the skillet from her limp hand and set it on the counter. “We’re not hiding,” he said. He walked to the front door, looked out at the empty driveway. “We’re fortifying.”
He pulled out his dead phone, then put it away. Useless. “We need a new gate. A real one. With a code. And lights. And a lawyer who isn’t afraid of Argentine exiles with bruised egos.”
Cymra joined him at the doorway, the night air cool on her face. The fear was gone. In its place was a weary, solid anger. A resource. “And a security system. And a big dog.”
“Two dogs,” Pedro amended. He slipped an arm around her waist. “We fight back. Here. On our terms. Not by running. By building a wall he can’t climb.”
In the distance, the city glowed, a hazy aurora over the hills. But here, there was only the dark, the dust, and the two of them standing in the broken doorway of a house they would now defend.