Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 106948 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106948 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
I stared with unseeing eyes at a window, looking out into the dark night, the thoughts of how I was going to torture those responsible for her death soothing me.
Chapter 1
Leo – Age 28
The darkness within my cold heart held no pity for the once beautiful woman trapped in the dog cage bolted to the floor, dirty and beaten. If anything, I wish we’d had longer to torture her, longer to keep her in the same pain her young son, Jason, had experienced at the hands of his kidnappers. Kidnappers his mother had hired to hold him for ransom.
I’ve always known Nina was a no-good ruthless bitch, but Fernando, one of my best friends and the son of the Cordova cartel leader, loved and married the bitch when she’d turned up pregnant, so I’d tolerated her. But now the sight of her disgusted me so much, I spat on her cringing form, fury sending a throbbing rush of strength into my clenched hands, urging me to dole out a richly deserved punishment.
“You wanna know how we found him, your beloved son?” I snarled. “Beaten, filthy, tied up with wire that had cut his wrists so deep it was embedded in his flesh, missing three of his fingers and one of his ears—dead, having choked to death on his own vomit because they gagged him too tight. So fucking tight the corners of his mouth were ripped open. All for fucking money.”
I wanted to kick the cage again, to have another hour to draw more pain from her body, but Nina’s mother-in-law, Judith Cordova, was about to arrive, and she was going to demand her pound of flesh from the treacherous cunt whimpering in her own filth.
The hermetically sealed door behind me hissed open and I tried to calm my breathing as I went over to one of the industrial sinks in the corner of the interrogation chamber and began to wash Nina’s blood from my skin. Normally I protected myself against any contamination from other people’s bodily fluids; I dealt with too many nasty fucks who’d stick their dicks in any pussy offered to them. But I wanted to feel Nina suffer, to feel her tremble and writhe from the pain I was inflicting while trying to purge from my head the memory of Fernando’s screams as he held his son’s battered body.
Tears and heavy emotions were something that seldom bothered me, but I understood the loss of family enough that it awakened my rarely felt compassion. So while Fernando had been unable to personally deal with his betraying wife, I had stepped in for him, trying to ease his burden in any way I could by making sure she paid.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t come close to slaking my blood lust, but I had to step aside as hushed voices spoke quietly behind me, the sound of Nina’s moans and sobs almost drowning them out, but one woman’s strained voice I recognized.
Judith was here to collect the debt Nina owed Fernando’s family.
Dressed from head to toe in a stylish black pantsuit and decked out in tasteful diamonds, for once Judith looked like shit. Her normally carefully styled, short silver hair that framed her wrinkled but classically beautiful face was in disarray, the deep lines around her mouth betraying her grief. But her eyes, her dark eyes—much like my own—glittered with pure insanity. Not many people were aware of it, but Judith could sometimes lose her grip on reality and do some crazy shit in her rage. I had a feeling I was about to witness the demon that lived inside the wife of the head of the cartel I worked for come to life.
Behind her, two of her nephews came in, along with her son Ramón. Her other son, Diego, was no doubt with Fernando and their father, Jose. Diego and Fernando were twins, so they tended to rely on each other in times of crisis, and Jose was there to help keep Fernando from trying to take his life—again. A shudder ripped up my spine as I remembered the sound of my friend screaming in complete and total agony until his voice broke.
Judith strode to the middle of the large concrete room in the basement of one of the popular and trendy restaurants she owned, the drain in the floor stained with drying blood. The door hissed opened again and more high-ranking members of the Cordova cartel moved in, until there were around twenty of us circling the room, pressed shoulder to shoulder, all focused on the cage situated beneath the bright floodlight overhead.
My stomach clenched as I realized Judith was about to make an example of her daughter-in-law, one none of us would ever likely forget.
A heavy metal cross let out a teeth-clenching screech as it was dragged across the floor, both men pushing the weighty piece softly grunting beneath its bulk.