by Pam Godwin
“I don’t owe you a goddamn thing.” Fury flushed through his body, hardening his muscles. “Release her.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Myself.”
“What is your business?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“Mr. Smith.” Silvia sidled up beside him and stroked his arm. “You can tell us the easy way. Or we can force you the hard way.”
“You think I would choose a girl over the critical confidentiality of my business?”
“A girl you paid three mil for?” Silvia narrowed her eyes. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“You’ve threatened me, and now it’s my turn.” He directed his gaze over her head and met Marco’s eyes. “You can apologize and escort me and my purchase directly to my plane. Or you can suffer the backlash of my exceptionally powerful and ruthless business partners. I’m connected, Marco, deeply and dangerously, and I will turn every magnate within my far-reaching circle against your cartel. You are fucking with the wrong man.”
That much was true. Between Van Quiso, Tiago Badell, and Matias Restrepo, Luke had some brutally violent allies. Add Cole Hartman into the mix, and they were ingloriously, terrifyingly unstoppable. Whether or not he and Vera died tonight, La Rocha would be annihilated. There was no doubt.
Marco stood so still he didn’t seem to be breathing. Only his eyes moved, scouring Luke’s blank expression. Without looking away, he slowly raised an arm and snapped his fingers.
For an asinine moment, Luke thought he’d won.
Until the man in the kayak tossed a lid off a large container and poured the contents atop the dome on Vera’s head.
Luke lost his mind as a cascade of teeming, shiny black bodies glimmered in the spotlight, tumbling down the mesh sides and hitting the water. Vera’s face froze in a silent scream and quickly vanished behind a writhing wall of spiders as they raced back up the dome, climbing over one another to safety.
The kayak jostled, rocking wildly beneath the man’s sudden and frantic attempt to paddle away. The oar whirled around him as if he were fighting off an invisible monster. Within seconds, he was beached on the shore and running, shouting in Spanish, and slapping at his arms.
“Black widows don’t like water.” Miguel’s amused voice penetrated the panic that lay siege to Luke’s mind. “Eventually, they’ll find their way into her hair and slip under the net. Once they start biting, the venom will attack her nervous system. With her diaphragm in paralysis, she’ll struggle to breathe. Severe abdominal pain will set in, along with tremors in her legs, vomiting, profuse sweating, and swollen eyelids. The number of bites and the depth of the punctures will determine how quickly she dies. That’s if she doesn’t drown first.”
Fear was a vicious, quivering entity inside him. Tunnel vision invaded, and light-headedness crippled him with an overwhelming need to sit down before he fell down. But more than that, he was ruled by the savage, reckless urge to run to her. His legs contracted and burned to go, go, go. Now!
That was what they wanted.
This was the test.
Dozens of eyes watched him from all directions, waiting for him to strip his disguise and rescue the girl.
A slave buyer wouldn’t dare dirty his expensive suit to save the life of a whore. But a cartel sicario or teniente would endure torture and take a bullet before returning to his jefe empty-handed. That would be career-ending. Life-ending. The ultimate disgrace.
To survive this, he had to prove to them that he wasn’t with an enemy cartel. He was John Smith, shrewd businessman and unfeeling slave owner.
He stood motionless, ice-cold and dead inside, calling their bluff.
Seconds stretched. Spiders swarmed. His lungs refused air.
The longer he waited, the more deadly Vera’s predicament became.
Seeing her smothered beneath a blanket of black widows burned away the lining of his stomach and turned his guts inside out. There was only so much stress a body could bear—hers and his.
With her mouth forced open, her limbs restrained in murky water, and her head enveloped by a hood of venomous spiders, her panic would’ve exceeded volcanic by now.
Long black hair floated around her, skimming the surface and providing a landing place for clinging legs. Were they swimming beneath the dome? Sinking fangs into her tender skin? Injecting her with venom?
Enough.
Everything inside him switched gears. Tendons turned to steel. Muscles flexed around fortifying joints. Adrenaline spiked, and his mind cleared.
He would die for her.
He didn’t remember removing his suit, but by the time he reached the pond’s edge, every stitch of clothing was gone except his pants and shoes. He toed off the latter and scooped them up to use as weapons against the spiders. Then he calmly waded into the chilly water.
“What are you doing, Mr. Smith?” Marco asked, not bothering to chase him.
“Retrieving my property.” He wouldn’t survive their gunfire, but he would do everything in his power to ensure that she escaped.
Beyond the spotlight’s beam, he waited until the water rose to his hips before discreetly removing the key card and phone from his pocket. Both went into one shoe, which he kept above the water and shielded from their view.
“Come back here,” Marco called in a bored tone. “We will shoot you.”
“Do it, Marco, and you’ll invite an army of enemies you won’t win against.”
“How will they find us?” Marco laughed.
He met the man’s eyes over his shoulder. “How did I find you?”
Marco’s face went taut. Let him stew on that for a while.
As the water rushed over his shoulders, he kept the insides of the shoes dry, floating them smoothly along the surface.
The swim toward her was the longest half-minute of his life. The spot between his shoulder blades tingled beneath the aim of multiple guns.
They could shoot him at any moment, but he counted on them waiting. He was providing them with a show of human suffering and vain hope. It was the ultimate entertainment. They lived for this shit.
He slowed at the center, scanning the illuminated water for squirming black bodies. Thank fuck for the light—
It clicked off, dousing him in pitch black.
“Turn it back on,” he roared, panic setting in.
The laughter of monsters erupted on the shore.
Fuck them. Without the light, he couldn’t see the spiders. But it also meant the cartel couldn’t see him.
He released the shoes, letting them float. Then he inched toward the bobbing spider-covered dome.
“It’s me,” he whispered. “I’m going to remove the gag first. Don’t make a sound when I do.”
He couldn’t see her face through the squirming bodies to know if she was still above water. There were too many, some falling into the black depths around him. He could splash the mesh hood or hit it with a shoe to clear it, but that would just scatter the threat and waste time.
His skin erupted with the sensation of crawling legs, and he spun, shaking himself beneath the surface. His blood pressure exploded, and paranoia set his teeth on edge.
He breathed through it, drew a deep gulp into his lungs, and dove.
His eyes opened to sheer blackness, but he found her legs quickly. Sliding his hands over her jeans, the life vest, and her neck, he reached the surface with questing fingers.
Her skin felt warm and alive, her face still above water. Still breathing.
Hang on, Vera.
There wasn’t enough room in the dome for both of them. So he tucked his head downward, kicked his legs to maintain buoyancy, and blindly unbuckled the spider gag.
A sudden, searing prick erupted on his forearm. He screamed, unable to control the reaction, and his lungs expelled precious bubbles of air.
Motherfucking fuck! That hurt!
It was just one bite. God only knew how many she’d suffered already.
His
pulse pounded as his fingers located her lips and pried the metal ring from her mouth. Pulling the gag away, he tackled the rope on her hands.
He couldn’t hear anything, didn’t know if the cartel was yelling for him. He couldn’t care. His lungs burned for air, but he needed her out of this rope.
When the knot around her hands finally gave, his chest was on fire. He kicked hard, shooting upward and surfacing only long enough to take a huge breath. Then he dove for her feet.
The rope there took longer, the knot too tight to loosen with fingers. He wasted invaluable seconds trying to untie it from the cement block.
They’d done this before. Everything was too perfectly measured. From the anchor to the life vest, her body was stretched in a vertical line, allowing no wriggle room. The dome was fastened to the vest, which she should be able to unzip and slip—
Her knees bent above his hands, eliminating the taut stretch of her legs. She’d removed the vest.
Soft fingers curled around his, and together they tore at the knot around her ankles.
He wanted to sigh beneath her living, breathing touch. He ached to hold her and whisper kisses across her skin and show her how much he loved her.
The rope fell away.
They reached the surface together to the sounds of Marco shouting from the shore.
“Mr. Smith, bring her here.”
“Did you get bitten?” he whispered.
“Just a few times.” She cupped his face in the dark, her legs sliding soundlessly against his as she stayed afloat.
She was close enough that he could make out her exquisitely fierce features. And the movement in her hair.
Near her temple, a black widow clung with long legs, seemingly tangled in a curly lock.
“Oh, God, there’s one in my hair, isn’t there?” Her question rode on a hesitant breath.
“Hold still.” His chest constricted as he pinched the hard black body, cringing as he flung it away.
“Thank you.”
“I love you.”
“Luke—”
He covered her mouth with his hand. “You’re dead.”
“John Smith!” Marco called again.
“She went underwater, goddammit! If she’s dead, I’ll be extremely displeased.” He whirled, finding the shoe with the phone in it floating nearby. He pushed it toward her while pulling her close and whispering quickly. “This contains a phone and Silvia’s key card. My team is on standby in Orange County. Call them. Help them find you. I’m going to create a diversion.”
Her eyes turned colder than the Greenland ice sheet, flickering with flames of rage. “You can go to hell.”
“On my way. But I need you to do this.” He rattled off a phone number, his nerves raging with frantic energy. “Repeat it back to me.”
Her jaw set. Then she whispered the numbers. “I’m not leaving you again.”
“If we both run, we’re both dead. Go.”
Her gaze, as sharp as a blade, absorbed everything from the restless men on the shore to the dense trees on the other side. She knew he was right, and she hated him for it.
“You can’t fake my death,” she said. “They’ll search the pond for my body.”
“That’ll take time and daylight. Avoid the cameras and get to that breach in the wall before sunrise. I know you can do it.” He kissed her hard and fast. Then he pushed away and started screaming.
“Ow! Fuck. Get them off of me!” As he splashed around in the water, he marked her retreat.
She swam beneath the surface, guiding the shoe along the top as she raced to the far shore.
“Get me out of here!” He continued to thrash, moving away from the floating dome of spiders. “I can’t find her, you son of a bitch! Get your men in here and fix this!”
The spotlight switched on, blinding his eyes. It pointed away from the direction she’d swam. The cover of trees should hide her exit from the water, but he kept flailing, ensuring all attention remained on him.
No one came to his rescue. They stood around like the heartless fucks that they were and waited for him to drag his ass to the shore. He took his time and made a lot of noise, giving her an extra minute to flee.
“You killed her.” He trudged out of the pond and collapsed onto his knees, heaving. “You owe me three million and a lot of goddamn groveling. Take me to my plane.”
“I don’t think so.” Marco prowled forward.
Yeah, he hadn’t thought so, either.
As he pushed to stand, he was so focused on not looking for Vera on the far shore that he missed the butt of a rifle swinging toward his head. He saw it just as it collided with his skull.
Pain ricocheted. The ground rose up, and the world went black.
Luke woke without clothes.
The room was austerely gray. Prosaic. No windows. One door. Fluorescent lights. Concrete walls. And a large steel table, which he was bent over. With his feet on the floor, his arms stretched over his head, his hands were shackled with handcuffs—the standard-issue police variety.
It was a cartel interrogation room.
The cuffs connected to a chain that fastened beneath the table. A rod between his ankles forced them apart and secured to something beneath him. He gave the restraints a testing yank. No give.
His skull pounded from the collision with a rifle, and a burning itch flared on his forearm around two red fang marks. But those were the least of his problems.
He wasn’t alone.
“Oh, good,” he murmured, his voice cracking with dry rot. “The whole family is here.”
Ignoring him, Silvia and her four brothers communed beside a wall of shelves filled with fetish equipment and instruments of torture.
He was no stranger to the array of tools that sadists used to correct, fuck, and break a body. Eight years ago, he’d learned how to endure the full spectrum of pain, purgatory and hell, and every torment in between. He’d barely survived those weeks.
I won’t survive it again.
That disparaging thought was overshadowed by a more pressing one.
Vera.
Was she still alive? Had she made it through the breach in the wall? What if she’d been bitten too many times to recover?
He shook off his worst fears and fantasized about her sprinting through the junkyard in the cloak of darkness, armed with weapons from the armory, reaching a busy street, and waving down a motorist with a gun.
It was an impossible notion. She’d had three years to escape, and God knew she’d tried.
But maybe this time was different. The cartel was distracted with whatever they were planning for him. And she had Silvia’s key, which gave her access to places she hadn’t been able to go before. Places she could hide without cameras. But if she’d gone to the armory, she would’ve been detected. Alarms would’ve sounded.
What had he missed while he was unconscious? He couldn’t have been out for longer than a few minutes. Not long enough for Silvia to leave his side and discover that her key card had been swapped out.
Hopefully.
He wouldn’t ask the cartel a single question about Vera. If they told him she was dead, he wouldn’t believe them. He couldn’t. By the looks of the instruments they were considering, they intended to torture him. Physically. Psychologically. Any manner they pleased.
The silver lining? He didn’t see a container of spiders anywhere.
Silvia turned and sashayed toward him. Her red lips curved into a smirk, causing his heart to whack against his ribs like a caged animal. Then he saw the apparatus in her hand.
A metal dildo the size of Tomas’ dick strapped to a leather harness. Strap-ons were Liv Reed’s specialty, and he’d been on the receiving end of her thrusts more than once. But she’d used phalluses with a squeezable texture. Never metal.
Wordlessly, he watched Silvia lift her red dress and expose her bare cunt. Just as wordlessly, her brothers gathered around, staring boldly at the disturbingly erotic view their sister gave them.
Th
is was an area of kink he had no experience in. She was blood-related to three of these men. They’d all been raised together since childhood. Talk about a mindfuck.
The sounds of quickening breaths coming from them made his blood shudder. Twitchy hands, chilling grins, the stench of anticipation. Then the deep voice of the oldest son, echoing through the room. “Answer our questions, and we’ll let you go.”
No, they wouldn’t.
He lay his cheek on the cold steel table and tried to relax his muscles. Van had trained him how to endure this without injury. The key was in not fighting the invasion.
Marco and Silvia stepped out of sight behind him, making it impossible to remain calm.
“What’s your real name?” Miguel approached the table near Luke’s head and unzipped the fly of his suit pants.
“I’m not interested in your dick, sisterfucker.”
“I’m not interested in yours, either. But I do love to watch my sister fuck.”
Feminine hands curled around the muscles of Luke’s ass, stroking and fondling and coiling him with anger.
“He’s so beautiful.” She bent over his back, fingers wandering everywhere, her hair tickling his spine with dread. “Just look at this body. Big and strong and powerful. I want to keep him.”
“We’ll see.” Miguel pulled out his erection and lazily stroked it. “Tell us who you’re connected with, John.”
Luke squeezed his eyes shut as her hand found his flaccid cock.
Please, don’t react. Dear fucking God, don’t give her what she wants.
His body would respond to her touch eventually. But he stalled it by casting his mind back to the pond and replaying his horror and fear as spiders teemed over Vera’s head. He thought about how close she’d come to dying in that water and the anguish he would’ve been experiencing now had he been forced to witness that.
“He’s not getting hard.” Silvia tightened her strokes, her grip too clumsy and aggressive.
It was the wrong hand.
The wrong fucking woman.
Miguel slammed a fist on the table, prompting Luke’s eyes to flash open. “Then make him hard.”