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Twisted Obsession

Page 26

by Keta Kendric


  A spark of hope stirred within me at D’s update. I focused on his fingers as they worked like a blur over the keys before my gaze lifted to his face. His eyes rose, sensing my gaze on him. His fingers continued to dance over the keys as we stared at each other.

  “Regina has a tracker on her,” I blurted. “I’ve attempted several times to see if I could pick it up, but I couldn’t get anything. They may have used a jamming device to disrupt the frequency.”

  My finger pointed in D’s direction. “If I give you the serial number, do you think you can pick it up or turn it back on, even if it was jammed?”

  D’s fingers stopped, ceasing the incessant pecking of keys as he glanced at me. I sensed every eye in the room on me now. Scott glanced up from my laptop that sat in front of him. Rob, who was standing over D’s shoulder picked up his head and glared at me. Marcus shoved his phone in his back pocket. I think he’d hung up on someone. Aaron, who sat at the end of the table, glanced up from his phone.

  A thick silence filled the room and allowed the sound of the clock ticking on the wall behind me to come alive.

  “If you have a serial number and it emits any kind of signal, I’ll find it,” came D’s sure-sounding answer.

  Aaron’s face was scrunched in confusion. “Unless you were anticipating her being taken or have trackers on all her clothes, how the hell did you get a tracker on Regina? How do you know they didn’t find it on her and throw it away?”

  Those were two questions I didn’t want to answer. Ignoring my cousin, I took up the pen and pad that D slid my way and wrote the serial number down. I also wrote the frequency at which the tracker transmitted. When I pushed the pad back across the table, D’s questioning glance was almost as pronounced as Aaron’s.

  “Wait, you know the shit by heart?” he asked. I didn’t answer D’s question either. Instead, I stood and started pacing as five sets of eyes followed my movement. A bit of my tension eased when D’s fingers started up again.

  “If I can track down any part of the signal on the device before it stopped transmitting, I can send it a digital jump-start that could possibly turn it back on. Then, I could triangulate the signal. If this works, it could lead us straight to Regina and a location, provided they haven’t found it on her and tossed it already.”

  D’s words tamed the beastly roar of the monster stirring inside me.

  “They are not going to find it on her,” I informed D with certainty in my tone. Sound was once again sucked from the room as silence, and inquiring minds wanted to know what would spew from my twisted brain next.

  Aaron stood. “Why are you so sure that they are not going to find a tracker on her? We’ve dealt with these motherfuckers before. They aren’t untrained thugs off the streets that don’t know what they’re doing.”

  Aaron knew me better than anyone else. He and I glared at each other for a paused moment, his eyes widening the moment he’d connected the dots.

  “They are not going to find the tracker on her because she doesn’t even know she has a tracker on her, does she?” Aaron didn’t give me a chance to answer.

  “Tell me, you didn’t put the fucking tracker inside her,” he barked.

  D, Rob, Marcus, and Scott stared between us, not saying a word. The tension in the room was so thick it appeared they were holding their breaths.

  “Tell me you didn’t implant a tracker in her body?” Aaron questioned, side-eyeing me.

  One nod went in my cousin’s direction before I turned away from him and met the awed gazes of the others staring across the table at me.

  “You put a tracker inside your woman? Daaamn!” came Scott’s comment.

  “Brings a whole new meaning to the word keeping your woman in check,” Marcus’ statement followed.

  “You all can say what the fuck you want. I don’t give enough fuck to care. If my crazy ass logic helps us to find Regina, what’s the fucking problem?”

  Silence followed my question. I wasn’t sorry for what I’d done. I would do it again. Besides, we needed to find Regina before some fucked up shit happened to her. If it already hadn’t.

  D sat at the table with his lips balled up as he typed away at the keyboard. At any moment, it appeared he’d explode in laughter. Rob was concentrating extra hard on something on the screen of my computer that he was using. Marcus had already turned his back and pretended to be staring at the picture on the wall as his shoulders bounced up and down. Aaron’s unblinking gaze was aimed at my face. Scott straight up started laughing, not giving a damn about my pinched expression and coiled body.

  The men already believed I was one swerve from flying clean off the rails. This stunt likely tipped the scales for them.

  They laughed. Aaron and I didn’t.

  “How long?” came Aaron’s question. “How long have you had the woman branded like she’s some fucking cattle?”

  “Two weeks,” I stated, eyeing him with the same level of intensity he flashed at me. I should have been ashamed. I wasn’t. I should have felt bad about what I’d done. I didn’t. I’d already decided that I was going to stalk Regina if she left me, so I’d decided to save myself the trouble of having to hunt her down. I didn’t intend to follow in Aaron’s footsteps by trekking across the country to find Megan.

  D snapped a finger to get our attention. He resumed typing on the second laptop he’d set up in front of him.

  “JG’s been stabilized, but he’s in serious condition. He’s in intensive care. He was shot in the chest. Bullet missed his heart but collapsed a lung. He’s cited as a suspect, which means he’ll be cuffed to the bed the entire time he’s recovering.”

  We’d been in this situation before when Rob had been shot and captured. Due to the number of bodies we’d left behind, he’d also been cuffed to the bed as he recovered. Thanks to our friends in law enforcement, he’d been uncuffed and upgraded to a nicer hospital room.

  The news of JG being okay eased a lot of the stiffness we carried. D turned his attention to the second computer.

  “Hey, guys, I think I’ve got a signal.”

  All eyes fell on D as our bodies moved closer to him from all areas of the room.

  “It’s a rather unorthodox way to keep track of someone, but with that tracker device in her, we should be able to find Regina relatively fast. The good news is the location is less than five miles away from the last sighting of the license plate.”

  This was the best news I’d heard all night.

  “Where did you put the tracker?” Marcus inquired, not hiding his grin. The conversation had turned back to my craziness. I didn’t answer Marcus.

  The nagging idea of Regina leaving me wouldn’t stop, so desperate times had called for desperate measures. Before we’d even crossed the line and let feelings get involved, I knew that I’d wanted to keep her. I knew that I’d have a hard time letting her go.

  My gaze roved over the men in the room. They could call me crazy, a stalker, obsessed, I didn’t care. All I knew was that I wanted Regina and was willing to do just about anything to keep her. Now that she’d been taken, it reinforced my need for her.

  Regina gave me a taste of something I’d never had before. I didn’t care if I had to blow up hell and set fire to the high waters, I’d get Regina back.

  She’d forced her fears aside, delved past my exterior, and fought to understand me. She’d encouraged me to allow more emotions to sink in instead of tossing them aside to embrace rage and anger. She forced me to experience a deeper connection even as I fought against it.

  She gave me the one thing I’d never gotten from any woman, the one thing I never even believed I deserved.

  Love.

  47

  Regina

  My eyes popped open, and they fell back closed as fast as I’d opened them. My groggy mind minced my thoughts as my woozy body wavered from whatever chemical they’d drugged me with.

  I’d seen another vision, a nagging hallucination I’d been praying not to see anymore. A vision was the o
nly way to explain who stood before me, filling my view.

  “Did you miss me, princess?” came a voice dripping with enough poison that my skin crawled. “Did you really think you could get rid of me that easily?”

  The sound of that voice took my breath away. I reached up and gripped my chest to keep my heart from exploding. My mouth fell open, but all I could force out was a few choked utterances that didn’t make sense. Was I mentally ill? Had my life been so traumatic over the years that I’d suffered a complete mental break?

  My eyes blinked in rapid snapshots before I squeezed them together tighter and reopened them to ensure I wasn’t imagining things. Nothing I did took the vision away. As sure as I drew breath, the devil stood in front of me.

  “How are you…a…a…?” I managed, breathless, awed, confused.

  “Alive?” he finished the question I attempted to ask. “Let’s just say, there’s a guardian angel watching my back.”

  Evil laughter filled the space, and my skin didn’t just crawl, it melted off my bones and left me a skinless vessel of wracked nerves.

  “Bet you thought you’d never see me again.”

  One evil finger shook at me as he stepped closer. “You believed that new boyfriend of yours would keep you safe? I’ll give him some credit. He did a good job, but I knew patience was the key to us reuniting again.”

  His taunting words were evil reminders of our history of violence and shame. He’d promised that he’d kill me if I ran from him again. I’d not just run from him, I’d sat by and let Ansel and August Knox plot his murder.

  My gaze panned my surroundings as the strong scent of chemicals invaded my nostrils. Inside a small break room, four cheap wooden tables sat next to a collection of rickety chairs pooled together near two refrigerators, offset by a single sink with a dripping faucet. Another table sat alone in a corner under a dirty microwave. The doors of the two white wall cabinets that hung over the sink were crooked on their hinges.

  I’d been shoved into the open empty space near the far wall. Praying for mercy was useless because the monster that stood before me would never give it.

  Ansel was my only hope of getting out of this situation alive. He was one of the smartest men I knew, and if anybody could find me, it would be him.

  However, locating me would be a difficult task. I didn’t have the instincts of an ex-military ranger but searching for me with no viable leads was the same as looking for a needle in a haystack. I didn’t even know where I’d been taken. Hope and faith kept my mind from imploding as fear placed me in a chokehold.

  The training that Ansel had started giving me, surfaced. I wasn’t good enough to fight a man, but when the time came, maybe I could find a way to make this monster kill me faster. It was the only way to keep him from getting what he wanted and to avoid the pain and suffering I knew he intended to inflict on me.

  My fingers swiped my tired eyes once more, praying that this was a vivid dream and not my current reality.

  “What’s wrong? Still think you’re seeing a ghost?”

  “So…So…Sorio?” My voice crawled over my tongue and cracked into pieces as soon as his name passed my dry lips. If Sorio was alive and standing before me, who in the hell had August killed in Ansel’s garage?

  The monster taunted me with cruel words, his body standing proud and sure before me. Surprisingly, his words didn’t have the same effect that they’d always had on me. The words were spoken, they sank in, but my body didn’t flutter with fear like it always had in Sorio’s presence.

  My mind attempted to piece together an explanation as to how he was alive, combing my brain for clues. I’d seen who I believed was him, dead on Ansel’s garage floor nearly a month ago.

  My gaze scanned the area he’d taken me to. Outside the break room area we were in, there wasn’t much else but the cement wall of the hallway I’d been dragged down by one of his men. When the drug had started to wear off, I’d continued to feign sleep in an attempt to figure out where I was. It was unfortunate that I had already been inside this place when my vision started to return.

  However, I recalled us traveling down some steps, so we were likely in a basement since I hadn’t spotted any windows. My family loved their secret underground hideaways. This one stunk of mildew and chemicals. Stale and recycled air surrounded me, same as it always had in the cellar they’d stuck me in in Texas. I’d caught a glimpse of the machines they used to make their drugs, so this had to have been one of their meth labs.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you, you fucking black cunt!”

  His loud, sharp words were familiar. But like his presence, they didn’t have the same impact anymore. He’d always called me black, like the Mexican part of me had been a horrible mistake. Did my color offend him? He was Mexican too, so he wasn’t much lighter than I was. However, I understood that some people developed color complexes. They associated lighter skin with superiority. I also remembered my father telling me that not many of his family liked the fact that he’d chosen to marry my African-American mother over the woman they’d intended for him to marry.

  A sharp standing kick landed in my side and rattled my teeth as a painful jolt radiated through the rest of my midsection and sent my back slamming into the wall behind me. Folded in pain, I gripped my side and struggled to suck in oxygen.

  “I said look at me, bitch!”

  Through my anguish, I fought the weariness in my body and lifted my head. I glanced up into my cousin’s face, but images of me standing over his burning corpse filled my brain. Where did that come from? Why was I not afraid anymore? Why was I so carelessly ignoring him, knowing he’d get angrier?

  Smack! My neck snapped hard to the left as the sting of his backhand ravaged my skin and set fire to the right side of my face. The force of the impact sent me sideways, and with nothing to break my fall, my hands reached down to cushion the impact.

  The hard slap of my hands against the floor sent pain shooting up my arms that mingled with the stinging burn on my cheek. My head throbbed from the pulsing pain. One, two, three drops of blood from my busted lip dripped to the floor as I struggled to lift my head. A few shakes of my head took some of the ringing out of my damaged ear as I forced myself to overcome the pain. It didn’t work, but I endured it.

  Sorio had put me through so much pain over the years that I was sure that I could endure more than I should have been able to. His black shadow on the floor moved closer before the heat of his body revealed him standing over me. He placed rough fingers under my chin and jerked my face up. For a second, it appeared, surprise flickered across his evil gaze. If so, it was due to my lack of tears or fear.

  I refused to give Sorio the satisfaction. The satisfaction he’d enjoy in seeing me crumble before him. The satisfaction he took in making me beg for his mercy. I didn’t care what he did, and I refused to give him what he wanted. He’d taken enough from me already.

  “I see that new boyfriend has been teaching you how to be a woman. Let’s see how much of a woman you will be when I get through with you. When I take that tight pussy again.” His threatening words hissed out like poisonous gas was being released into the air.

  “Sid, George, Pablo, Alvero, come in here!” he demanded in a roaring voice that sounded over the hum of machines and the shuffle of feet.

  “I’ve got a special treat for you this morning,” he informed as the four men entered the area. The men gathered around me, circling like a pack of hungry wolves that hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  “She’s a pretty one, boss,” one of the men stated as his dirty fingers stroked my hair. I jerked my head away from his hand that smelled strongly of the chemicals he’d been mixing.

  “I’ve never had one this brown. They say the juice is sweeter from the darker berries,” another commented as he grinned down at me. My roving gaze landed on his hand as it tightened around the bulge in his pants. Their actions suggested that they’d done this with Sorio before.

  Another traced my left breast
with his finger, causing me to recoil in disgust as his tongue sliced over his lips.

  “Don’t touch me,” I protested. When I slapped his hand away, a boisterous laugh escaped him. Fear hammered through my body but thinking of Ansel and how he’d urged me to be strong helped me to control it.

  Sorio stood before me, the grin on his face wide and smug as he enjoyed his dominating position. His men pawed at me from every direction. Smacking their hands away and yelling for them to stop was useless. However, my cries of protest refused to be silenced, and my instinct to defend myself had surfaced with an abiding strength I’d never felt before.

  “I like this long hair,” one announced before pulling my hair, making me yelp in pain.

  “Calm down, boys, I get the first taste,” Sorio announced through the sinister smirk as his evil gaze remained locked on mine.

  Even as my cousin threatened me with the one thing that had broken me the most, I refused to give him the satisfaction he craved. He liked me scared and helpless, but I wasn’t the same Regina anymore. Was I scared? Shitless. Was I afraid? Deathly. Was I going to let Sorio see it? Hell, no!

  The time I’d spent around the Knox men and witnessing how fiercely they fought for family inspired me to be more like them. Ansel would come for me. He’d promised that he would, and I believed him. Even if he didn’t find me before my cousin unleashed the hell he’d planned, the idea of Ansel coming for me was enough to keep me strong.

  Even if Sorio and his men raped me a thousand times, I’d endure the punishment to deny him what he wanted most.

  He reached down and jerked my arm with a brutal grip before he yanked me to my feet. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you hear me talking to you?”

  He shook me, tossing my body around to snap me into the reality he wanted me in. The laughter of the men surrounding me sparked my anger and heightened my resolve to tap into every bit of strength I owned.

 

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