“I’m scared, Miri.”
“I know. Me too.” I tossed the pillows to the floor and grabbed my friend’s hands. “Would you rather stay here forever, or die trying to get free?”
“I can’t stay here anymore, Miri. I can’t take it.” Cat began to sob.
“Shhhhh, I really think this is going to work. No one has noticed anything.” Cat nodded and wiped her face with a piece of toilet paper. “Start singing,” I said while I stripped a pillow of its case and wound the fabric around my hand.
I stripped the second pillow, stuffed it in the sink, and held the first pillow up to the mirror. Cat began to hum a song, as if she were singing in the shower. Taking a deep breath, I pulled my bound hand back and punched the center of the pillow that was up against the mirror. Nothing happened. I tried again, harder this time. A crack in the reflective glass snaked up from the behind the pillow.
“It’s working,” I whispered.
Cat’s eyes filled with tears as she continued to sing a tune I recognized but couldn’t place. One more blow and half the mirror shattered, the shards tumbling softly onto the pillow in the sink. I threw the pillow I held to the floor and inspected the pieces of glass.
“Here.” I threw the second pillowcase and threw it to Cat. She quickly wrapped it around her own hand. “Take a big chunk, Cat.” With a shaky, sheet-covered hand, Cat chose a nice, dagger-shaped piece and gripped it like a knife. “Good.” I chose one for myself and took a deep breath and nodded at my friend. “Open it.”
Behind Cat was a small linen closet. The shower and tub shared a wall with the hallway, which put the linen closet at the opposite end of the bathroom, sharing a wall with another room of the house. She opened the door and quickly pulled out the piles of towels. I joined in and helped remove the wood shelves. We put everything on the floor in front of the door. The tiny closet was actually deeper than it appeared. It was only eighteen inches deep or so, but there was extra space to the left of the door. When the shelves were in, it was pretty much unusable, but without them, a single, slender person could fit tucked inside the gap.
“Hurry,” Cat hissed as I slid inside the tiny closet. I could feel the panic rolling off my friend in thick waves.
“I am hurrying.”
It took some maneuvering, but I managed to crouch down in the limited space. Near the floor, I tugged on a washcloth tucked into a hole. It slid out of the hole I had made in the wall a few inches from the ground.
“I’m going to look first,” I said.
With my neck bent at a weird angle, I lined my up eye with the fist-sized hole. Just like it was every time I checked, the spare bedroom was dark, with no sign of life inside. Our bedroom backed up against another, unused bedroom and the hole I made in the drywall using a mattress spring was hidden by the enormous bed and flowing bed skirt. Both stood between us and the bedroom door.
“We’re good.”
“Go, go,” Cat said, urging me to move.
I tugged at the drywall and it crumbled in my hands. Punching it out would be easier, but also louder and messier, leaving evidence in the bedroom. Within a few minutes, the hole was large enough for me to slip through the sixteen-inch gap between studs.
Thank God we’re both small.
It took Cat several more minutes to return the shelves and towels the best she could from inside the small space, then pull the door shut. When she was done, I turned and helped Cat wiggle through, still clutching her glass weapon. Hopefully, when they checked our room, they wouldn’t know which way we went. I was certain they’d never think to look in the spare room on the opposite side of the house.
Not that we planned on staying long.
I crept to the bedroom door and laid my cheek on the floor, peeking under the gap. No feet, no noise, no lights, no sign of anyone.
“It’s clear, Cat.”
My best friend shuffled across the hardwoods until she was behind me. I put my hand on the doorknob and glanced over my shoulder.
“Are you ready?”
She shook her head. “No. But I have to do this. Like you said, I’d rather die than stay here.”
“Use your weapon if you have to. Slash, don’t stab, Cat. If you stab someone too deep the glass could get stuck inside the person and you won’t have anything to use.”
Cat paled, which was shocking, because she was already the same color as the white cotton pillowcases.
“I don’t know if I can kill someone,” she said, trembling all over.
“Cat, you can. Think about what they did to you.” My friend pressed her lips together in a tight line. “They’re nothing but scum. If one of them has to die for us to get out of here, then that’s what we’ll do.” She gave me a quick dip of her chin in acknowledgement.
I held up my makeshift knife and slowly turned the knob.
Cat lifted her own weapon and whispered in my ear. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
I opened the door and stepped into the hall.
“Come on,” I waved Cat out of the room. “Stay close.” I didn’t have to tell her that—she was stuck to my back like glue.
We crept quietly down the hall, pressed flat against the wall as we went. The house was silent. Unusually so. It made me nervous. Whenever Raoul came for me, we always passed multiple men on the way to what I now called the torture chamber.
At the end of the hall was a set of stairs. We had to go down—it was the only way out. What we didn’t know was where the stairs led or what we would find at the bottom.
I sucked in a deep breath and descended one stair at a time, Cat practically on top of me as we went. At the bottom, I held my knife up high in case I would need it, and peeked around the corner.
Shit.
“It’s the kitchen,” I whispered to Cat.
Probably the busiest room in the house. Good thing was that most kitchens had exits to the outside. I checked again. Still empty.
“We have to go, Cat.” I saw her nod in my peripheral vision.
We stepped into the brightly lit kitchen. It took a second or two for my vision to adjust to the light. Once it did, I spotted a glass-paneled door across the room.
“There.” I pointed with the shard of mirror.
We hurried toward the door, my heart hammering in my chest and my pulse roaring in my ears. I twisted the knob and nothing happened.
“Shit, it’s locked.”
Men’s voices rattling in Spanish came from one of the nearby rooms.
“Unlock it, Miri!”
I looked at the knob and cursed. “I can’t, it needs a key.” My stomach lurched as the voices grew louder.
“Come on!” I ran for the doorway opposite the direction of the voices. We were in an enormous and richly appointed dining room.
The men entered the kitchen, continuing their conversation. Cabinets opened and closed as well as the refrigerator. One of the men laughed at something the other said and they bantered back and forth for several minutes, punctuated now and then by the sounds of chewing.
I wanted to scream. How could they act so normal when they were torturing and raping hostages? How could they eat a meal and chat as if this were a regular house in a regular neighborhood while Cat and I were regularly beaten and terrorized? While young women were moved in and out of the house like cattle?
At that moment, I wanted to kill them. I needed to kill them. I didn’t realize I took a step toward the kitchen until Cat hissed under her breath.
“Miri.”
I snapped out of my daze.
“Sorry. I’m just... forget it.” I shook off the anger and focused on getting out of here.
Cat stepped forward and peeked around a fancy pillar.
“The front door is right there.”
“How far?”
“Maybe forty feet? I don’t know. There’s a big foyer with a staircase and the front door.”
“No one is guarding the door?” I was glad, but not surprised. Again, El Cuchillo’s weakness was his sense
of immortality. As if he were untouchable despite living in the dark and deadly world he chose to submerge himself in.
“No,” Cat said. She turned and faced me. “No matter what happens next, I want you to know I love you, Miri. You saved me from my stepdad and I’ll never forget that.”
“I’m sorry we ended up here, Cat.” I struggled to keep the tears at bay.
Cat shrugged. “We never seem to catch a break, do we?”
I sniffed quietly. “No. We don’t.”
She turned back to the door and motioned me forward. By the time we hit the foyer we were almost sprinting. Cat flung the door open and we bolted out into the night. Barefoot, with every single muscle in my body screaming in pain, I ran as fast as I could through the grass, Cat just in front of me.
I stepped on a rock and stumbled, but scrambled to my feet quickly. Not quick enough. An arm came around my waist and flung me to the ground, hard. My abused muscles screamed and the air whooshed out of my lungs as I hit the dirt.
I shrieked and closed my eyes, slashing out wildly with the shard of glass. It must have made contact with the guy because the glass dragged through something for a brief second before continuing its path through the air.
The man above me let out a choked gurgling and a cascade of hot liquid gushed down onto my face and neck. It was so thick I was rendered blind by the sheer amount of blood pouring out of him, unable to wipe it out of my eyes as fast as it fell. Dead, his body collapsed on top of mine. I shoved the heavy weight to the side, biting the inside of my cheek so I didn’t scream in agony from the fire that ripped through my battered ribcage.
Adrenaline was coursing through my veins at an unbelievable rate. Using the burst of power provided by the hormone, I summoned the energy to turn over and somehow managed to climb to my hands and knees, the shiny piece of mirror still clutched in my wrapped hand. I wiped my eyes with the back of the pillowcase around my hand until I was able to see enough of the dark landscape to keep going. With a grunt, I pushed to my feet and turned in the direction Cat and I originally ran.
I could only hope that Cat already made it to safety.
Not sparing a thought for the man I just killed, I took off for the road I could just about see in the distance. The red-hot agony tore through my calf a fraction of a second before I heard the gunshot. My leg collapsed and I went down face-first onto the unforgiving rocky landscape. This time, when my ribs slammed into the ground, I couldn’t stop from screaming in agony.
There was no time to recover or even look at my newest injury, which, by the feel of it, was only a bullet graze. A man was on top of me. He grabbed me by my hair and hauled me to my feet, or foot, as I couldn’t put much weight on my left leg. I struck out erratically with the mirror, swinging my arm in the hopes of striking something, anything.
“Pinche puta!” the man roared in my ear.
His arm curled around my throat and tightened, cutting off my air. I brought the glass up to stab his arm and cried out when he brought his other arm down on my wrist. Whoever this guy was hit with so much force, a jolt of breath-stealing pain shot all the way up to my shoulder and I dropped my weapon. The man began dragging me by my throat backwards toward the house.
Hell no!
I’d rather die than set foot in there again, so I kicked and struggled to get free. His arm tightened around my neck and the lack of oxygen extinguished my ability to fight. My vision became spotty and my limbs weak. As consciousness faded, I heard El Cuchillo growl in my ear.
“You will suffer for what you have done, coño.”
I hope he just gets it over with and kills me.
6
Jag
“You’re sure about this, Boss?”
I was about to break Milo’s nose. He had only asked the same fucking question twenty times since we left our meeting with Brick and his men. Milo didn’t trust Brick to watch our backs, which was to be expected from any good lieutenant. Caution was important in this line of work and enemies were never truly your friends. But then, Milo wasn’t privy to the details of my deal with Brick. Because of Milo’s bizarre and antagonistic behavior as of late, I chose to bring Shade into the private meeting as my second in command.
The look on Milo’s face when I picked the head of distribution over him was nothing short of pure loathing. I wasn’t sure when, exactly, my most trusted lieutenant went from a close confidant to a man I needed to keep at arm’s length. I wanted to say it coincided with Miri’s appearance in my life and her presence turned Milo sour, but it ran deeper than that. Milo’s hostility had grown exponentially ever since I turned down El Cuchillo’s offer to join him in trafficking kidnapped women and girls. Miri just happened to be a convenient outlet for his frustration.
This erratic behavior was exactly why Milo wasn’t let in on the details of tonight’s discussions with Brick or our plan to move on Los Guerreros.
“I know what I’m doing, Milo,” I answered as I studied the ridiculously out of place mansion through a pair of Bushnell night vision binoculars from a distant clump of tangled shrubs and stunted trees. The kind that grew like weeds in this part of Texas.
El Cuchillo’s men were spread out everywhere along the edges of the property, each wielding a bright flashlight. They were searching for something… or perhaps someone? Was it too much to hope Miri, who Brick confirmed was inside the house, had escaped?
My phone silently buzzed in my pocket. I pressed my earpiece to answer.
“Boss here,” I whispered.
“I have some information for you,” Brick stated calmly.
I waited for the man to elaborate. When nothing further came, I became impatient.
“And?”
“And I think you should come and see for yourself. I am at the location we previously discussed.” The line went dead.
“Fuck!” I hissed. I tapped the earpiece and turned to Shade and Milo, pointing. “You two stay here. Anyone comes close to you, kill them. Quietly.” I stared at Milo so he knew not to use that fucking hand cannon of his. “And try to leave one alive for questioning.” I shot them both dark looks and gave Shade an extra second to tip his head in understanding. He knew I was silently telling him to watch Milo carefully. Milo’s behavior and attitude were so unpredictable I didn’t want to take any chances my lieutenant might do something stupid and reckless to ruin the element of surprise.
“Got it, Boss,” Shade answered. Milo simply sneered as I handed him the Bushnells.
On foot, it would take a good forty minutes to circle halfway around the rough terrain comprising El Cuchillo’s nine hundred acres. There wasn’t enough time for that bullshit. I hopped in the car I left parked far enough from the compound to remain undetected, and with the headlights off, drove the entire one and a half miles of rocky, dirt road in less than five minutes. I stopped next to Brick’s massive black SUV and yanked the keys out of the ignition before leaping from the car and jogging over to a group of men. As I got closer, I noticed they were standing in a circle, watching a single man who was crouched over a body on the ground. My breath caught and I stumbled at the sight.
Is that Miri? is she dead?
Dread swamped my veins and my heart hammered in my ears. I forced one foot in front of the other until I stood at the edges of the tight circle comprised of Brick’s men. Peering over a guy’s shoulder, I glanced down at the figure, but it was too dark to make out any specific features. All I could tell was that whoever was on the ground was female—small and rail thin, with long hair fanned out on the rocky, uneven ground. In a panic, I elbowed my way between two of Brick’s men and fell to my knees. When I saw the girl’s face, all of the air punched out of my lungs.
Not Miri. And not conscious either, so she wouldn’t be answering any questions at the moment.
“Who is this?” I demanded. When no one spoke I stood and scanned each bewildered face until my gaze landed on Brick. “Brick?”
The always calm and collected man motioned me over.
“She came out of the bushes over there.” Brick pointed a decent distance away. “Based on where she ended up, we think she ran out the front door. My men immediately brought her to me. But no red hair, my friend, so I knew right away she wasn’t your Miri.”
The reminder of Miri’s captivity was a slap to the face. I blinked back the hot rush of anguish, recovering fast enough to shelter my pain from Brick. “What did she say? Did you get anything out of her before she passed out?” I held my breath in the hope that this woman either knew of my doll or saw her inside. The most likely scenario was that she was one of Cuchillo’s captives for his new sex trafficking venture.
“Yes. She is tired, dehydrated, and quite confused, but she knows your woman.”
I swore my heart stopped beating for a second. “Wait. She… did you say she knows Miri?” Somehow I kept my voice from breaking. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up the facade when inside, I had shattered into a thousand pieces, each one slicing my heart.
Brick nodded. “Quite well actually. From before all this.” Brick waved his hand in the direction of Cuchillo’s hideous, out of place, Spanish-style mansion, built in the middle of nowhere fucking Texas.
“I don’t understand. She knows Miri, like knows her?” The new information caused me to stagger back a step. I rubbed a hand across my forehead and dragged it down my face.
Brick shrugged. “The girl didn’t say much before she went down. She seems very thin and badly abused. Once she reached us, she dropped like a rock and we haven’t been able to rouse her. Before she fainted, she said she shared a room with Miri in the house, but also shared a room with her before.” He gave me a sympathetic look. “Whatever the hell before means. I got the impression it was a few years ago.” My breath hitched when I remembered Miri once mentioned a friend who went missing… a friend whose name I couldn’t for the life of me recall. Brick continued speaking while I was in the midst of a major mental struggle to dig out the memories. “The two women escaped but got separated outside. This one,” he pointed to the unconscious woman, “thinks Miri was caught and brought back inside.”
Jagger (Broken Doll Book 2) Page 7