Marco punches her and Tess falls lifelessly to the ground, her body crumpling under her. The helplessness I feel is matched only by my fury. It’s like a raging wildfire, the inferno spreading and eating up everything in its path.
I throw myself towards my wife but the two men behind me restrain me. They force me back down to the ground at their feet. “Let me go, you bastards! Let me fucking go.” I turn my attention back to Marco. “I’m going to kill you,” I vow between clenched teeth.
Julio crouches down and picks Tess up in his arms.
“What are you doing?” I question, my voice tipping over into mania. He ignores me and starts to walk away with her unconscious body in his arms. Every step he takes away from me is a fresh stab wound to my heart. “Stop! Where the fuck are you taking her? Come back! COME BACK!”
Her head lolls to the side, her hair covering her face entirely. Something rips inside me watching her be taken from me. I thrash, I kick, I fight like fucking hell. I go berserk. I manage to break free and make some progress towards her, but with my hands cuffed behind my back, I’m quickly caught and yanked away.’
‘Calm the fuck down,’ one of the traitors orders.
My powerlessness when she needs me most kills me.
Crazed, demented energy takes over until the rational part of me is no more. All that’s left is the animal need to protect my wife. An unhinged scream tears from my throat when Julio disappears out the door, taking her with him. Raw desperation tears at my insides like I’m being hacked apart by a meat cleaver.
Marco smirks down at me with a vindictive smile.
I need to keep him talking, to keep him with me.
To do anything I can to stop him from leaving this room and…
I can’t think about what will happen if I don’t stop him.
“How did you do this? Turn my men against me?”
“You made it so easy for me and for that, I have to thank you Diablo. Arturo warned you what the dangers would be if you left London, he just never imagined how close the threat might be. I amassed support while you were gone. It was painstaking work, turns out a lot of the cartel is loyal to you. Finding people willing to turn against you was harder than I thought it would be,” he churns out, the muscle in his cheek ticking angrily. “But I found them eventually.”
I’m powerless to stop my anger from boiling over.
“You know exactly how traitors die,” I growl. “You’ll die a traitor’s death. It’ll be my pleasure to send you into the afterlife.”
The smile wipes clean off his face. He walks up to me and drops into his haunches so our faces are level.
Behind my back, my hands work conspicuously to dig the blade out of the sheath built into the interior side of my trousers.
“I was going to kill you right now,” he announces. “But I’ve decided I’m going to keep you alive while we all take turns fucking your wife. I want that to be the last thing you picture, the last thing you hear, before I kill you.”
I roar savagely, the sound unlike anything I’ve ever made or heard. I throw myself at him like a rabid dog, but he easily stands and steps back. A sick, sour feeling burns my throat.
“I’ll go first,” he says smugly, cupping his cock obscenely through his trousers. “Put him in one of the rooms, I’ll be back for him later.” And then he walks out.
The bottom falls out from beneath my feet and I lose my shit. The thought of another man touching her, of another man positioning himself between her legs and taking her body for his own pleasure makes me sick to the point of pain.
Nausea twists my belly and I dry heave. Bile and saliva hit the floor as my stomach turns against me.
The falcon whose name I don’t even remember laughs cruelly. He circles around to my front.
“Look at this whipped pussy. Literally hacking up his guts at the thought of us testing out his wife.”
I spit out the remaining bile and snap my black eyes up to meet his. He must see something in my gaze that warns him because the smile wipes abruptly off his face.
I turn on my knees and use my legs to kick his feet out from underneath him. He falls to the ground and I throw myself down on him, the knife now firmly clutched in my hands driving into his flesh. With my hands tied behind my back, I’m attacking him blindly. He yells when the knife sinks into his belly. I pull it out immediately, going higher, searching for weaker flesh. I hack at him, in and out, in and out, until I feel the blade sink into his throat. He dies with a pathetic gurgle.
The other falcon stares, wide-eyed and afraid. He’s younger, inexperienced. He probably had no idea the magnitude of the decision he was making when he was roped into this mutinous plan.
It doesn’t matter. He made it anyway.
He stands, frozen.
It gives me the time to maneuver my tied hands from behind my back, over my feet and to my front. The process is excruciating. My shoulder rips out of its socket as I dislocate it to free myself. The agonizing pain tears through me, still nowhere near as searing as the pain in my heart.
The falcon jerks into action when he sees I have my hands in front of me, but it’s too late. He comes at me with a knife and I knock it out of his hand with a simple move, adrenaline keeping my injured arm from being a hindrance. Then I use the chain of the handcuffs and choke him to death.
It’s as his dead body slides down mine that an ear-splitting, hair-raising, dread-filled scream rips through the air. I’d know it anywhere.
“Tess!” I roar, a guttural scream that rocks the walls of the bomb shelter.
Buzzing erupts loudly in my ears. I realize that it’s the sound of my blood thrashing madly through my body.
My shaky, frenetic hands search the first body, then the second, until my fingers close around a pair of keys to open the handcuffs.
I’ve got the first one off when a sound worse than her screams tears through the silence. I didn’t think such a thing existed until I hear the very recognizable, very loud bang of a gunshot.
Followed almost immediately by a second one.
I start running before the echoes have even stopped. There’s no word in either language I know to describe the terror that slams into me. It undoes my chemical makeup, rewrites the strands of my DNA, and changes me forever.
Truth is, I’ve lost my grasp on my sanity.
I’m met at the door by a third falcon. I drive the open handcuff into his neck and sever his carotid, not stopping to watch him fall at my feet.
I run through those halls barely aware of where I am or what I’m even doing. I’m on autopilot, my body knowing who it needs to find without needing to get my brain involved. Pure, animalistic need pushes me through those hallways. The need to find her and kill anyone who touched her. My injured arm hangs limply at my side as I run faster than I ever have in my life.
I don’t let myself think about what state I’m going to find her in. Alive, that’s all that matters.
Alive, alive, alive.
If there’s a limit on prayers allowed in one night, then I’m fucked.
I hear someone coming down the hall so I stay around the other side of the corner, waiting to ambush them. They’re running, their feet slapping loudly against the concrete floor. Getting closer.
They round the corner at a frantic run. My arm wraps around the person’s waist at the same time as I spot a mass of blond hair, at the same time as a spicy scent hits my nose with a punch of relief.
I’m pushing her against the wall in the same split second. When clear blue eyes meet mine, a massive bubble of relief bursts from my lips.
“Tess?” I ask disbelievingly.
“Thiago?” Her eyes widen. Her hands come around my neck and she throws herself into my arms. “Thiago!”
I stumble two steps into the closest room and then I fall to my knees with her clutched in my arms. She’s shaking powerfully against me as I crush her to my body, ignoring the screaming in my shoulder.
“Tess,” I groan, burying my face in her neck.
I can’t believe I’m holding her. That she’s alive. That she’s safe, at least in this moment. It doesn’t feel real. Part of me wonders if this is a hallucination brought on by the hysteria roiling through me. I cup her face and push her back, brushing the hair behind her ear. There’s blood on her cheeks, but it doesn’t seem to be hers. It soils her perfect skin and I can’t bear to see it. I rub it off her with rough thumbs, focusing on this because I can’t bring myself to look down and see what I fear might have been done to her.
“Amor,” I mutter, emotion hollowing my words.
“I’m okay,” she promises.
Finally, with my heart in my throat, I look down at her body. The first thing I see is the large tear in her skirt, all the way up to the top of her thigh. The only thing keeping the garment attached to her body is the thicker band at her waist.
Fresh nausea threatens to make an appearance. Hollow silence echoes loudly in my ears as my trembling hand comes to her thigh.
Hell opens up a pit in my stomach as I’m confronted with the potential confirmation of Marco having violated her.
“Did he–” My words catch in my throat. “Are you okay? What happened? Did he…Did he…”
My voice cracks in torment.
I can’t bring myself to say the words. I don’t know how to ask if he touched her, if he…
She cups my face and raises my eyes to hers.
“He didn’t touch me. I managed to get away.” She presses her lips heatedly against mine. With one chaste kiss, she restarts my dead heart. I grip her waist tightly. She pulls away and places her forehead against mine. “I used the hardest parts of me against the softest parts of him,” she breathes. “I listened to what you taught me.”
A shattered growl rumbles up my chest and bursts from my lips. I press my forehead back against hers, my eyes fluttering shut. “Thank fuck. I couldn’t live with myself if he’d hurt you that way, if he’d touched you because of me.”
The agonizing pain starts to recede to a dull ache. I kiss her fiercely, communicating the depth of the fear, worry, and love I have for her in one press of my lips.
“He didn’t. I managed to get his gun and I– I shot him, Thiago.”
I still, then pull away. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t think so. He was on the floor, bleeding when I left. I hit the wall once and then hit him somewhere in the stomach.”
“Good girl,” I praise. She took those self defense lessons to the next level. “Where’s the gun?”
Her eyes widen and she blanches. “I– I left it. I’m sorry, I didn’t think, I ran scared after shooting him. He has it.”
“Shh,” I quiet her, kissing her forehead. “You did exactly what you needed. More actually. I’m going to go finish this now.”
I start to rise to my feet but she grabs my arm and pulls me back down. When I hiss, she startles.
“What’s wrong with your arm?”
“My shoulder is dislocated,” I say grimly.
“Let me help you.” She gets to her feet, feeling gingerly around my shoulder until she finds the problem. “This is going to hurt.”
I look her in the eye. “Nothing can compare to the last half hour of my life.”
Her gaze softens. She pops my shoulder back into its socket and I wince. Her hands massage the tender flesh as her eyes beg me.
“Don’t go. Please don’t go.”
“I have to. We’re not out of the woods just yet, and we won’t be until he’s dead. I’m going to kill him and then I’ll come back for you.”
Her chin sets stubbornly. “I’m not staying here. I’m coming with you.”
“No, amor. You need to hide and you need to wait for me.”
She shakes her head obstinately. “What if he hurts you?”
I cup her face and force her to look at me. Those blue eyes eat me up from the inside out the way they always do.
“The only way he can hurt me is if he hurts you. I won’t be able to focus, to think about anything else, if I don’t know that you’re safe, do you get that? I need you to stay back and hide. Promise me that you’ll hide, Tess.” She still looks uncertain. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” she whispers.
