He held my gaze. “That piece ain’t worth shit to anyone else. Yeah, it’s a collectible. It’s worth a few bills, but—”
“But it’s priceless to us, and whoever took it knew that. They’re making a point. A fucking ballsy point. I’m gonna get it back and then cut his fucking balls off.” I eyed him. “Led knew about this gun. Now he’s gone.”
“Yeah. Him and those two other Flames from Ohio came back here for the Howl,” said Butler.
“I thought they’d all left together a while back?”
“They did. All three of them took off to do the usual touristy shit—Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, Sturgis. But they all came back last night for the Howl, partied, and then left for Ohio first thing this morning.”
My pulse throbbed in my neck. I hoped to hell it was Catch and the Flames jerking our chain. The alternative sent an icy claw ripping up my spine.
Alejandro’s threat from years ago remained fresh in my mind: “I will find you, wherever you go, and you will suffer. I will find ways to make you pay...One day, I will take it all away from you. I promise you.”
I was losing my mind.
Inès had disappeared without a word after we’d fought about going to LA. My friend Julio told me he’d heard she was with the Calderone brothers, our fucking bosses.
Julio and I were two of their many soldiers. We rarely actually saw them though. The Calderones would come to you. You didn’t find them. I’d usually get my orders through a fine line of other worker bees unless it was a special assignment, those they handed down personally. And there were plenty of special assignments for me.
After a success, I’d be invited to hang with them at one of their infamous parties. I was their prized discovery, their exceptional apprentice in the dark arts of vengeance and terror, and I enjoyed being singled out. I’d drink from their wine. I’d eat from their table. I’d take Inès, and we’d have ourselves a taste of the good life, their high life.
The fucking crazy life.
Big mistake.
Over two weeks after she’d taken off, I caught them at our place. I noticed their shiny hot rod double-parked outside our building that afternoon. No one double-parked in my neighborhood and lived to tell about it.
The moment I opened the door, I heard the moaning and the low guttural Spanish, the seething tone of a male voice. Slaps and hard smacks on flesh and heavy panting. My hand released my knife from my lower leg, and I prowled silently through the dark narrow hallway of our shabby apartment, my pulse racing.
I reached the end of the hall, and my brain stuttered. My eyes burned.
Inès was on all fours on the rug on the floor, sucking off Felipe Calderone, while his brother, Alejandro, held her hips up high in a tight grip and drilled his dick inside her. Inès’s small tits jiggled, her whole body bouncing with the force of Alejandro’s fucking.
I bit down on my lip, and the metallic flow of blood filled my mouth. My heart pumped so hard that I thought it would explode, yet an eerie cold oil slimed through my veins.
They were saying ugly things to her and to each other, and it drove them faster, harder. Their faces were scrunched in intense concentration. They were blitzed on an acid high. The large muscles of the brothers’ legs, their arms, their asses bulged and bunched up under the strain.
Felipe’s pelvis thrust in her face, his long dick plunging in and out of her mouth. She stared up at him like he was a god who held all the secret answers to her life. Both his hands were fisted in her mass of dark hair, keeping her facing up at him. Moans warbled from her throat, saliva dripping from her lips. He came with a loud growl, and she swallowed.
Felipe pulled his wet dick out of her mouth. “You like that, don’t you, mi perla negra?”
Black pearl? What the fuck? He already had a pet name for her?
“I love it,” Ines replied. “I love you.”
Obviously inspired, Alejandro fucked her harder from behind. Felipe held onto her, muttering to her in Spanish, swatting at her tits.
Inès was their possession, their slave, their drug, and they were addicted.
And so was she.
That tiny room reeked of sweat and sex and betrayal, choking me, flattening me. The blue-and-pink Indian rug we’d found in a flea market together, the huge beaded pillows she insisted on keeping on the floor, the shimmering curtains we’d created out of brightly colored fabric samples and scarves—everything now defiled, everything foul, everything melded with the shadows.
You are ours. You are nothing. They had told me as much from the beginning, and it was true, wasn’t it?
I slid and stumbled back down the hallway and out the door, vomiting the minute I rounded the building, my head spinning.
I waited and waited, sweat running down my enflamed chest. Laughter, muffled words, and the roll, scrape, and bump-bump of a suitcase burst out the door and down the broken cement steps.
She was leaving—with them.
I was a raging bull, nostrils flaring with smoke and fire. My neck craned toward them.