and groaned.
“Let me help you.” Cat assisted until I leaned heavily on pillows propped against a twisted iron headboard.
“Where are we?”
“We’re in a bedroom in a house somewhere. I don’t know where. I don’t even know what city we’re in.” Cat’s tone of voice was flat, unaffected, as if she’d either accepted her fate or didn’t particularly care what happened next.
This wasn’t the Cat I knew. My Cat was a fighter. Except for the deep depression she suffered from her stepfather’s abuse, I’d never known Cat to be anything but optimistic. She was the one who got us an apartment. She was the one who said we could get jobs and make it on our own. It might have been my idea to leave home, but Cat was the one who made me believe we could someday have the life we wanted.
“Jag…” I sobbed. “They hurt him.”
“Who?”
“Jag. He’s my…” My what? My boyfriend? My drug dealer? My savior? I didn’t know. “He’s my friend. They hurt him when they took me.”
One good thing came out of the videos. If Cuchillo was sending them to Jag, it meant he was still alive. They didn’t kill him in the parking lot of the garage.
I focused on Cat through the swelling around my eyes and gasped. She looked nothing like the girl I remembered from less than a year ago. Cat was horribly thin, dark eyes dull, hair brittle and frizzy, and her formerly gorgeous tan skin was a sickly shade of yellow.
She looked like me when my addiction tossed me off the cliff to hit rock bottom. I wanted to check her arms for track marks, but couldn’t. I was too weak, too beaten. I didn’t need a mirror to know I was covered in bruises from top to bottom. El Cuchillo beat me within an inch of my life, always hard enough to make me scream but never enough to actually break any bones, though I was sure he wouldn’t care if he did.
“Cat,” I croaked. “We need to get out of here.”
Jag
I ignored the sounds of the contractors working on my office. I wasn’t sure why I was bothering to fix shit up. If I didn’t get Miri back soon, I’d just tear it up again in another fit of rage.
My bruised knuckles pulsed in time with my heart and I rubbed my hands. When I watched the video sent by El Cuchillo… Shit. It hurt just to think about it.
My entire body began to tremble as I relived the fury all over again. My anger was so raw I had to close my eyes to rein in the violence that threatened to shove logic to the ground and piss on its remains. Waves of tension radiated up and down my spine, spreading to my extremities—begging, screaming for me to unleash on the nearest object.
Yesterday, Cuchillo sent a video of him and some dude named Raoul—a soon to be dead man whom I assumed was second in command. Raoul Quintero, a nasty son of a bitch with a sadistic streak that rivaled Milo’s, systematically beat and tortured Miri alongside Cuchillo. When the clip ended, I couldn’t see straight. Screaming, I hurled my laptop against the bulletproof windows. The glass held but the flimsy machine burst into a dozen pieces on impact. I didn’t stop there. No fucking way. It wasn’t nearly enough to extinguish the anger and hurt and guilt expanding inside my body until I felt as if I might explode from the pressure.
By the time my vision cleared and my mind snapped out of the murderous haze, whatever had been left in my office was torn to shreds. Every last item was either broken or damaged. Chest heaving and eyes stinging with unshed tears, I barely made it to the kitchen before I fell the fuck apart.
Too many feelings assaulted me at once: anger, fear, guilt, loss, fucking failure. Miri was embedded too deep in my heart for me to have any chance of keeping emotions out of the equation. Jag and Boss no longer existed as separate entities. The two men had merged into one—lover and criminal, fire and ice, passion and violence. They wove around each other, tangled until there was no way to tell where one man ended and