Page 2 of Cruel Devil

Hope flickers pathetically deep inside me.

Is he here to rescue me?

“Nnnn.” It feels like my tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth, my throat a dusty tunnel. Is that why I can’t speak?

“Hush. You need water.”

As if he summoned it, a savage thirst hits me, urgent and terrifying. But the hope that he’s freeing me helps stamp down the panic a little.

I keep working my hands as he slices away the rope around my ankles. My body stays stuck in its fetal position until the man gently puts a hand on my knees and starts pushing them down.

Agony.

Wild, frantic, piercing agony.

I scream, sob, try to claw his hands away so he’ll stop. I barely hear him making soothing sounds above me in the gloom.

I try to fight him, but the pain is too intense. And I am way, way too weak. He forces my legs straight and massages my trembling thighs and calves while an internal fire scorches the meat from my bones.

Darkness snatches me away.

For once, I’m more than happy to step into another nightmare.

There is no pain here.

Chapter 2

Nyx

I’m not sure what’s worse. Trying to keep a smile plastered on my face as the Domingo Cartel’s Capo’s mistress, Viv, chatters to me like a parrot on Adderall, or trying not to side-eye my five-foot-six two-hundred-eighty-seven pound Colombian babysitter, Matty.

The winner—loser?—is my husband’s goon, Matias.

He’s taking the whole ‘Don’t take your eyes off of her’ thing way too seriously. As soon as he climbed into the Rolls, he told the driver to lower the privacy screen. Now, half-twisted around in his seat, he stares suspiciously at me and Viv like he’s convinced we’re planning an attack on Capitol Hill.

I’ve only ever known him to always be this suspicious…else I’d have been worried that he was on to me. After all, I am masterminding an escape from a Colombian cartel…and my beautiful, savage husband, Caesar Domingo.

Ironically, I’m literally in the impromptu wedding dress I’d been wearing at our shotgun wedding only a few hours ago. Not that it means I’m getting cold feet. He said I’d be safer as his bride, and I believe him. But what he hasn’t said is that he’s done everything in his considerable power to find my sisters, and even if he did, I wouldn’t believe him.

I’m not a patient woman.

If he thinks I’m going to wait around while God knows what is being done to my sisters, then he’s a few beans short of a burrito. And I don’t say that because I’m stereotyping his Colombian heritage. I’m saying that because I’m actually pretty damn hungry, and I love burritos.

Now I wish I’d made up a Mexican restaurant for me and Viv to go to instead of a sushi joint. Like La Buena Papa, the restaurant where I met Caesar what feels like an eternity ago.

If I could time travel, would I have made the same decisions? Saving Princess from a fate worse than death? Inadvertently becoming an unsung cartel hero by alerting a capo—the one I’d been hired to kill—that he was in danger? Ending up in the arms of a devastating handsome man with throat tattoos and a cock with as much, if not more, power than he himself possessed?

It would mean I’d never have met Savage. The man who kidnapped me, imprisoned me, fucked me within an inch of my life, and then forced me to marry him so I’d be safe.

And I said yes, even though I didn’t really have a choice. Because despite knowing what a monster he is, despite wanting to gouge out his eyes and castrate him, he made me fall in love with him…just like he made me do a lot of other things I didn’t want to do.

This wild ride has barely lasted a month.

And now I’ve been enmeshed in some cartel war that’s gotten my sisters snatched. Now I’m stuck figuring out who kidnapped my babies. Where they’ve been taken. How to reach them. How to extract them. And, lastly, how to blind, castrate, and behead the person responsible.

Viv clasps her ring-bedazzled hands together so hard they clank, ripping me out of a glorious daydream involving more blood and gore than a Quentin Tarantino film.

“I can’t wait to tell my daughter about this.” Her shoulders drop a moment later, mouth drooping at the corners. “If she’ll take my call.”

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