Page 1 of Savage Fire

Casa de Soledad

Buenaventura, Colombia

Seven Years Ago….

Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Though the clock ticked and his heart pounded…silence had never been so loud. The vacuum of time between the explosion of the bullet and the wetthunkof projectile meeting flesh, only seemed to grow larger, suck up more space, until the whole of the room was throbbing with suffocating…silence.

Dragging his gaze from the body at his feet, Javier Lopez took in the room that had been the theater of his nightmares for fifteen of this thirty years. Framed in rich mahogany wood on each wall, with ceiling-tall books cases along the wall behind the massive desk. A desk as immaculate and empty as the man who sat had behind it. Wide sliding doors across the room from the desk offered the best view of the veranda and the verdant garden beyond it.

It was the office of a business man. A man who sold sin and destruction. A man who made a fortune off the backs of others. Man, child, woman. It didn’t matter to the dead man. And that is why he was dead. Why Javier had ended him.

His chest burning from holding his breath, his heart racing, his body thrumming with tension, aggression, and rage, Javier peered down at the body once more, the bullet wound in the man’s forehead weeping drops of bright red blood.

Javier blinked eyes stinging with shameful tears, then glared down at this hand. His shaking hand. The gun in his grip was heavy as his numb, cold fingers struggled to keep their hold. Fuck that! There’d be no tears today. Not now, not ever. The man on the floor deserved no such emotion. He’d only deserved a slow, agonizing death. It was too bad Javier hadn’t had the time to give that to him.

He’d done it.

It was over.

Sucking in another breath to steady himself, he barely moved when the door to his father’s lavish, opulent office swung open, a familiar face entering the room.

The man’s gaze flicked from Javier to the body on the floor at his feet. No expression. No sign that he’d just seen his own father’s dead body…and his younger brother holding the gun that made him that way.

“Jorge,” Javier said, his voice flat.

Jorge Calderone, eldest son of Jose Calderone, the evil, greedy, psychopathic leader of the Calderone Cartel, nodded in greeting, his dark eyes trained on Javier’s face, seeking…what? Remorse? Fear? Grief? Disbelief? He’d not find those things.

Because Javier didn’t feel those things.

He was finally free.

“You did good,lobezno,” Jorge offered, taking a step closer, slowly, deliberately, as though approaching a wounded, snarling wolf. Or as Jorge delighted in calling him, a “wolfling.”

Dropping the gun to the thick, expensive Aubusson carpet, Javier shoved his fingers through his shoulder-length black hair. “I did what you demanded, Jorge, and now I want what I earned.”

Jorge bent over and picked up the gun, inspecting it, before turning to carefully place it on their father’s desk. “What you earned…. Freedom.”

“I want to walk away today, a ghost. I will no longer exist to you or any other member of the Calderone Cartel. You and I never met. We never made this deal. To you, I was never born.”

Gritting his teeth, his jaw muscles flexing, Jorge stared, something working behind eyes too much like their father’s. Dark as onyx and just as hard and cold. Once again, suffocating silence filled the room.

Finally, Jorge raised his hand in a negligent wave, offering Javier a careless smile.

“You have earned your freedom,lobezno,” he said. His smile slipped from his face as he continued, “But do not mistake this freedom as a life free from the consequences of what you’ve done the last fifteen years.”

Javier sneered. “I know that. I am fully prepared to live with the consequences. I knew what could happen when I agreed to do this, but I knew it had to be done. He had to be stopped. The world is a better place without thishijo de putaliving, breathing, and ruining lives.”

Lives like Javier’s mother’s. Ana Lopez. She’d been twelve when Jose Calderone got his claws into her. Stolen from her small village in El Salvador, sold into sexual slavery, and finally left to rot once she got too old to whet the appetites of wealthy perverts. Ana had been just seventeen when she’d gotten pregnant with Javier, but being a mother wouldn’t save her from the ugly brutality of her life. It hadn’t saved Javier, either.

How many men could say they’d been born on the filthy floor of a tiny bedroom in a seedy brothel? How many men could say they’d been raised by their mother in the backrooms of a house of prostitution? How many men could say they learned about sex from six women who’d all taken their turns teaching him…hands on? All he knew about life, sex, and pleasure he’d learned from women who’d made sex their trade—though none had had a choice. They’d been stolen and sold, then tossed away, just like his mother had been.

Jorge angled his head, his penetrating gaze locked on Javier’s face, contemplating.

Javier refused to cower, to show any emotion, any weakness. He stood, waiting, his chest still burning, his heart still racing, his thoughts now spinning.

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