Page 23 of Velvet Deception

“Don’t hurt her!”

My heart seized. My lungs locked in all the air I’d shallowly pulled in.

No! Ramon? No!

But I’d heard his voice. It was my sweet son, shouting at these men from the back of the house. Hewashere, not next door. He wasn’t safe. He was here and in danger to stand up for me.

The man hovering over me blocked my view, but I heard the stampede of his little feet running over the floor. He’d rushed out into the living room from my bedroom. In a flash, the motion blurring by too quickly for me to track it, my sweet son, the reason I lived, darted out.

“Don’t hurt her?” The druggie who kicked our things about snatched my son as he ran out to stop this other brute from hitting me.

“No! Don’t!” I wrestled and squirmed, lifting my knee to ward off this asshole so I could get free.

The rabid need to kill these men lit a fire within me. Rage. Fury. White-hot anger burned so hot through me with this urgency to defend my son. Ramon relied on me. He counted on me, the only person he had in this world, to save him and protect him. Motherly instincts flamed so that I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t think.I was no longer able to even rationalize anything. All my energy, sparking with a desire to make these men suffer, was funneled down to protecting my baby from a single second of harm.

Like the Devil, laughing and sneering, the man caught Ramon in his arms. Holding him close as he flung out his arms and tried to kick out of his grip, the man narrowed his eyes on me. “I thought you had a kid. This will work even better.”

“Let him go!”

“Give us the drugs.”

Spittle flew from my mouth as I clenched my teeth and sucked in air to scream. “I don’t have any!”

“And I think you’re lying.” He held Ramon tighter. “And you can watch me take your son away and sell him, bitch, if you don’t listen to me now. I want the drugs.”

“Give them to us,” the other man said as he lifted his arm to strike at me again.

No.They couldn’t do this. It was asinine to think that just because I was a nurse, I would have drugs. It was ludicrous, a stupid, idiotic assumption that these bastards would believe, but they were too far gone, high or in the throes of withdrawal and rooted in malice, to stop and realize how wrong they were to insist that I had drugs here.

He tugged at my pants, ripping the seams of the scrubs. “I’ll prove it. You don’t believe me? I’ll show you. I’ll fucking take this cunt right now. Right in front of your son before we sell him on the streets if you don’t?—”

“Let her go.”

The man’s grimy fingers stopped clawing at me. Heaving hard breaths, I watched as he narrowed his eyes and tilted his head.

Ramon continued to kick out in my peripheral vision, but the man who captured him turned toward the back of the room.

In the frenzied seconds that passed since Ramon darted out to save me and stop the druggie from hurting me, someone else intervened.

Stepping out from the shadows was none other than Diego. He stalked forward, his fisted hands ready to fight back.

I wasn’t alone.

I wasn’t defenseless.

He was here, ready to help.

10

DIEGO

Iwas going to kill them.

Both of the filthy thugs who’d broken in here would be dead.

I knew it. More than I knew anything else in this world, both of them would be killed. By my hands.

Controlled by an inexplicable rage, I strode from Sofia’s bedroom and entered the madness in the living room, the singular space where Sofia had given me privacy and security as I grappled with the reality that I didn’t know much of anything. In here, I was granted the peace and comfort to rest from whatever had happened to me before all my memories were scattered or stolen from me.

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