Page 177 of Devil Mine

“Let me help you.” She gets to her feet, feeling gingerly around my shoulder until she finds the problem. “This is going to hurt.”

I look her in the eye. “Nothing can compare to the last half hour of my life.”

Her gaze softens. She pops my shoulder back into its socket and I wince. Her hands massage the tender flesh as her eyes beg me.

“Don’t go. Please don’t go.”

“I have to. We’re not out of the woods just yet, and we won’t be until he’s dead. I’m going to kill him and then I’ll come back for you.”

Her chin sets stubbornly. “I’m not staying here. I’m coming with you.”

“No,amor. You need to hide and you need to wait for me.”

She shakes her head obstinately. “What if he hurts you?”

I cup her face and force her to look at me. Those blue eyes eat me up from the inside out the way they always do.

“The only way he can hurt me is if he hurtsyou. I won’t be able to focus, to think about anything else, if I don’t know that you’re safe, do you get that? I need you to stay back and hide.Promise methat you’ll hide, Tess.” She still looks uncertain. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” she whispers.

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Chapter Sixty-Three

Thiago

The fury coursing through my body is bone deep. It’s buried so inextricably in my marrow that I’ll carry traces of that anger with me for the rest of my life. Betraying me carries its own death sentence, but going after my wife? Death is a mercy Marco will be begging me for before I’m done with him.

The violence that thrums through my arms makes me feel invincible as I stalk down the halls of the bomb shelter in search of the man I’m going to eviscerate. I follow the trail of blood he left behind. There is no rational thought, no care for my own safety, just single-minded focus on hunting down the animal who hurt my sister and tried to assault Tess.

Rounding a corner, I see Julio. He was born into the cartel, both his parents have been a part of the family since my father was in his twenties. His death will hurt them, but his betrayal will destroy them. I’m behind him, forearm locked around his throat, before he’s even aware that I’m there.

“Dile a tu dios que el diablo dice hola, hijueputa.”

He has a split second to stiffen before I slit his throat, the viciousness of my stroke nearly decapitating him in the process. I release him and his body falls to the ground just as someone rounds the corner at the opposite end of the hallway.

Fredo. Julio’s brother.

My knife whips through the air and buries itself eight inches deep into his eye from across the hall. He dies with a pathetic whimper, no more a man in death than he was in life.

I stalk up to his body, pulling the knife from his head and slotting it away in the band of my trousers. His other eye is frozen in disbelief, staring sightlessly back up at me. With a roar, I reach into his eye socket and grab that useless eyeball, ripping it out of his head with ease. It’s clutched tightly in my fist as I follow the trail of blood to a closed door.

I should have known the night of Augusto Leone’s death that Marco was the mole, or at least suspected. I’d been so consumed by Tess that I hadn’t seen anything else. And that motherfucker had used that weakness against me, just like I’d predicted.

The door shatters open when I kick it in, the top hinges prying completely loose. Marco is sitting on the same chair on which Leone died. There’s a certain poetic justice in knowing that he’ll die there as well.

“Your little mutiny failed,” I drawl, tossing the eyeball at him. It hits the ground and rolls to his feet.

Tess did a number on him. His face is a bloodied mess. He’s pale, his skin white as a sheet, and he’s clutching his abdomen. There’s a thick pool of blood beneath his chair; it leaks out of him and drips slowly onto the floor. Tess unknowingly gave him a kill shot. He’s bleeding out and judging by the quantity surrounding him, he doesn’t have long to live.

His mouth is open, lips parted around his ragged breaths as he watches me with crazed but quickly fading eyes.

“Don’t you die on me, Marco,” I seethe. “I still need to fucking kill you.”

“It wasn’t supposed to end this way,” he mutters.

“How did you think it would end? You betrayed the family, you were never going to get away with it.”

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