Page 31 of To Catch A Rook

I dropped my voice, pressing against the glass hole and my venomous whisper carried over the vast emptiness of the clinical space.

“Death is too easy—too final. You will remain here until you fade away into nothingness. Your life will mean nothing. Your death will mean nothing. You. Are. Nothing.”

I stood and tapped my red gloved fingers against the glass in veiled apathy. “But,”—I stared at my pretty red hands, the color mimicking the crimson palette of fresh blood—“I can make the nothingness easier. Perhaps I dim the lights one evening. I give you an extra bar another. Perhaps I get bored and put a bullet into your brain to end your suffering early.”

My stare left my dancing fingers and zoomed in on Alec’s pallid face as he watched me with cautious, sunken eyes. “I will give you the opportunity to choose your fate—the one thing you stole fromher.”

When the bitter word touched my tongue, I refused to taste it. Instead, I spat it out into the bright hallway and glared at my prisoner for forcing it into my mouth.

“The West Coast was owned by the Carlos Cartel,” my captive admitted in a scratchy, hesitant drawl. “But the Midwest was Alvarez’s territory.”

“Which Alvarez?” My tone was sharp, viciously hungry for the truth of my situation. Each one of Alejandro’s sons was his own brand of repulsive.

“Marco’s.”

The oldest brother. Marco appeared a white-collar family man; he ran two tech firms. How disgustingly fitting he’d trade tech by day and people by night.

“How long did he own the territory?”

A shrug of skin and bone. “As long as I was in the business. The trafficking was split up into four different zones, and whether the girls were international or domestic. He preferred to ship his girls in. I only dealt with domestic.”

Thevileness of this man, speaking of human beings as if they were products to be used and abused. If I wasn’t so set on his suffering, I would kill him tonight.

“How many?” I swallowed my fear at the question, knowing the answer wouldn’t be one I wanted to hear. But I had to hear it.

Alec’s black eyes peered up into mine, their depths filled with an evil I’d never be able to name. His pink lips pouted upwards in an attempt at a smirk.

“Girls? A few thousand a year, maybe. Have to restock—not much of a lifespan in this line of work, is there?”

Remain calm, remain … calm.

“You’ve chosen your fate.”

I nodded to Joey, who moved aside, and input a passcode to unlock the tiny cupboard behind her. I removed a small slew of torture devices. An electric cattle prod, a bone saw, a handy pair of pliers. She’d get to choose her preferred method of torture tonight.

I would kill him in seconds if I conducted the torture session. I wasn’t willing to let him go just yet.

“Make him bleed, but keep him alive. It’ll have to be quick tonight. I’ll be outside.”

I forced my body to move at an unhurried pace, through the lit hallway and into the still-dark one, before stepping outside into the still night air of September.

I made it to my passenger door of the vehicle before my rage bubbled over into a spewing mass of pure hate. I couldn’t contain it any longer; the acidic scream crept up from the roiling in my guts, and I slapped the metal skeleton with my open palm in bitter anguish.

My sobs dissipated into the dense tree line; immediately I clamped my mouth shut, and chastised myself for my lack of self-control in an area where avalanches were common.

I forced filling breaths of air down my throat and into my belly as I waited for Joey to return. All of my pretense was out the window – I needed to get a hold of myself before I made a crucial mistake.

I counted down from one thousand to clear my mind from the plaguing spiral of sorrow and got to 323 by the time Joey came out of the building. I walked over to the panel and reset the code using my slew of biometric software. Then we slipped back into the night, driving the dark, twisted road back toward home.

The next day came and went in a blur and my preplanned evening to myself was not going well. A few hours of trash television and a particularly back-breaking workout did nothing to assuage my feelings of guilt. Nor had an entire bottle of Champagne.

A visit with the demons of my past always made me restless and hungry for a distraction. I’d wallowed enough; I needed something in the present to ground me. To take me away from thoughts ofher.

Sex was the perfect antidote.

Sex required no thought, no emotion, onlyaction.

Sex had stopped being a connection of souls a decade ago; instead, I had molded the act into the perfect escape—a delicious release of pleasure and pain, an untethered bliss of in-the-moment relief.

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