Page 44 of Reckless Forever
“Thank you, you’re beautiful as well.” I embraced her and we parted. Everybody here in the States was stacked and looked like models. If I ate enough candied yams, maybe I’d have ass like this because it was heavy.
“You been crying?” Remy asked.
Before I could answer, Storm cut in. “She’s worried about the guys going to Bolivia.”
Remy looked at me like I had two heads. “Judah is going to shoot before they even get their guns out of their waistbands.”
The entire room was filled with laughter from everyone except me. Even from the two guys, before they disappeared into the living room.
While it may have made me feel a little bit better, knowing that Padrino was in danger didn’t make me any less uneasy about it. I know that he had crossed the line by sending thesoldiers into their parents’ home, but I wasn’t exactly okay with him being in harm’s way. He was really all that I had left of real family. I didn’t want to see him die.
I excused myself from the table and found the nearest bathroom. I had to get away from the noise to get my head together. In the midst of my reflection, the guilt hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had another moment where I just had to cry it out. I hoped that I had made the right choice to follow my heart and give Judah and I a real chance. But now I had escalated it into something that was bigger than me.
After I gathered myself, I walked out of the bathroom and bumped right into who I believe was Cupcake.
“Blow these,” she said as she held up the bubble wand in her hand. I laughed through tears and took her to the couch, where I blew bubbles for her to run through. I was smiling, but, on the inside, I wasn’t okay, and I wouldn’t be okay until I knew that this was over and everyone was safe.
My phone vibrated underneath my head as I tried to go to sleep for the third time. In the time that I had been at the safe house, I hadn’t heard from Judah since he walked out the door. I grabbed the phone quickly and hoped that it was him, but it wasn’t. It was Emilio. I ignored it. He had been asking me for my whereabouts for the last three days, and I refused to open his messages or respond to him. It vibrated again, and I looked just for good measure. Another message from Emilio.
This time, I caught a glimpse of a video image. My heart raced as I clicked on it, my hands shaky, barely able to hold it straight. I pressed play, and what I saw made me damn near get out of bed and run for the hills.
Judah, Jaxon, and Trouble were walking through Padrino’s house with the biggest guns I had ever seen. They had the man who was on guard in the control tower at gunpoint. They walked through slowly, with militant precision, as Jaxon and Trouble had him sit on the couch, and Judah walked through the house as if he were taking a stroll in the park. When he finally came out, he had Yenny, dragging her across the floor on her knees.
“Go sit on the couch,” He barked.
She didn’t move. Jaxon repeated what he had said in Spanish, and she hurried to go sit, crying the entire way.
He reached down into a duffle bag and pulled out a set of collars, while the other two had their guns trained on their hostages. She tried to run away. Judah yanked her back by her hair and shot her right in the forehead. The blast made me gasp from the other end of the phone. I covered my mouth as I watched in disbelief.
“I ain’t tussling with no fucking body today,” he argued more to himself than anyone else.
Trouble stepped to the side nonchalantly and looked down at his shoes like he couldn’t be bothered with having blood on him.
Judah crouched over the soldier, adjusting the collar, his hands moved almost surgically. He pulled out a tablet, and the LED lights on the device glowed softly at first. Like a heartbeat, but then, the glow intensified. The man whimpered, his eyes widened, and Judah’s head tilted slightly, studying the reaction with a smile on his face. A fast flick of his finger on the tablet, and his body arched violently. The scream ripped through the room, piercing and raw, echoing off the walls.
I could hear the crackle of energy through the speakers on my phone, even when the camera was angled at such a far distance. It wasn’t just electricity; it was burning, screaming, making him contort and throw up in a way that made me want to claw my own skin off. Another quick tap on the keyboard made himconvulse violently. The muscles in his arms and legs stretched and then tightened like rubber bands. Judah’s face remained unreadable, like an evil genius conducting a science experiment.
Trouble’s gun never wavered, and Jaxon’s eyes were sharp, and his head never stopped scanning the room for potential danger, but Judah controlled everything. Every twitch, every spasm, every scream was done by his hands. He typed, swiped, tapped until he got the reaction he wanted.
For minutes, he let it go on until the body went completely still. I could see faint smoke coming from the collar.
He stood, straightened his jacket, and walked between the two bodies as if it were nothing, then he pressed a button on the tablet that made the collar stop glowing at once. His eyes flicked toward the camera, cold and sharp, and I sat back in my bed, as if he were looking directly at me.
Jaxon walked to the camera and spoke in Spanish.
“Santos, we respected you. But disrespect is met with disrespect. You give countdowns, we don’t. We just proved to you that you’re not untouchable. This is a war you won’t win.”
Judah put his tablet back in the duffle bag and walked through the living room.
“G, how do you say checkmate in Spanish?” He called out.
Jaxon responded. Then Judah walked into the camera, aimed the rifle, and said “¡Fin del juego!” (game over). Before they walked out like they didn’t just leave a burned body on the floor.
The video ended. My hands were shaking so hard, I nearly dropped the phone. The living room of Padrino’s house was empty, silent, with nothing but the picture of electricity, smoke, and vomit so vivid, I could almost taste it through the screen. I wasn’t surprised or shocked by the element of death. I was shocked to see a different side of a man who had made mefeel nothing but butterflies. Judah had turned the war into something that was almost inhumane.
Emilio’s message after that video was a plea for me to help him. He had been contacting me around the clock and begging me to return to Bolivia with him. He knew that he couldn’t set foot in the country without me, but I wasn’t going back. Well, I hadn’t planned to anyway. After what I saw, I had no idea how far this was going to go.
It made sense when all the women laughed at me earlier today. This was a family full of psychopaths, and I thought I had seen it all, but this was something straight from a movie scene.
