Page 87 of Wicked Intentions (Wicked Games 3)
“Absolutely not,” I say flatly, blood pulsing in my ears. “Fuck no with a capital F. Would you send Tabby in if the situation was reversed?”
“You think it would be up to him?” Tabby asks archly.
Sounding thoughtful, Mariana answers. “Capo’s never searched me before any of our meetings. He trusts me. He’d never know if I was wearing a wire.”
He trusts me. That makes my stomach roll like my breakfast might make a reappearance.
“What would I have to get him to say?”
“No, Angel,” I say, gripping the back of her chair. When she looks up at me, I shake my head to underscore my words. “No. Never. Gonna. Happen.”
The look in her eyes tells me I’ve already lost this fight.
“Reynard bought me from Capo when I was ten years old,” she says, unflinchingly holding my gaze. “Did you know that? Did you find that out in your talks with the FBI?”
The only sound I hear is the pounding of my pulse. The whole room narrows to a small tunnel of black, focused on Mariana’s face. I sink into the chair next to hers.
“What?”
“With money he’d been skimming from Capo’s operation for years,” she continues, as if I haven’t said anything. “Very small amounts, nothing that would raise suspicions. My sister Nina and I were in a group of girls being trafficked to Europe from South America in a shipping container. There was no food, only jugs of water, and no receptacles for waste. Twenty-seven of us went into that shipping container. Twelve of us survived the trip to London. We were all children. The oldest, my sister Nina, was fourteen.”
From the corner of my eye, I glimpse Tabby recoil and cover her mouth with her hand, but I can’t look away from Mariana. I can’t move. I can’t even breathe.
“Normally, girls taken from the villages in my country are smuggled to Tenancingo, Mexico, which is a hub for human trafficking and forced prostitution, but we were sold abroad because we were pretty. Pretty girls get higher prices. And Capo pays the highest prices of them all. Especially for virgins.” She waits a beat, looks at her hands. “He gets a new container every month,” she whispers.
“Jesus Christ,” Connor breathes.
Mariana takes another moment, then shakes her head as if pulling herself from a bad dream. She speaks more briskly, her voice clear and level, but there’s an undercurrent of rage.
“To make a long story short, Reynard went to the docks thinking he was meeting a shipment of stolen paintings, but got the surprise of his life when the workers opened the doors. Somehow the manifests got mixed up, and there we were, a dozen starving, terrified little girls in collars and chains, huddled among corpses.
“Reynard only had enough cash on him to bribe the workers for one of us. They were Capo’s men, of course. The story became that only eleven girls had survived.”
I remember putting a hand around her neck in passion and her stiffly saying “I don’t like to be restrained,” and I have to swallow the bile rising acidly hot in the back of my throat.
“Later I found out that my sister and the others were brutally raped by their transporters before they ever got to Capo. But my sister escaped. She got her hands on one of the men’s guns and blew her brains out. She was lucky, in a way. I understand not one of the other girls made it to sixteen.”
I’m aware that my mouth is open. I’m aware that the silence in the room is one of the most awful sounds I’ve ever heard, filled with the horror of three adults who’ve seen plenty of terrible things in their lives. But I can’t move. I’m frozen. All I can do is stare at Mariana.
She sighs heavily, passing a hand over her face. It’s obvious the toll this tale is taking on her. I wonder if she’s ever spoken about it to anyone before.
“It was another ten years before Capo found out what Reynard had done. I don’t know how. All I know is that one day he came to the shop and said I had a choice to work off Reynard’s debt in one of two ways.”
Her mouth pinches in distaste at some memory. “So instead of becoming Capo’s whore, I became his puppet,” she says, more quietly. “His obedient minion, sent to fetch whatever bauble struck his fancy. I was already an accomplished thief by then. By seven years old I could sneak into any locked room, pinch a wallet or a watch from a man without him knowing it was gone. Reynard only refined my skills. So it made sense for Capo to recruit me, though he would’ve preferred I choose the other path. And all these years later, here we are.”
Mariana looks at Tabby and Connor, both of whom are obviously in the same shock I am. “I’ve wanted to kill him for as long as I can remember. So if there’s anything I can do to help take him down, I’ll do it.”
Tabby and Connor look at me.
“Angel,” I say roughly, hunting for her eyes. When I get them and she looks at me, I say, “Let me kill him for you.”
“If we don’t give the FBI Moreno, she doesn’t get a clean slate,” Connor says quickly.
I’m not really listening. It’s hard enough to concentrate on sitting still when every nerve is screaming for me to go cut off Moreno’s head and present it to Mariana on a silver platter.
I want to destroy him for what he’s done to her. I want to obliterate him. I want to rip him apart with my bare hands and feast on his bones. I’ve never felt such all-consuming fury.
Looking deeply into my eyes, Mariana smiles.
