Page 77 of Savage Sin

My eyes roll and darkness steals my vision. Fingers dig around inside me. Bile rises into the back of my throat and my body convulses. Fires a thousand times hotter than the sun bleed into my veins, singes my nerve ending and then ignites inside me until I can’t breathe. I can’t do anything but scream.

My heart beats skyrockets.

Cortes finally pulls his fingers out of the freshly opened wound and holds up something that looks a little bigger than a grain of rice. A tracker? He knew where I was this whole time and used me as bait?

Cortes breaks into Spanish, his tongue moving fast and his words soaked with bloodlust and greed.

“I didn’t plan it, but you turned into the best asset there for a while. When Silas killed that fucking mole, I knew someone would come looking for the piece of shit. I did not know it would come back to some biker group. And then one plucks you up and here we are.” He’s still marveling over the tracker like he wants to break his arm to pat himself on the back.

He moves down my body and traces the tip of the blade along my abdomen. My skin quivers under the sharp pain.

“You would have had it easier had you spread your legs and let me use your cunt to build my army. But you Castel women like it the hard way.”

Blood drips down his hand and stains his cuffs. I try to push him off, but he’s not budging.

My brain tells me I knew I would end up here, but my heart wanted what I found with Rage.

His eyes flash with pure evil intent and I glimpse the animal just beneath the surface.

“I’ve taken everything away from you because I could. And now I’m going to tell you a little secret. Your mother couldn’t give me the heir I wanted, so she told me to take you as long as I didn’t cut off her money supply.”

My heart shrivels up into a ball and dies.

“Mí mamma?” I don’t believe him. Not for a second.

Cortes pulls up his phone and plays an audio that has my soul sinking into the earth at my back.

“Don’t you love modern technology?”

Betrayal grips my lungs and I can’t find it in me to breathe. Tears fall uncontrollably and I can’t tell the gun from the knife anymore.

I don’t care. Just end my life, the voice in my head whispers. But my heart lurches in my chest and wills me to fight. If not for me, my sister, the baby. And Rage.

The razor thin edge of the knife presses into my neck. Blood drips down the side of my neck, but I can’t focus on the pain or the fact I can smell my own blood.

“Where’s my sister? You might as well tell me if you’re going to kill me.”

“She’s going to do what your dead mother couldn’t and what you refused me. Gabriella is going to breed me sons.”

“My mother is dead?”

“And cold.”

I don’t know how I feel about the news. I don’t have time to think too much about it, anyway. Cortes slices into flesh.

“You killed my son. Now I’m going to take the last thing you have to give, and that is your life.”

“It was fair. Right? Isn’t that how this world works? You killed my father and stole what wasn’t yours.”

Cortes shrugs, like killing your best friend is nothing. For him, it probably wasn’t. “He had what I wanted, so I took it.”

“You’re forgetting one thing. I can’t blame you, though. You don’t know. When you threw me at the bottom of that ship, you gave me freedom. I found love. And he’s found you.”

Rage cocks the hammer on his gun and pulls the trigger.

The weight of my family’s sins lifts from me as Cortes’ body falls to the side.

Dead.

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