“I’ll check when I get there.” He insists. “Saban, what about you?”
“I’m not sure.” Looking at my arms. I don’t know. Shrugging, he can check when he gets here. I would put anything past that unhinged maniac.
“Kandie?” He growls.
“No fucking way.” She hisses with a surety I wish I felt.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” comes Mateo sing song voice. We all huff out a laugh despite the darkness falling around our lives.
Chapter seven
THE HUNT
SNAKE~ MONTHS LATER, WESTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA
When I catch that little motherfucker, I’m breaking her neck. Promise.
As we approach the compound. I feel a sense of elation that has escaped me since the night I discovered her gone.
No message, no note. Nothing.
Just fucking gone.
The cottage was cold and lonely when I arrived. After that hellish day and seeing what those kids endured, the first face I wanted to see was hers — to pick up where we left off earlier. To tell her we were once again rescuing kids from a fate worse than death.
My fucking soul felt like it had been scraped bare with a rusted knife, then had acid poured in the cavity. All because of her — Saban.
Days later, finding her phone burned into a black mass of charred plastic and metal outside the little faded buttercup yellow clubhouse the Love girls hung out at when they were younger nearly undid me.
I hadn’t felt so broken since I lost my parents and fiancé and my sister was forced to flee to the US.
I went wild, thinking someone had snatched her. Wracking our brains trying to find out who — neither Angel nor I thought for a second there would not be any blowback from disrupting the trafficking ring or me putting down Marco no matter how amenable his second in command was to the idea.
We wasted valuable time tracking down potential enemies, and by the time we focused on the Loves, someone had spirited them away. The family closed ranks. It was as though Saban and Ezekiel-Jane evaporated like steam in the hot southern sun.
Even after being confronted by us, neither Kandie nor Krie buckled. Kandie — barely bigger than a gnat — attacked us in her shop, which ended up in her being carted off to jail by none other than the Sheriff, her lover and our partner in the very scheme we were being accused of.
Interrogations, raids on all our enterprises let us know just how far Rudy’s network went with the sick fucks who wanted to use kids in the most despicable ways. Something tells me we’ve barely uncovered the actual truth. This enterprise goes much farther than we ever realized.
Women we trusted with our very beings started the whole mess because they didn’t believe in us enough to hear us out. Women we protected with our lives — who saw us at our most vulnerable — betrayed us.
Ezekiel-Jane didn’t know Angel like Saban knew me, so she can have a pass. But that little terrorist fucking lived with me for the last ten years. Should know fucking better. She knows. There will be no mercy given when I find her ass.
Saban broke me. Now, I have no choice but to ruin her in every way imaginable.
She can beg, plead, cry, fight — I welcome it. She will find no grace with me.
“We are coming up on the east end. The east is where most of his commandos are. Servants are south of the primary residence. The southeast wing is where they said guests reside. No one enters that wing unless I give the go-ahead.” Speaking over the mic, I see our teams nod. Each of us — Rocco, Padre and Angel — leads a team of twelve men, making us the thirteenth.
Though financed by Angel, this is my op. As they all are since he tapped me as his second in command. As Primo, I’m the lead enforcer of the club.
“Nothing can replace your training,” he said all those years ago when he took over the el Diablo. The respect we share goes both ways. He knows when to fall back and let me lead in situations like this. He’s more than a business partner, and, impossibly, this hell we’ve endured has brought us closer than even I thought possible. Angel is my brother in every way that matters.
Spurn and betrayal will do that — I recognize his pain because it mirrors my own.
Not that my head is in any less turmoil than his. But he has a child on the way. I don’t think Easy got rid of the baby like he does. Seeing how she looked at him, I knew she at least felt she had no choice but to get as far away from him as possible. I hope for the sake of the world my hunch is true because we have all seen what a bruised Angel de la Muerta is capable of, and none of it is good.
I can’t judge my friend, though. He had to stop me from killing some of the Love male cousins more than once in the last few months. The mercy I’ve shown all is only to preserve what little peace he can find once he gets his wife back.
