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“I told Ciro your honor was a leash. Thank you for proving me right.”

A door near the kitchen slammed open—the one I’d dismissed as a closet.

Cold air rolled in, carrying the damp smell of the basement below. Then came the sound of boots moving fast beneath the house.

My body remained useless on the sofa, and fear crept up my spine. It was a sensation I’d rarely experienced. The worst part wasn’t that men were coming for me. It was that I could hear them coming and do nothing.

A staircase descended into the darkness beyond the threshold, and Spanish rose from below, low and harsh, men speaking over one another as they pounded up the steps.

By the time the first man reached the kitchen light, I already knew the truth.

They hadn’t broken into Isabella’s house.

They’d been inside it the whole time.

I knew how to take pain, but this helplessness was a whole different kind of mindfuck.

Two of the men reached me first. They had MS-13 written all over them, from the ink crawling up one man’s neck to the dead-eyed way the other grabbed my arms. A third followed behind them, older and cleaner, with a gun in his hand and the face of someone paid to keep mistakes from becoming disasters. A fourth came through the door last with a coil of restraints in his hand.

I forced every bit of will I had into my arms and legs.

Nothing.

The man with the restraints rolled me hard, dumping me onto my stomach on the floor. “Keep him alive,” the cleaner man ordered in English. “Señor Delgado wants him talking.”

One of the others laughed. “He will talk.”

They wrenched my arms behind my back and bound my wrists tightly. My shoulders screamed. My chest pressed into the floor, and my lungs worked too slowly to keep up with the panic trying to tear through me.

Isabella stepped around my head. Her black boots stopped in front of my face.

“Don’t damage him too much,” she said. “I want him to be conscious when he learns what obedience feels like. Angry enough to hate me. Awake enough to feel every second of it. And pretty enough on his knees that I can enjoy watching him break in my hands.”

The older man barked, “Move.”

They hauled me up under the arms. My legs dragged uselessly beneath me, boots scraping across the hardwood, then catching on the edge of a drop cloth. The world tilted; everything slid past in pieces.

My men were outside watching a lie.

The basement stairs dropped beneath us, narrow and steep. They didn’t bother with care. My shoulder slammed into the wall. My boot hit the railing. My cheek struck a concrete edge at the bottom, and pain raced across the right side of my face. Warm blood slid toward my jaw.

Good.

Pain meant some part of me still functioned.

One of the men cursed as they dragged me across the floor toward a steel door.

The house was never the extraction point.

It was the mouth of the trap.

The man with the gun in his hand opened the door, and the odor of damp earth hit my nose. Beyond it, a low utility passage stretched into the dark with old concrete walls, rusted brackets, dead conduit, and pipes that hadn’t carried anything useful in years.

Someone shoved a utility cart toward us.

“Get him on it.”

They slammed me onto the cart. My ribs hit the metal edge, and a grunt tore out of me. One man grabbed my legs, another my shoulders, and together they strapped me down across the frame.