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CHAPTER20
Blind rage coiled in his bones like hardened tar as he looked at the man struggling against the ties Antonio had bound him in.
He needed information, and he needed it fast. There was no time for subtleties. He was currently in the “hospital” which was a glorified torture chamber for the women and girls, and when necessary, disciplinary actions for the men who worked here. He’d forgone the chairs with stirrups, opting for the rickety wooden table and chairs. The dingy room did not invoke confidence in health care, with its filthy walls, unknown fluid spattered across them, clumps of something in the dirt, and stains all over the chairs.
“Tell me who she was with. I want to know about the other women we took.”
The man gave him a smirk.
Antonio had worked his way up in this organization. He’d started like one of these grunts, but now he was their boss, with his own quarters and this man smirked at him?
Antonio pulled his bound hands across the tabletop in front of them, tying them down. Only now, the smirk faded.
“I will ask again. Who was she with? Who else did we take?”
He licked his lips, but still didn’t speak.
“Is it a secret from me?” Antonio let the gray wolf out. He turned his back on the man, heading to a shelf on the other side of the hut, and pulled down a large pail of ten-inch nails and a hammer.
“No, it’s not.” The man started speaking, finally realizing what was happening. Lobo Gris was serious and the grunt was in trouble.
But it was too late.
“We took four women that night.” He spoke fast, even as Antonio poised the nail over the back of his hand, flattened on the tabletop. As soon as he stopped talking, he drew the hammer back and let it fly, hitting the nail with enough force to drive it through the man’s hand and into the table.
An unholy scream ripped through the air.
“Where are they? Why are you making this so damn difficult? I brought you here to have a conversation, not a torture session. Who doesn’t want me to know this?”
“One was shot on the plane on the way over. She made too much noise, argued, screamed. Hector shot her for annoying him. She wasn’t the one we wanted, anyway.” The man cried, cradling his injured hand as best he could with his good hand. “One succumbed to the drugs. Javier gave her too big a dose on accident, and she must have had something else wrong with her because she died in her sleep. The other one is in the doctor’s office. She’s alive still.”
The doctor’s office.
A room where the women were rarely taken for checkups, only when El Cuchillo had a particular buyer who insisted on health or virginity or whatever. Sometimes, they wanted implants. It was a terrifying room, not at all sterile, with three torture chairs. More often than not, it was where men sampled the wares before they were sold.
“Listen carefully now.” The man’s whimpers ceased and he looked at Lobo Gris with a healthy amount of fear. “How many times was my woman taken to the doctor’s office?”
He would put one nail in his hand for each time they’d taken advantage of Katie.
“I don’t know. Hector was in charge of her. We were all under strict instructions not to touch her; she was a gift for you.”
“How many times?”
“Four that I know of, Lobo. But we only used her mouth. I swear it.”
The man dissolved into tears as the Wolf pulled four nails out of the bucket.
* * *
Katie was a test, then. Antonio stalked from the room off the airplane hangar, where the man was still nailed to the table. Twenty-one nails in his hand. One for each time she had been used, plus one for each man that had used her.
The man’s screams still echoed in his mind, like a concerto. The other men here had forgotten who he used to be. He was the gray wolf, for Christ’s sake. He was dangerous. It was almost as terrifying to know Lobo Gris wanted to see you as it was when El Cuchillo, the big boss man, did.
Or used to be anyway.
He’d gone soft. El Cuchillo had seen it and brought Katie to him for a test.
He had to get her out of here or they would kill her. He had no doubt of that.
He was on his way to his bungalow, intent on bundling her up and getting to one of the Jeeps, when from the corner of his eye, he saw El Cuchillo himself, Hector at his heels, cutting across the yard to him.
They were confronting him. In his home. El Cuchillo had a large gun strapped to his chest.
He was a dead man if he didn’t think fast.
Pretending he didn’t notice them, he quickened his steps, a plan forming in his head.
