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For a second, I think they’ve buried me alive in some pit until I hear footsteps.
The shrieking hinges of a heavy, reinforced door.
Then a strip of light so intense it’s blinding, coming from outside wherever the hell I am. The lights hum loudly behind the small group of shadow men standing in the doorway.
They mutter back and forth in Spanish.
There’s another wish. If only I understood more than the awkward snatches and fragments every white boy who grows up in California absorbs by osmosis.
When the tallest figure steps forward—the only one whose face isn’t hidden behind a balaclava mask—I already know what’s on his mind even before he stomps on my chest and starts snarling in my ear.
“You. I chose you because you brought it back.” He thrusts his fist down to my face, and it takes my throbbing eyes a few seconds to catch the glinting, ornately carved metal on his finger.
The ring.
The second ring I kept from those bastards in Vegas that I didn’t turn over as evidence.
The same cartel prize I brought for good luck, now wrapped around his finger. He brushes his other hand over it the same way you’d caress a lover.
“You killed my men,” he whispers. “Did you think death would stop them when they belong to me?”
Eladio Joaquin.
No one else.
I try not to cringe at his soulless villain schtick.
And if my eyes would work better, I know he’d be leering at me with his razor-sharp eyes.
“What do you want?” I grind out.
“Everything,” he says in his thick accent, his voice like thunder. “Hold nothing back, or we stop wasting time and play twenty-one roses.”
Fuck.
I try not to gag, hating that these pricks really are as sadistic as their reputation.
Twenty-one roses.
Ten fingers.
Ten toes.
One penis—or sometimes a face.
And they’ll remove them all slowly with a dull blade, laughing, one grisly piece at a time if I don’t give them what they want. I wish I’d caught a bullet from that goddamn contraband gunship before it was blown out of the sky.
It has to beat letting them turn me into a mangled meatsack of a man—or worse, sending me home in a destroyed state that’ll cost Delia her soul before I ever heave out my last breath.
“I already started on the old man,” he says dully. “Got two roses in before he gave me his name. That was all I needed. Sexton Jones.”
I want to swear so bad it hurts holding it in.
Not half as badly as I’d like to rip this asshole’s throat open with my teeth.
But if they’ve actually captured Sex, tortured him...they could do a fuck of a lot worse to everyone if I ignore these monsters and decide to be stupid and brave. Emphasis onstupid.
There’s a rustling noise next to my ear. I realize he’s reaching into his designer pants, fishing something out—his phone, judging by the blaring square of light in my face a second later.
