I wake up to a pounding in my head. Rolling over, I wince, slowly twisting my neck from side to side to try and alleviate the ache. I stretch my arm across the bed and freeze when my fingers meet a warm body. Cracking my eyes open, I find Lucas on the other side of the bed. His eyes are closed, his mouth hanging open as he sleeps. He’s still fully clothed, and there’s a pillow wedged between us. I wait for a sense of discomfort to come, but it doesn’t. It’s as though my mind can’t even comprehend Lucas as any kind of threat. He’s just too innocent, too…kind. Kindness is a quality I can’t recall ever seeing in another person, but he has it.

He jerks awake, letting out a little snuffle as he does. It’s cute. He glances around the room before looking at me.

“Ah, Anna. I can explain…” he trails off, his usual blush staining his cheekbones. “The doc said someone had to watch you because you might have a concussion, and uh, I fell asleep. I’m sorry.”

“So, I could have died, and you wouldn’t even have known?” I ask.

His eyes pop wide. “No! Yes. Maybe.”

I smile. “It’s fine, Lucas.”

He blows out a breath. “So, how are you feeling today?”

“Like I was in a car crash and a gun fight.”

“I’ll go and get you some more painkillers.” He hops up and practically runs to the door.

Lifting my hand to my cut forehead, I feel a neat row of butterfly stitches. Blood is crusted into the strands of my hair, and I know I must look a mess.

I shower and walk back into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around my body, startling when I see Rafael sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Rafael.”

He glances up at me, and I notice the heavy shadows lingering beneath his eyes. He’s wearing suit pants and a rumpled shirt, the buttons loose to the middle of his chest. His usual put-together self is nowhere to be seen.

“Have you slept?” I ask.

His lips pull up on one side. “I’ve had a busy night.”

I stare at him, and this strange feeling settles in my chest, a shift in the air.

I move closer until my knees are only inches from his. His eyes drift up my towel-covered body until they meet my face. He seems almost vulnerable for a moment until I spot the smear of blood on the collar of his shirt and the open splits in his knuckles.

He follows my gaze to his hands before clenching his fists. I don’t know why I do it, but I find myself reaching for one of his hands and taking it in my own. He watches me as I brush my thumb over the torn skin.

“He deserved everything he got,” he says.

“Who did?” I whisper.

“The man who broke into my house to take you.” I swallow and stare at his large tattooed hand in mine. “Does it scare you, avecita?” he asks.

I meet his eyes, so dark and bottomless. “No,” I breathe, and it’s not a lie. Granted, not many people truly scare me anymore, but it’s more than that; he makes me feel…safe. I can’t explain it, or maybe I’ve just given up trying because if I’m honest with myself, I’ve felt safe with him ever since that night on his office floor. It’s that gut feeling again, something beyond the rational workings of my mind.

“I have something I think you should do,” he says, turning his hand over and stroking his fingers over the underside of my wrist. “Get dressed and meet me in the kitchen.” He stands up, forcing me to take a small step back. He stares at me for a beat, and then he’s walking out of the room.

When I hobble into the kitchen, I find Rafael, Samuel, Carlos, and Lucas all crowded around the breakfast bar. Carlos and Samuel look just as tired as Rafael, both of them clutching cups of coffee in front of them.

Rafael’s hair is damp, and he’s now wearing a clean shirt. Maria walks over and hands me a cup of coffee before loosely wrapping one arm around my shoulders and trying to hug me. I remain awkwardly stiff until she finally walks away.

Samuel gets up. “Sit here, Anna.”

“I’m okay,” I argue, not wanting to take his seat.

“Sit, Anna,” Rafael orders.

Sighing, I take the seat next to his. Lucas takes my crutches and props them against the breakfast bar before pushing a couple of tablets in front of me. “Thanks,” I say, popping them in my mouth and washing them down with coffee.

“I see you avoided the needle,” Carlos says, smirking at the butterfly stitches on my forehead.

I glare at him, and he laughs. I turn to Rafael. “So what is it that you want me to do?”

I don’t miss the look that passes between him and Samuel. “Come with me,” he says.

He stands up, and I follow him out of the room, my crutches clicking rhythmically down the hallway. At the end he pushes open a door, revealing a set of stairs. Peering down into the darkness, a shiver of fear skates down my spine and his lips twitch.

“Scared of the dark?”

“Depends what’s in it.”

With the flip of a switch, the stairs illuminate. He leads me down them, and I swear the temperature drops by several degrees. Stopping outside a door at the bottom, he turns to face me.

“If you want to leave at any point, you can.”

I frown, and the door clicks open. The sight that greets me when I step into the room makes me freeze in place.

A figure hangs from a hook in the center of the ceiling, his wrists chained and his body slumped awkwardly. He seems to be unconscious, his chin lolling against his chest. There’s a line attached to one of his arms, hooked to a blood bag, suspended from the same hook as the chain. It confuses me until I take in the rest of him. One of his hands is bandaged, blood soaking through the white linen. On closer inspection, I realize that his fingers are missing and the hand is nothing more than a bloody stump. The shirt hanging from his body is torn, the bloodstained material exposing an array of bruises and cuts all over his skin. He’s a canvas depicting a violent and gruesome story. The blood bag is to keep him alive long enough that he doesn’t bleed out. It’s savagely morbid.

The metallic scent of blood fills the room until it’s all I can smell.

And this room…it looks like some kind of slaughter chamber. It’s cold like a walk-in refrigerator. There are no windows, just the one door—no escape. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all a dull grey, stained in various places with darker rust-colored patches. The entire floor slopes gently into the center of the room where a drain sits. A metal trolley rests against a wall with various knives, pliers, and knuckle-dusters on it. Rafael has a room in his basement solely for the purpose of torturing and killing people. In the back of my mind, there’s this niggling awareness that this should bother me, but the time for what should or shouldn’t be; has long since passed. I find the violence of it all strangely peaceful because I know it. Blood and pain, the simple act of consequence and punishment; I understand it more than anything else. This is clarifying.

Rafael leans against the wall, one foot kicked up against it and his thick arms folded over his chest. He watches me, studying my every reaction as though he expects me to run from the room screaming.

“Who is he?” I ask.

“You don’t recognize him?” His eyes flash with dark amusement.

“It’s hard to see through all the blood.”

He smirks. “This is the guy who broke into my house and took you.” He lifts a brow, and I inhale a deep breath. “He told me all about it. Why he did it, who he works for…”

“And?” I prompt.

“Dominges hired them.” I don’t know who that is. “The boss of the Sinaloa cartel,” he clarifies. I blow out the breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding.

“Oh.”

“So, avecita, what are you going to do about it?” He straightens away from the wall, prowling towards me with a lethal kind of grace. It would normally scare me, but it doesn’t because this monster is on my side. An unfamiliar sense of security washes over me when he moves closer, and I frown because I can’t quite compute this sudden trust in him. It’s not rational. But then, does it need to be?

“Me? You want me to do something?”

“This man hurt you.” His eyes drop to my neck, which I know is now ringed in thick purple bruises. He reaches out and strokes feather-light fingers over my throat, his expression darkening with each passing second. Rafael circles around behind me, his fingers remaining on my neck as he brushes my hair to the side. A shiver skates over my body at his touch and goosebumps erupt on my arms. “He took you, and he would have handed you over to Dominges without a second thought.”

“I know.” My voice is nothing more than a broken whisper. I can feel the heat of Rafael’s body behind me, offering strength while threatening to burn me—such a precarious line. I resist the dangerous urge to lean back into him, to take comfort in a man who I know can provide none. He may have saved me, but this is just business to him.

“This man made you powerless, Anna. Here. In my home. Where I promised you safety.” His voice is rough, restrained.

I turn around to face him, tilting my head back to meet his eyes. “That’s not your fault.” I place my hand against his chest and feel his heart racing beneath my palm.

He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and I drop my gaze away from his, focusing on the sight of my hand on his chest. Willingly. I’m willingly touching him. I frown at the unfamiliar sight, and my hand falls away from him.

“He’s going to die, avecita.” He nods towards the bloodied man. “I think you should do it.”

My eyes go wide, snapping to his instantly. “What?”

“He wronged you, and in my world, that warrants a payment of blood.” He reaches behind him and slowly pulls a gun from the waist of his pants. “I don’t know how to help you any other way,” he says quietly. “So I’m giving you the choice. Either way, he dies.” He holds the gun out to me.

My crutches hit the ground with a crash when I shove them away. Tentatively, I reach out, wrapping my fingers around the cool metal. I wait to feel something…a sense of anxiety, or a whisper from my conscience…anything. All I feel is the heady rush of power that comes with holding that weapon, a power I’ve never once had before. I glance over my shoulder at the unconscious man. He would have handed me back to the very people I escaped, to a man who was willing to hire people to break into Rafael’s house just to get to me. “Dominges would kill me,” I say, more to myself. With the weight of the gun in my hand, my numb indifference splits like the parting of a curtain, allowing years of pent-up rage and bitterness to slither through to the surface.

“You escaped him. You make him look weak. Men have died for far less in the cartel,” Rafael growls.

“Wake him up.” Without argument, Rafael moves around me and walks over to a small sink I hadn’t spotted in the corner of the room. He fills a metal bucket with water before tossing it at the prone man. Jerking awake, the guy drags a rattling breath into his lungs. When he lifts his head, I see that one of his eyes is swollen shut. Blood streams from his mouth and nose and his jaw is an array of different colors. I know Rafael did that to him. Closing my eyes, I can picture him like an avenging angel, completely without mercy as his fists cause untold damage, driven by thick muscles and raw power.

When I open my eyes, the man’s focus is on me, his gaze slipping to the gun in my hand. He lets out a laugh that turns into a hacking cough. “You’re going to let the girl kill me?”

Rafael walks over and grabs a handful of his hair, wrenching his head back. “You should be thankful. You get to die at the hand of a beautiful woman with a bullet. I would have just started removing body parts until you bled out.” The man’s Adam’s apple bobs before Rafael drops him and moves back to my side.

“Can you shoot?” he asks.

I shake my head, and a small smile graces his lips before he moves behind me. His body presses tightly against my back, and this time I do lean into him. The gun feels heavy in my hand, and I’m both anxious and excited by the prospect of ending this man’s life. Rafael’s steady breaths calm me, his chest rising and falling against my back.

“I’ll help you.” The warmth of his breath caresses my neck, making me shiver. His hands slowly slide down my arms, wrapping around my wrists before he lifts them. His entire frame encases mine as I focus on the man in front of me, the man who tried to send me to my death. For once I do not have to accept it. I’m going to kill him.

“Flip the safety off,” Rafael breathes, sliding his thumb over a small switch on the side of the gun. “Close one eye and aim.” I do as he says, closing one eye and aiming the gun at the man’s head. I pause for a moment, seeing his face, the determined set of his jaw contrasting with the fear in his eyes. Yes. I want his fear. I crave it.

“And simply pull the trigger.” Rafael’s hands move over mine, holding the gun steady. In an instant, the man in front of me becomes every man who has ever hurt me, touched me, abused me. The rage that permanently simmers deep beneath my forced indifference rises, gripping me in a red haze. I hate them all, and I want his blood. Without any more hesitation, I allow Rafael to guide my aim and squeeze the trigger. The gun explodes in my hand, raw power bursting forth. A hole appears in the man’s forehead, his eyes going wide before he slumps in the chains. A single stream of blood trickles to the floor, the liquid spattering the concrete beneath him.

For a second I just stand there, staring at the blood hitting the floor and running down the drain. I just killed a man. In a fraction of a second, I held power over life and death. I was judge, jury, and executioner. And I feel no remorse. A sense of peace washes over me as though the blood running down the drain is taking with it all the pain and helplessness of the teenage girl I once was. Many men have hurt and used me over the years, and I’ve never been able to do anything about it. There was no punishment for their acts, no justice to be found, and I expected none because my entire life was an injustice. Maybe it still is. But finally, I’ve found some form of retribution, and it’s a heady feeling. I don’t want to place my trust in Rafael, but how can I not when he hands me gifts such as this? I would never have done this on my own, but it’s like he knows what I need better than I do.

Rafael’s hands move away from mine, and I lower my trembling arms, turning to face him. He wordlessly takes the gun from me, sliding it into the back of his pants again.

“Welcome to the cartel, avecita.” A grin spreads over his lips and then, as if on instinct, he reaches up and strokes his fingers down my cheek with a gentleness that’s so at odds with everything he is. His gaze drops to my mouth, my heart does a strange little skip, and I’m not sure if it’s fear or something else. His stare lingers a beat longer before he snatches his hand away from me as though I’ve burned him. Fingers curled into a tight fist, he takes a step back, his brows pulled together in a frown. And then he turns away, walking out of the room without a backward glance. I take one last look at the dead man and follow Rafael. I just took a man’s life, and I don’t feel a thing. Does that make me a monster?