CHAPTER 13
Two hours later, Lucia left the sobbing victim chained to the floor in the chamber. As she stepped into the hall and tossed the condom in the trash, she tried to embody the cold precision of a blade, sharpening her expression and steeling her posture. But despair swelled an unwieldy pressure behind her eyes, and every breath was a fight to keep the tears away.
Armando had been the cameraman, and as he followed her out, his probing, over-staring eyes produced a stampede of goosebumps across her nude skin.
“When are you going to milk my nuts?” he asked in Spanish.
The gun was already in her hand, so it only took a fraction of a second to aim at the nuts in question.
“Another time then.” With a grin, he lumbered toward the stairs.
She waited until he was out of sight before lowering the Beretta and pulling on her clothes.
Today’s victim was a middle-aged married man and father of five, who had come to Venezuela on a religious mission.
And she’d just raped him.
If she had any humanity left before she’d stepped into that room, she didn’t now. But despite the man’s wretched crying, he wasn’t broken. If his wife paid the ransom within three days, he’d live.
Lucia dragged the balaclava off her head and let it fall to the floor. She was the one who was broken, and if she lived three more days, she wouldn’t deserve it.
Footsteps approached from the stairs. She holstered both guns in her jeans and turned to find Tiago strolling toward her, flanked by two guards.
He gave her a cursory once-over. “Was it convincing?”
The victim had wept prayers to his god, begged for his virtue, cried for his wife to forgive him, and in the end, ejaculated in the condom, inside her, with a self-loathing howl. As far as torture went, he was emotionally wounded, and the camera caught every second of it.
“Yes.” She breezed past Tiago, anxious to escape the basement. “If his wife has the money, she’ll pay it.”
“I know why you did it.”
Her breath caught. Did what? Rape that man? Or did he know about the one she killed this morning? Oh God, did he find out about Tate?
She slowed her steps, arranged her features into a detached visage, and pivoted to face him. “What do you mean?”
“Leave us.” He swept a hand at the guards without looking at them.
The two armed men retreated to the stairs and closed the door, leaving her alone in the dark hall with Tiago.
The guns at her back suddenly felt heavy and threatening, like foreboding shadows looming behind her. There wasn’t a single time in eleven years when she was permitted to keep her weapons in Tiago’s presence without his guards. If this was a test, she was guaranteed to fail.
“Come here.” He snapped a finger at the space before him.
Heart hammering, she held her arms at her sides and closed the distance. When she reached him, he slid his hands around her waist and rested his fingers on the grips of her guns.
She closed her eyes as everything inside her froze. This was it. He was going to shoot her with the guns she’d earned in his employ.
“I know why you petitioned me to use your method of torture,” he said at her ear.
Oh. A ragged breath fled her lungs.
When she was initiated into this job, her role had been to hold the camera as Tiago exacted ungodly pain from the skin of his victims. She’d been weaker then, her stomach unbearably sensitive to the sight of blood and sounds of anguish.
She’d also been naive enough to believe rape was a mercy over the flesh-cutting cruelty Tiago inflicted.
The victims only needed to look distressed for the video, mistreated just enough to convince a family member to send money without hesitation. Rape had been her solution.
And that was the flaw in her logic. When was rape ever a solution?
But in her idiocy, she’d persuaded Tiago to use her vile approach instead of his. Not only had he agreed, he’d designated her as the resident torturer of the male victims.
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she’d been wrong, that her way wasn’t as effective. But could she really go back to watching him carve up the bodies of innocent men? Men. He never tortured women in that way. She didn’t think it was out of chivalry. Quite the opposite. He’d told her once that his art of mutilation was a man’s rite of passage.
“You’re trying to make a difference in the kidnapping world.” His mouth hovered over hers, his breaths warming her lips. “And you’re doing it with sex.”
“Rape.” She ground her molars.
“Whatever you want to call it, Lucia. You could’ve begged me to abandon my ruthless line of work.”
“You would’ve killed me.”
“That’s right, and you can’t make a difference if you’re dead, yeah? So instead, you suggested what you believed was a gentler method of torture. A suggestion that didn’t make you appear weak to me or my men.”
Her method was psychological and emasculating. His was physical, gruesome, and barbarous. Whether one was better than the other was debatable.
“I feel nothing in particular for the victims.” He squeezed the grips of her guns, pressing them against the rise of her backside. “Except maybe pity. It’s their own stupidity that brings them into my kingdom. But that wasn’t the case with you. Taken from your home, left to die in a fatal crash… None of your choices led you to me. Do you know why I kept you imprisoned all those years? Why I didn’t just kill you then?”
She tried not to think about her first eight years in his compound—locked in a room on the upper floor, the unbearable isolation and fear, the news of her parents’ deaths, Camila already gone. In those darkest years of her life, she lost parts of herself she would never recover.
Her illness developed over that time. When she became too sick to go without daily injections, Tiago had a new way to cage and torment her.
“No.” She met his heartless eyes. “I don’t pretend to know why you do anything you do.”
“I hope you never give me a reason to kill you.” He slid the Berettas out of her waistband and glided the metal frames along the outsides of her arms. “No matter how ill you are or how intolerable I make your life, you manage to keep something in your possession, something I lost long ago.” Lifting one of the guns, he trailed the barrel across her cheek. “You still have compassion.”
Her throat tightened. It was the closest he’d ever come to saying anything sentimental without making it feel sexual.
It was also possible that he said shit like this just to fuck with her head.
“I live in an ugly world,” he went on, “and you’re… You’re a pretty little flicker of compassion, begging to be extinguished. Sometimes I’m tempted to do just that. But I like you like this. You remind me how weak and foolish it is to cling to humanity.”
Her nostrils flared.
“You can retrieve your guns from my guards.” Without a backward glance, he ambled toward the stairs with her weapons. “You’re free until dinner.”
Free.
She wished for nothing, prayed to no one, and had zilch to lose. If freedom was a state of mind, she was hopelessly liberated.