Obsession Read Free

tried to calm my breathing as I went over to one of the industrial sinks in the corner of the interrogation chamber and began to wash Nina’s blood from my skin. Normally I protected myself against any contamination from other people’s bodily fluids; I dealt with too many nasty fucks who’d stick their dicks in any pussy offered to them. But I wanted to feel Nina suffer, to feel her tremble and writhe from the pain I was inflicting while trying to purge from my head the memory of Fernando’s screams as he held his son’s battered body.
    Tears and heavy emotions were something that seldom bothered me, but I understood the loss of family enough that it awakened my rarely felt compassion. So while Fernando had been unable to personally deal with his betraying wife, I had stepped in for him, trying to ease his burden in any way I could by making sure she paid.
    Unfortunately, I hadn’t come close to slaking my blood lust, but I had to step aside as hushed voices spoke quietly behind me, the sound of Nina’s moans and sobs almost drowning them out, but one woman’s strained voice I recognized.
    Judith was here to collect the debt Nina owed Fernando’s family.
    Dressed from head to toe in a stylish black pantsuit and decked out in tasteful diamonds, for once Judith looked like shit. Her normally carefully styled, short silver hair that framed her wrinkled but classically beautiful face was in disarray, the deep lines around her mouth betraying her grief. But her eyes, her dark eyes—much like my own—glittered with pure insanity. Not many people were aware of it, but Judith could sometimes lose her grip on reality and do some crazy shit in her rage. I had a feeling I was about to witness the demon that lived inside the wife of the head of the cartel I worked for come to life.
    Behind her, two of her nephews came in, along with her son Ramón. Her other son, Diego, was no doubt with Fernando and their father, Jose. Diego and Fernando were twins, so they tended to rely on each other in times of crisis, and Jose was there to help keep Fernando from trying to take his life—again. A shudder ripped up my spine as I remembered the sound of my friend screaming in complete and total agony until his voice broke.
    Judith strode to the middle of the large concrete room in the basement of one of the popular and trendy restaurants she owned, the drain in the floor stained with drying blood. The door hissed opened again and more high-ranking members of the Cordova cartel moved in, until there were around twenty of us circling the room, pressed shoulder to shoulder, all focused on the cage situated beneath the bright floodlight overhead.
    My stomach clenched as I realized Judith was about to make an example of her daughter-in-law, one none of us would ever likely forget.
    A heavy metal cross let out a teeth-clenching screech as it was dragged across the floor, both men pushing the weighty piece softly grunting beneath its bulk.
    In short order, Nina was bound, nude and covered in bruises and cuts, to the X shape, almost incoherent pleas for mercy falling from her lips, saying that she didn’t mean for it to happen, that the men she’d given Jason to had double-crossed her. Pleas for compassion mixed with her now panting breaths, her one good eye madly roving the room, looking for a hero, for someone to save her. She’d find no forgiveness here.
    We’d all loved Jason, Jose and Judith’s first and only grandchild. While Nina had been a mostly absent mother, Fernando had lived and breathed for his kid. Jason’s birthdays were already legendary at the age of five and I’d been assigned to his bodyguard detail at various times over the years, enough that the kid always greeted me with a hug and a smile.
    A deep pang of sorrow reverberated through me, my chest aching like someone had beat it with a sledgehammer, breaking ribs and sending deadly shards of razor-sharp bone straight to my heart. I could remember the earthy smell of his