Cartel (9 page)

For a while, she paced, probably waiting for him to return. He bore the time patiently, dismissing the hunger in his stomach after a full day on the road. Once he went upstairs, he’d be on the phone and screaming at the rest of the guys to try and get some product out onto the street. So he took his time, and he watched the girl pace in her tiny room.

Three paces, turn, three paces. She did this over and over again, and he imagined for a moment that she was doing it for him. But she seemed oblivious to his peeping, her stride getting quicker, her face turning from carefully controlled detachment to an anxious rage. She stopped at the far end of the room, her back to him, and struck out at the wall in front of her. She kicked it a couple of times too, but most of her energy seemed intent on using her fists to smash the fucking wall to smithereens. It wasn’t as if she was trying to escape — the wall was solid limestone, anyone could see that. No, the little Colombian girl that made his cock ache was mad. Ropeable. Absolutely fucking
enraged
.

He watched her a little longer, a vague sense of concern pressing at him as he saw the blood dripping from her knuckles. She stopped hitting the wall, but she didn’t stop hurting herself. She marched over to the suitcase he’d left inside the door, opened it and spilled the contents onto the ground. Selecting a small round compact from the pile of clothes and make-up, she opened it and threw it at the ground. The mirror shattered into several pieces, and he watched with interest as she knelt down and selected one of the larger pieces.

He assumed she was going to hide it, use it as a weapon for when he re-entered the room, but what she did next surprised the hell out of him. She took the piece of mirrored glass in her hand, sat on the narrow bed that took up one corner of the room, and held out her wrist.

Is she going to …?

She was. She dragged the sharp tip of the glass down the inside of her wrist, and fresh blood sprang forth. The sight excited him — yeah, he was a sick motherfucker. He enjoyed the sight of blood. He wanted to burst into the room, kneel in front of her, and lick the deep cut in her arm from end to end.

As long as she didn’t stab him in the neck while he did it.

Make sure she isn’t marked.

His father’s words came back to taunt him, and it gave him the perfect excuse to interrupt her psychotic attempt at self-mutilation.

Make sure she is untouched.

Well, that one was a little more difficult, but he’d do his best to make sure he at least didn’t leave bruises on her if he found himself unable to resist. He’d never raped a woman, but he’d never needed to — they usually found his enthusiasm a turn-on more than anything. He might have coerced or blackmailed, but he’d never straight-up held a woman down and driven himself inside her against her will.

Yet.

He liked to think he never would, but he was his father’s son. The darkness that flowed through his veins disgusted him, but trying to resist it had only ever made things worse. When he tried to control the darkness inside him it didn’t abate, but stored up in increments, until it inevitably bubbled up like poison, rendering his violence uncontrollable. He’d killed people over trivial matters when he let things get too pent up, so he figured it was better to destroy the people who were the source of his rage in the first place. Even as he justified the blood on his hands to himself, he knew that he was a bad man. Hopefully, though, he wasn’t the worst.

Make sure she isn’t marked.

Dornan groaned as he opened the door and saw Ana sitting on the bed, sobbing incoherently as she bled all over herself.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked her as he closed the door behind him. He expected her to try and hide the glass, or run from him, or attack him. He expected something. What he didn’t expect was for her to continue what she was doing, dragging the sharp glass down her arm as if he wasn’t there, as she muttered and shook and wept.

‘Hey!’ he said, a little louder this time. He crossed the room in two quick steps and grabbed hold of the hand that held the offending weapon, squeezing hard until she was forced to drop it. The glass fell to the ground, breaking into two bloodied, uneven shards.

‘Seven years bad luck,’ he said flippantly, looking from the glass to her glazed eyes. He felt relief when she glared at him, the daze seemingly broken.

‘Are you kidding me?’ she growled. ‘I think I’ve got a lifetime of bad luck ahead of me, don’t you?’

He kicked the glass away and sat beside her on the bed, close enough that his jeans brushed her blood-smeared thigh. ‘What did you do that for?’ he asked, genuinely curious.

She shot him a look so scathing, it made him want to shrink back — only, he was Dornan fucking Ross, and he shrank back from nobody, not even his own father.

‘I know you were watching me,’ she replied, and it made him smile.

‘I like watching you,’ he said, shocked by his own honesty. ‘Does that bother you?’

She continued to stare boldly at him. ‘Your father’s men killed my boyfriend last night,’ she said, making a choking noise at the back of her throat.

There it was. Her anguish. Her struggle. Her
why
.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, noticing how the blood was still pouring from her wrist. She’d cut deeper than he’d first thought. ‘May I?’ he gestured towards her wrist and she shrugged, which he took as an invitation. He gathered his grip around the underside of her wrist and cradled it up to the light, gently inspecting the cut.

‘Are you trying to kill yourself?’ he asked, probing at the wound with his fingers to determine its depth, all the while biting down on the tip of his tongue to stop it from darting out and licking up her blood.

‘Of course not,’ she retorted, pulling her hand away. But Dornan didn’t release his grip on her, and they stared each other down in a silent battle of eyes and wills.

‘Don’t you ever want to hurt yourself because you can’t hurt the person who fucked everything up?’

Her words were frank and revealing, making him ponder them. Every time he smashed his own fists into a boxing bag, or a whore, or another Gypsy Brother, he relished the pain, and welcomed the relief that spilling his own blood offered.

‘Let me guess,’ Dornan said, rubbing his thumb along her cut as she watched in silence. ‘My father?’

She snapped her gaze back to him, a sadness bursting forth from her that made him drop her wrist and stand up, lest that sadness infect him in some way.

‘Yes,’ she said brokenly. ‘Your father. And mine.’

He didn’t take his eyes from her until he remembered the blood, and looked down to see it coating his palms.

‘You like blood, don’t you?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Other people would recoil at the sight of it, but not you. You wear it like an old outfit. It suits you.’

Anyone else would have been embarrassed to admit it, but not Dornan. He traded in lives and in blood, so why shouldn’t he like it? And in this case, she had spilled it of her own volition, which made him all the more excited.

‘I like
your
blood,’ he replied, smiling wolfishly. ‘I like it very much.’

To say I was embarrassed would be an understatement.

I was
mortified
.

When Dornan didn’t come back, I’d assumed I was on my own for the night. And, truth be told, I was terrified. I eyed the bed at first, thinking that I could maybe get a little sleep, but the thought of being woken with a knife at my neck or a gun in my mouth made me determined to stay awake.

So I paced. I always paced when I was nervous, or impatient. This time, however, I was pacing almost entirely to keep myself from passing out and waking up to an even worse situation.

My stomach cramped into a twisted, painful knot, and for some reason it made me think of Luis.

I will never see him again
.

The thought stabbed at my insides with such ferocity, it doubled me over with grief. I clung to the limestone wall, bits flaking off and coating my palms with a powdery chalk.

Was I dying? It felt like I was dying. As far as my sweet boy would know, his mother would have vanished.

He would never know all the nights I had cried for him, clung to him while he was still in my womb, wishing for us both that he could just stay in there forever so he didn’t have to leave me.

And now I had left him. Because my father had fucked up again.

I had paid for his sins with my life. And it sickened me.

I didn’t even realise I had struck the wall at first. There was a burst of pain in my fist that lanced through my arm, the shock registering in my neck and head. My ears rang. It hurt. It felt
good
.

So I did it again.

And again.

And again.

Until my hands were covered in blood and my knuckles were a pulp of red, broken skin.

The blood calmed me a little, I’m not sure why. It was the same reason I’d hidden a razor blade in my mattress at boarding school and traced thin cuts into my thighs while my roommates slept, blissfully unaware. Back then, the blood that sprang from my skin had made my sadness tangible. It had distracted me from the fact that my baby was thousands of miles away, on another continent, and everybody was acting like he didn’t exist. It had soothed the tears that dripped silently from my face onto my thighs, mixing with my blood. It had made me strong.

I suddenly craved that feeling again. Punching the wall had brought a temporary relief, but it waned quickly, and I wanted more. I knew Murphy had packed a small round mirror in with the cosmetics he’d bought for me — I had been forced to sit still while he painted my face with blush and lip gloss before we boarded our first flight. I knew there was glass in there that I could break and drag along my flesh; glass that would bring me some of that sweet relief I was craving.

So when Dornan had walked in, I didn’t even see him at first. Honestly, I was so hysterical by that point, I’d kind of forgotten where I was or what was happening. Hence the self-mutilation. I needed to come back down to earth.

And come back to earth I did when I finally saw him.

My own father had caught me cutting myself in the bathroom once. I was on summer vacation, and he wouldn’t let me out of the house to see Este in case I got knocked up again. It hurt my heart to be so close to the boy I loved, yet so far away. I had sobbed and raged, but my father responded by giving me the beating of my life and telling me to fuck off. It was the only time he’d ever hit me when he was sober, and it had hurt all the more because of that fact.

So I had gotten the razor out. And as the first blood had emerged from my thigh, my father had walked into the bathroom without knocking.

He never said a word to me. Never asked why. He just looked at me in disgust, turned on his heel, and slammed the door shut.

So, naturally, I expected Dornan Ross to do the same. But he wasn’t an ordinary man. Somehow I already knew this from our brief interaction earlier. He didn’t avert his eyes or stay away from me.

He came closer. He touched me where I bled. I watched him lick his lips unconsciously as he studied my handiwork.

It should have made me afraid of him, but what did I have to lose? I’d already lost everything.

I couldn’t help myself. When he had got up to leave me, I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone again with my despair. When he told me he liked my blood, and his eyes had gleamed with a hunger unlike anything I’d ever seen,
I knew
.

He was a dangerous man. And he liked me.
Liked my blood
. If I could get him on my side — maybe, just maybe, I could get myself out of this mess.

He said he liked my blood, but he left me anyway. I thought he wasn’t coming back, until he returned a few moments later with a first-aid kit.

I sat on the edge of the bed and let him play doctor. It was jarring, the way he picked my hand up like it was made of glass and examined it, the skin on his fingers rough but his touch gentle. For a six-foot tall, muscled, tattooed biker in leathers, his touch was surprisingly tender.

‘You’ve done this before,’ he said, glancing at the faint lines that marred my thighs. I didn’t answer him, tugging my dress down again to cover the scars.

‘I’m not suicidal,’ I said suddenly. And why should it matter if I was? But for some reason I wanted him to know. I needed him to understand.

‘Darlin’,’ he said, as he dragged a sterile wipe over my bloody arm. ‘Nobody would blame you if you were suicidal. You’re pretty fucked right now.’

I diverted my eyes to the floor.

‘What’s going to happen to me?’ I blurted out suddenly. His hands stilled, but he didn’t speak. I raised my eyes to his in question, and what I saw there made my stomach lurch.

‘Do you want me to lie to you,’ he asked, continuing to wrap the bandage around my arm, ‘or do you want me to tell the truth?’

I pondered that.

‘Lie,’ I said softly. I would ask him for the truth in a moment, but I was curious to see what he came up with.

‘Lie,’ he repeated, studying the wall behind me as he appeared deep in thought. ‘Well, I’d say you’re going to be taken upstairs and given a reprieve. You’ll be allowed to walk out of those front gates, and go on your merry way home. And this is all just temporary.’

Temporary. Huh.

‘And the truth?’

He smiled. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ He finished with the bandage and let my arm drop softly in my lap. The smile left his face and that glimmer in his eyes faded.

‘You’ll be stuck down here until Emilio decides what he wants to do with you. And you’ll do it. Or he’ll put a bullet in that pretty little head of yours, and bury you where nobody will ever find you.’

‘Oh,’ I said, that sinking feeling in my stomach coming back.

‘What do you think he’ll want me to do?’ I asked.

He paused and my heart leapt into my throat as I anticipated what he might say.
You’ll have to fuck strange men. You’ll have to suck their dicks. You’ll have to let them hurt you. You’ll be punished if you do, and punished more if you don’t.
Or even the simple,
Welcome to hell.

But he didn’t say any of that. Instead, he picked up the first-aid kit and stood, gazing down at me.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You know what’s going to happen. You’re a smart girl. You don’t need me to spell it out for you.’

My heart broke. He was right. I knew exactly what was going to happen. I was going to be used and abused, until there was nothing left.