Malo - Page 64

When I pull back, I see El Serpiente being loaded onto the back of one of the bikes. He’s slumped forward, clearly woozy from the blood loss. My mouth sets into a hard line. Good, I want to see him suffer. I’m surprised Beast let him walk out of here in one piece, but I guess he’s going to keep him as a prisoner for a while, get what he can out of the bastard. Clear out the last roots of the cartel and make sure there’s no chance for them to regrow even after we’ve dealt with them.

I hope I get a chance to get a few licks in, too. I want to make him pay for the pain he’s put Maria through. I’m not certain what happened to her father, but I know she’s not going to recover if he’s… if he’s dead. She’s poured so much of herself into making sure he survived this, and, when it’s over, if she really has lost him, I don’t know what she is going to do.

I gently lead her back to my bike, and pick up the helmet that she tossed aside when she scrambled off Harley’s motorcycle. I have no idea what the two of them are even doing here, what they were planning to pull by turning up here. To be part of the fight? I can see that. Neither of them are women who are exactly happy with the thought of stepping aside and letting other people handle shit for them, I guess.

“You ready to go?” I ask her, as I climb onto the bike. She winds her arms around me and grips on tight. I can still feel her shaking, but she’s stopped crying, as though she’s numb. Like she can’t feel a damn thing. She nods against my back. I hate seeing her like this, fucking hate it. She’s fought so hard, come so far, and without her, we likely wouldn’t have even gotten to this stage with the cartel at all. But the one reason she did this, the one reason she stuck with us throughout all of this, was because she wanted to save her father.

And, like it or not, she might be too late for that.

I kick the bike into gear and follow the flood of Kings back to the compound. During the fight, it was hard to keep track of who was going down but it looked like for the most part the Kings were intact, not without injury but thankfully no casualties. El Serpiente might have had the number but experience and a clear head were on our side.

Beast arrives back at the compound first, and he pulls Serpiente off the bike and drags him roughly toward the back—probably to get his shoulder seen to by Stitches. We can’t have him dying before we can get some answers and some payback. But, as I draw closer, I see the shape of a figure outside the clubhouse—no, not one person, two. We sent Q out to the cartel’s hideout, that’s one of the men standing there, but the other, I don’t recognize. Shit, did we leave someone alive, someone who’s coming to take their revenge?

Beast doesn’t seem to be bothered by it, nodding at them both as he passes by. I pull the bike to a halt and climb off, offering Maria a hand to steady her as she does the same. She pulls off her helmet, and I see the dark circles under her eyes, the utter grief that colors every inch of her face.

Until she lifts her gaze and sees the man standing there on the porch next to Q. Her entire body registers the shock, her head jerking back, her eyes widening. She claps a hand over her mouth, and I see her eyes fill with tears again. I turn back to him, trying to figure out who this man is, and then, Maria lets out a cry.

“Papi!”

And, with that, she brushes past me, and rushes into the arms of her beloved father.

CHAPTER 44

JOSE

As I bury my head into my daughter’s shoulder, it hardly feels real. For so long, I had been certain I would never get a chance to see her again, but here, now, she’s as real as they day is long. I pull back and gaze into her eyes for a moment, a grin spreading over my face that hasn’t been there for far too long.

She had been the first thing I’d thought of when they had first taken me, throwing a bag over my head as I left the lab one evening, and bundling me into the back of a car. I had been terrified, no idea what was happening or why, and then, when I had finally arrived at their hideout, I’d been met by El Serpiente.

“Listen,” he’d ordered, his dark eyes full of cruelty. “You do as we say, and nothing happens to your family, entiendes?”

My heart dropped in that moment. I couldn’t let anything happen to my family, least of all my Maria. She was all I had, after I’d lost her mother, and I knew my mind couldn’t take it if she was harmed too. I agreed. How could I not? I knew these men were evil, knew what they wanted me to do was going to be sick and twisted, but I had no choice.

They’d chained me to a table in that lab, and had me work there day and night. If I was caught resting, even for a moment, El Serpiente would send his men in to set me right. I’d taken more beatings than I could count, my body growing weaker with every passing day. I didn’t stand a chance against them, I wasn’t a man of violence, couldn’t defend myself without a gun in my hand, and they knew it.

Barely able to keep my eyes open, all I could think about was Maria. Doing everything I could to keep them from going after her. She was in the UK at the time, so I all I could do was pray she wouldn’t come looking for me, but I should have known it would only be a matter of time before she started to search for me, when I missed all of our weekly calls.

I couldn’t come up with the drug they were looking for. Nothing that would work well enough and keep the user alive, at least. Every time I came up with a new compound, El Serpiente would storm in a few days later and throw it back at me.

“They’re dead,” he would tell me. “The junkies who used this are dead! How am I supposed to make money off this if it kills them, huh?”

That alone was enough to make me feel ill. All I had done, my whole life, was work to make the world better, safer, healthier, and now, I was being forced to create a drug that would get people hooked, and, in the process, innocent people were losing their lives. I couldn’t stop thinking about the parents who were losing their children, the kids who were growing up without their mothers and their fathers, because of me. It tore me apart, but I was selfish. I kept working because I couldn’t stand the thought of something happening to Maria, and these men, I knew they would harm her if they wanted to.

So, when they brought her to me, it felt as though everything was tumbling apart on the spot. All the work I had done was for nothing if she wasn’t free. I was hardly able to speak a word to her before they dragged her away from me, to be used as part of their plans; my mind tormented me with ideas of what they might have done and where they might have taken her, but all I could do was keep working, keep my head down, and pray it was enough.

The look on her face when I saw her, is burned onto my memory. The pain, the fear, the heartache, just like when she had lost her mother, but this time, I knew I was responsible for it. If I had just been a little more careful, none of this would have happened. I never imagined I would even be of interest to a group like the cartel, but it seemed like they had ways of twisting everyone’s skills to their cruel ends.

I couldn’t come up with anything. Day after endless day passed, I begged to see my daughter, yelling into the cameras I knew they had up to watch me that I wanted to see her. I would do anything if they just showed her to me, but all I got were beatings and reminders to keep working if I wanted to keep her alive. I began to doubt they were even telling me the truth at all, certain they had already killed her. My addled mind tortured me whenever I closed my eyes for a moment of rest with images of what she must have been through, what they were using her for. I knew all too well what the cartel made use of women for, and if my daughter had to go through that…

I couldn’t even entertain the idea. I threw myself into the work they gave me, losing myself to the familiarity of crafting a new compound. I was getting closer and closer, I could feel it, to creating what they wanted. Hell, by that point, there was a part of me that wanted to take it myself. I had never been tempted by drugs before, probably because they were more work to me than anything else, but now? Now, I wanted some way to switch off my brain, and this was the only route I could see to making that happen.

Around two weeks ago, there had been a batch that worked. I didn’t get the usual visit from El Serpiente to try and motivate me further. No, instead, I heard mutterings from the guard who brought me my meager food that it was on the market, and working well. I wasn’t sure whether to be glad or not about that. Glad I had done what they had asked, and they would surely have to let me go soon, but guilty in ways I couldn’t fathom that I had likely created a whole new batch of addicts who would be consumed by the potent drug I had just helped put out on the streets.

A few days after the success, I was moved again, another bag over my head, forced out to a car, then a plane. I had no idea where we were going. I tried to ask for Maria, but my voice was aching from the weakness that felt like it had taken over my entire body. I had no strength to fight anymore, and I sent out prayers for her with every breath, prayers that she was alive, that she had found some way out of this if she had. She was a smart girl, and I knew she had it in her—if they had let her live long enough to make that happen.

Dragged to a new prison, I was locked away in a room in a large, concrete building. It smelled of rot and damp, and a thin, watery string of daylight crept through a high window that I couldn’t see out of. They didn’t have me working anymore, but I doubted they were done with me yet. My mind was delirious with exhaustion and worry, and I was plagued by dreams of her, dreams of my daughter.

The daughter, I was becoming more and more sure, I was never going to see again.