Sweetest Torture (Sweetest Kill Book 2) (11 page)

Mom is holding Landon. Rubbing his
back and singing him a soft melody I faintly remember her singing to me as a
boy -until Matthew told her I was too old for lullabies.

My heart feels full.

For years I cared only for Ryan and
my mom. When mom was sold by Matthew and Red, I took a turn into the hateful
man I needed to be to deal with it all.

The hateful man who killed bad men
with his bare hands.

The hateful man I remained until
the day that she walked into my life.

She is my light. In all of the
darkness that is my world, she is my sunshine. The reason to wake up in the
morning. She is my whole heart.

It hasn’t been easy. Stella messed
up so many things. Ashley hiring another man to kill Liv messed up even more.

But now she is mine. Her and our
son. We are a family. Nothing will get in the way of that. Ever. I am the
luckiest son of a bitch alive and I fucking know it. I can’t help but smile at
the satisfaction.

Ryan takes a seat at the head
table. We didn’t have a large wedding. Just close family and friends. A lot of
people that Ryan and I work with. Marco and Adam sit at the table as well.

Marco lost the use of his arm,
after Red’s men shot him. He can do basic things, thankfully it was not his
shooting hand, but still he has moved down a bit in the business. I still have
had a hard time forgiving him for not killing that man who stole Olivia from me
the first time, but it’s something I am working on. He’s a good man.

Landon is sound asleep with my mom.

Ryan’s cell phone beeps for a text.

He looks down at it and stands up
quickly

“Shit.” He snaps

Everyone at our table looks at him

“What’s wrong Ry?” Alexis asks

Landon stirs in my mother’s arms.

“Stella...” he mumbles

“What about her?” I can feel the
small grip of fear taking over at the mere mention of her name. She’s supposed
to be out of the country. Out of our lives. She was traded. What could she have
to do with anything?

“Where’s your phone?” Ryan asks,
ignoring my question

“In the back. I didn’t have it on
me during the ceremony.” I reply shortly.

Ryan looks at Landon, then up to
me. He turns around and looks at the men who work for us behind him.

“Ryan what the hell is going on?”
My mom asks

Landon makes a slight whimper. The
kind he makes when he is getting hungry. Where is Olivia? She went off to the
bathroom minutes ago. She’s still wearing her wedding dress. I assume it’s just
taking her a long time to pull everything back into place.

I know when we had sex right after
the ceremony before coming here it took her a while to right everything. But I
couldn’t help it, she was the hottest fucking bride I had ever laid eyes on.

“Stella. She... Text me.” Ryan’s
hands are shaking. I know something is wrong. Nothing upsets Ryan Corvus, he’s
a fucking drug lord. He’s a crime boss. He’s fucking tough. But right now, I
can tell he is about to start crying. He’s never cried a day in his life.

“Ryan spit it the fuck out man.”
Adam is standing beside me now, he’s scared too.

“Stella talked her buyer into
buying another slave. His son didn’t want her.” Ryan answers

“Okay, why the hell would he listen
to anything she has to say?” Adam asks

I look at Adam “she’s fucking the
guy, she’s his mistress the guy who bought her is in love with her. That’s why he
made the trade. She’s a fucking snake… He pretended to want her for his son,
but it was for himself.”

Ryan cuts me off

“Dean, they took Olivia.”                    

He married her.

He had a son with her.

I had to do something. There was no
way I could let him be happy with her.

She wasn’t taking my happiness.

He was supposed to choose me.

I planned everything perfectly.

We’d look for Connor. I didn’t want
the kid. I wanted Dean. I thought that if I pulled him across the country on
this trip, he would forget all about doe eyed Bambi.

I should have known the moment he
first mentioned her, the day after he was supposed to kill her for Ashley that
he wasn’t going to do it.

I gave Red and Ashley all his
information, told them everything they needed to know to get her the first
time. Then he had to go and save her.

He was supposed to fall in love
with me.

Now he has a family with her.

I made Michael think I loved him.
He will do whatever I want.

I put the bug in his ear that she
would be a perfect match for his son Max.

I told him that she is young,
beautiful and can bear children. That’s all Michael wants… More heirs to his
drug kingdom.

He stole that slut. Right from her
wedding.

Right after she finished having sex
with Dean.

Now I will get him to kill her.

And Dean will be all mine.

The Spanish speaking man refuses to
look at me.

He is angry.

I tried to escape

Three men grabbed me. They pulled
me into a truck waiting at the curb around the back.

I tried to scream, but one of the
men wrapped his hand around my mouth. I couldn’t even open my mouth wide enough
to bite him. The first time I tried, he punched me in the stomach, knocking me
straight to the ground.

The second time I tried, before the
doors to the truck opened, I was smacked upside the head with another’s boot.

These men were not going to be
gentle. I thought that Red’s men meant business. These men were murderous.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Dean
and my son inside. Were they okay? Did these men want something with Ryan and
Dead? They had to. But what would happen to my family?

The men continue to speak in quick
Spanish. I can pick nothing up.

The truck starts and speeds out from
behind the hall.

One of the men reaches over to me
and shoves his fat hand beneath my wedding dress inching between my legs. I
squirm back away from him, and the other man beside him slaps him upside the
head. Fat hand man quickly removes his hand.

Then he pulls a needle out of his
jacket pocket and before I can even try to move away jabs the syringe into my
exposed thigh.

I black out moments later.

Hector.

That is the name hear everyone
calling the old man who has be chained to the back of 16 wheeler truck.

The inside is totally empty, other
than the two other women who are chained to the opposite wall.

They don’t look at me. I keep
waiting to catch one of their eyes, I don’t know if I feel like I need to
reassure them, or feel some reassurance myself.

Hector doesn’t leave my side, but I
hear him talking to me. Always in Spanish, always angry, always like he is
amused with an insider secret I know nothing of.

We drive for what feels like hours.
Only stopping momentarily to refill for gas. I can hear the men outside
talking, laughing.

This is life as usual for them.

My breasts are aching, and I think
of my son. He needs to eat. I wonder how scared he is that he doesn’t have his
mommy with him.

A tear falls down my cheek. Hector
notices and issues another painful punch in my direction, this time into my rib
cage, rather than my stomach. Then he throws another, and another.

All for one single tear.

“Perra estúpida. Malditos esclavos”

He stops. Moves away from me.

Now I can’t breathe. I can’t pull
in deep enough breaths. I try to react quietly, but I know that my lack of
oxygen is not something I can hide. My ribs are broken, I can feel the most
intense pain I have ever experienced ripping through my back. It feels like it
is on fire, I feel like I must be bleeding everywhere.

He’s yelling at me again.

I stand up a little straighter and
try to turn my body away from his view while I regain my composer.

I have to. This man will kill me if
I do not and I have no idea if he is the one who will decide my fate, or if he
is working for someone else.

I almost miss Red’s men who spoke
English, and didn’t feel the need to use more than slaps or a random punch.
This man wants to hurt me. He wants to break me.

The man is speaking into a cell
phone now.

I heard him answer, with a hello.
The one word in Spanish I know well. He seemed upset by what he was hearing. He
looked back up to me, his eyes lit with fire.

When he hung up, he pulled a knife
from the back of his dirty jeans pocket.

The metal reflected off the dim
light that was rigged to the top of the truck’s cab.

He brought the knife to the side of
my face, gently pulling it down. It wasn’t cutting, I tried not to flinch, but
I knew that he was going to hurt me.

“Esclavo”

His voice was quieter this time,
almost a whisper.

Then he jerks the knife down near
my shoulder, cutting my wedding dress off.

As soon as it is removed, I am left
in nothing but a strapless bra and a pair of lacy panties.

Hector moves across from me,
wedding dress still in hand and begins to sort through the material, almost as
if he is looking for something.

After a while he grows bored and
begins to shred it to pieces, the dress was expensive, Dean insisted I buy this
particular one. The whole ‘not seeing the brides dress before the wedding’
didn’t apply to him. When I went dress shopping with Mom and Alexis, he snuck
in, when he saw this one he said it was ‘the one’ and insisted I get it. The
dress was $22,000. It was a joke between Alexis and me even trying it on... But
Dean loved it.

Which means that it kind of hurt
when the old man ripped it into nothing. A sinister smile on his face while he
tore each square inch of fabric apart.

No one would ever know that mere
hours ago, that fabric made up the dress that I wore while I married the love
of my life.

A man I might never see again.

Hector looks at me. The truck comes
to an abrupt stop.

“Bienvenido a México, Esclavo”

Mexico?!

When we stepped out of the truck,
they didn’t bother blind folding me.

In fact through all of this
process, no one bothered to hide from me their faces or our location. Which was
odd, Dean and Red had both been careful to cover their tracks.

We were in a seemingly poor town.
When I looked around, the majority of the houses were falling apart. Small
children were riding their bikes around an empty lot about 50 feet away. A few
came closer to inspect what was happening with me and the other women. I
notices quickly that these were 7 and 8 year old boys, with guns in holsters on
their sides. Nothing innocent about this. I felt sad for them.

Hector pulled me on his own, the
other men took the other women. They got into separate cars, but Hector pulled
me to a town car of sorts that was standing off to the side. I didn’t want to
be separated from the others. No, I didn’t know them but something made me feel
good about not being the only one. I didn’t want to be alone with Hector,
safety in numbers and all that. Not that it matter where this man was
concerned.

Hector spoke briefly to the driver,
who nodded his head in understanding at whatever the old man had told him. He
began his drive straight through to wherever we were going.

There was not much outside, this
town seemed so poor, I knew Hector had mentioned Mexico, so I knew what country
I was in, just not what city. There were no other cars, just us. Just us and
the dirty roads and the condemned houses with boarded windows while we passed.

About 10 minutes later we stopped
before a large gate. The driver rolled his window down and typed some numbers
into a keypad before a gruff voice came over an intercom.

When the men were done speaking,
the gates opened. We drove for 2 more minutes down a paved road before coming
to another set of gates. This time the driver only needed to enter numbers to
gain entry. When we pulled through those, I noticed a large house, really a
mansion ahead.

Hector looked at me and smiled

“Welcome home slave.”

He laughed at the fear I was sure
he could see all over my face.

The car pulled up to the front
door. Where I noticed a man around my father’s age walk through the front door.
He’s wearing an expensive suit, he’s slightly handsome, clearly wealthy and
obviously based on Hector’s body language… The boss.

Hector and the man talk briefly,
before the new man turns his attention to me. An immediate smile crosses his
face. Like he is trying to be friendly, like all of this is the most normal
thing in the world.

Well… I mean it is for him at
least.

“Olivia, it is so lovely to meet
you. I have hear so much about you.”

He looks deep into my eyes and
notices the bruising.

“Hector, did you rough the lady
up?” the man asks

Hector nods. But he says nothing
more.

The man makes a tsking noise in
disapproval “Max will not like that.” He says

Max. I have heard that name before…
Where?

The new man turns his attention to
me once more “let’s get you inside and all settled, we have much to discuss.”

Still smiling, still happy, still
acting like this is okay.

When we enter, I notice that this
house seems even bigger inside, than it does on the outside.

The entry way is fully open to the
entire bottom floor. The floors are an expensive marble that is cold to the
bottoms of my bear feet. Outside it was piping hot, Mexico is hot, and I had
always heard that. But it is nice and cool in here, it makes it easier for me
to breathe. I am wearing what seems to be a sheet that was sewn together to
look like a dress. It feels like a potato sack. Hector forced it on me before
left the truck earlier.