Their Cartel Princess: The Complete Series: A Dark Reverse Harem Box Set Read online

  She got up, splashed water on her face, and lost herself looking in the mirror and wondering why she looked so pale and strange. Then she went looking for gum, or Finn; whichever came first.

  The villa looked enormous, like she’d been shrunk. She tottered down the hallway, heading for the stairs. Everything pitched and wheeled around her because she had to lurch from side to side to keep her leg from bending too much.

  Luckily, the staircase leading down had a railing. She gripped it desperately and held on for dear life as she worked her way downstairs.

  She concentrated so much on moving downward that when the stairs ended and she looked up, she didn’t see sky. Her brain—reminiscent right then of a plate of spaghetti—refused to try and work out why. Instead of the sprawling, manicured gardens of the villa, she faced another hallway, gloomy and cold. The air smelled stale down here too. She looked up the staircase. It turned in a gentle spiral so all she could see was the smooth underside of the stairs she’d just descended.

  Cora faced forward again. Tottered hesitantly for a few steps and then swooned against the wall.

  God, she was thirsty. It felt like a dentist was working on her mouth and had one of those air-sucking things between her gums. She shivered at the thought and then soldiered on, a hand against the wall for balance.

  A shape came out of the darkness. A familiar face, even wreathed in shadows as it was.

  “Miguel,” she tried to say, but it came out as “Mi-gu.”

  “¿Señorita?” Miguel suddenly looked nervous “What are you doing here?”

  “Water.” That, at least, came out all right.

  Miguel’s chin moved back, and he nodded hurriedly. He scanned her, seeming alarmed at the state of her. “Si.” He waved a hand, saw she was struggling to walk, and came to her side so she could prop herself against him.

  “You fall hard, yes?” Miguel said. “What are you doing down here?”

  “Chicle. Por favor.” She mimed putting gum into her mouth, which made her teeth chatter against each other.

  But he didn’t seem to understand her. Miguel let out an uneasy laugh, and ushered her forward. “We get water,” he said, as if that would solve everything.

  Perhaps it would. Her mouth was a goddamn desert.

  The water was so good, Cora couldn’t stop until the glass was empty. She was sitting at a small metal table pushed up against a wall. The chair under her was metal too, rickety, and slightly concave. But not by design—it was as if it had been sat on by someone over its weight limit. Or had been bashed over someone’s head like at one of those wrestling matches. She laughed at this, and lost herself in one of those pseudo-dreams again. Finn, beating Javier over the head with a metal chair. But it didn’t seem to be damaging anything except the chair.

  “Señorita?”

  Cora swarmed back to reality, and gave Miguel a wide smile. He gave her one it return and helped her set the glass back on the table. He dry-washed his hands, eyebrows lifting in silent question.

  “Muchos gracias,” she said, dragging the back of her hand over her mouth. The water seemed to have brought some kind of clarity to her mind. She glanced around, noticing for the first time the complete lack of natural light down here. There were a few bare bulbs strung down the center of an endless hallway that eventually ended in a brick wall, but that was it.

  “Where are we?” she asked quietly.

  Miguel clapped his hands to his chest. “The cells.”

  “The…” she trailed off. Cells? As in…prison cells? She pushed herself up, hopping awkwardly until she found her balance. “I should go.”

  “Si, si.” Miguel waved her back the way she came.

  An alien noise echoed down the hallway. It made every hair on her body stand up, and forced a rough shiver through her. Miguel’s smile became stiff. “You go now,” he said, shooing her away.

  “What was that?” she asked, not in the least surprised that her voice shook as much as her hands did.

  It had sounded like an animal in pain. Or a demon.

  “No, no. You go now.” Miguel tried shooing her again, but she slapped her hand away. That did surprise her, especially when she started toward the noise instead of away from it like someone with a full set of brains in their head.

  Miguel was beside her in an instant. “Please, señorita. We must go back.”

  Why did everyone here insist on speaking English. Didn’t Miguel know she could speak Spanish? She had a feeling Javier insisted on it. He seemed to pride himself more on how well he fit into America than his ancestry.

  The idle thought swam around her mind for the long seconds it took her to reach the end of the hall. It didn’t end in a blank wall like she’d thought; to the right was a metal grate with even more gloom beyond.

  Gloom, and the suggestion of more grates.

  Like a block of prison cells.

  “Open this,” she said, wrapping her hand around one of the grates.

  “Señorita, please, I cannot—”

  “Now.” Her voice was leaden how she tried to stop it from shaking. This time, it wasn’t fear though. She’d known Javier wasn’t the gentleman he made himself out to be. There was a little dark in everyone. This was his.

  “They’re all empty?” Cora asked, peeking her head to each cell door so she could squint into the darkness ahead.

  “Not all,” Miguel said unhappily. “But please, señorita, this is no place for a lady.”

  “Of course not,” she said, giving him a sour look. “And neither is this a place for a man. Or any human.” Her bare feet stood in a puddle, and her face contorted in disgust. From the smell down here, she was pretty sure it wasn’t just some rain water that had found its way down here.

  She recoiled when a man flung himself at the next cell she poked her head toward. Her leg ached in complaint as her back slammed into the brick wall opposite the cell. She cut off her cry with a hand, clawing air into her lungs with a desperate breath.

  Arms reached for her, streaked with dirt. “Usted viene aquí, coño.”

  Miguel surged forward and cracked a baton over the man’s arm. He fell away from the bars with a scream that echoed through the hallway.

  The same scream that had led her here. Miguel stuck his arm through the grate and slashed out with the baton again, hard enough that she could hear it connecting with the prisoner’s flesh. The man screamed, cursed, and Miguel hit him again.

  On the third blow, the man fell silent. Dead, or unconscious.

  Cora realized she’d crowded against the wall, but it was near impossible to peel herself away. Miguel was breathing hard and, when he turned to face her, the vicious snarl that had been on his mouth was quickly replaced with that same uneasy smile as before.

  “Señorita,” he murmured, as though chastising her for still being down here to witness what he’d had to do. “Please. We go upstairs now.”

  She sidled away from him, her brain too clouded to understand she was going the wrong way. “What did he do?” she asked, having to swallow before she could produce the words. “What did he do, Miguel?”

  “This is no place for a lady,” Miguel said again, as if that was his only defense for the atrocities that took place down here.

  “Tell me!”

  “He…” Miguel put his baton away and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “He ratero. Informant.”

  “So you lock him up here? Why?” Abruptly, the bricks behind her vanished. She fell an inch back.

  Against another grate.

  “¡Señorita!” Miguel darted forward, but he was too slow.

  A hand grabbed Cora’s throat as an arm pinned her waist. She choked, grappled, and then tried to kick through the grate. Her heel slammed into metal, and she gurgled in pain—all that was possible with those determined fingers cutting off her airflow.

  A voice spoke slowly in Spanish. “Open, or I strangle her.” A second later, a strip of cloth replaced that hand. It whipped over her throat so hard it chafed
her skin.

  She reached desperately behind her, trying to find purchase on her attacker’s body, but he must have been curving away because there was nothing to grab onto.

  Perhaps he was a spirit. Perhaps his demonic cry had been the one that lured her here.

  Miguel didn’t bother with his baton this time. There was a pistol in his hands. Hands that didn’t shake or even hesitate as he aimed into the darkness behind her.

  “You’ll hit her before you hit me,” the voice said, still speaking in Spanish. “Open the cell.”

  Miguel must have realized it was a fight he couldn’t win, not without possibly injuring Cora and bringing down the wrath of El Guapo and perhaps the entire El Calacas Vivo cartel. So he fished around his waist for a bunch of keys that jangled too cheerily down here in the stinking dark. They rattled against the lock as Miguel opened the cell, and then he stepped back, the pistol still aimed inside the cell. Cora tried peeling that arm from around her waist. Sank her nails into the man’s flesh. Tore at him—but if he felt it, he didn’t seem to care. But there was a bandage on his hand, and blood had seeped through whatever wound it hid and had saturated the surface. She ground the tip of her thumb into that wound. Behind her, the man yelled in pain. The grip around her waist loosened enough that it took only one violent kick to push herself away.

  But then that twisted cloth around her neck yanked her back again. She gasped, flailing as tiny, bright lights studded her vision. The gloomy shadows swarmed toward her, black as a moonless night. She scrabbled furiously as the man twisted his hand, and the cloth cut even deeper into her throat.

  Bandage. Young Mexican. Angel? Was this the same sad, defeated man she’d shared the backseat with earlier today? She tried saying his name, but there wasn’t enough breath in her lungs.

  “Throw away your gun, or this girl dies.” Angel twisted harder still, and Cora’s hands no longer had the strength to fight him.

  Her lungs burned for air. She could feel her face heating up with trapped blood, and then growing cold. Her eyes felt too big for her face, and she couldn’t have closed them if she tried. Icy tingles spread from her fingers and toes, traveling to the center of her being as the last flicker of life slowly leeched from her body.

  From the shadows behind a terrified, confused Miguel, stepped a darkly robed figure. Bones clicked like stilettos on the concrete floor. A stray light flashed off a skeletal hand where it clutched a scythe.

  She’d never known the farm implement was so large. It almost dwarfed that dainty skeleton.

  But it was the crystal ball the figure held in one cupped, skeletal hand that drew Cora’s gaze.

  In it, brooding clouds swirled.

  And then blood. Her blood.

  Santa Muerte had finally come to claim payment for all the miracles she’d sent Cora’s way.

  Sangre por sangre.

  Blood for blood.

  49

  Paranoid drug dealers

  Lars had expected to be angrier than this. Calm filled him instead. A resolve he’d never felt before. Maybe he’d finally been freed from the guilt tying him to Milo all these years. It was obvious what the man thought of him; why the fuck he’d waited so long, god only knew.

  But he wasn’t planning on standing around and watching this all go even more fucking pear-shaped than it already was. He was leaving, like he should have yesterday. Milo could take care of himself. Always had. He didn’t need a voice of reason anymore. He could fuck things up perfectly fine by himself.

  The car they’d driven back in no longer stood in the circular driveway. A pair of guards did, though. Well, one had his back to Lars, ass resting against the side of an ornamental pillar that supported nothing except air, staring at something in the distance like he was dreaming of the day he’d be capo and all this would belong to him. When his boots crunched onto the gravel, both guards turned and hoisted their AK’s up as if he’d gone blind and had somehow managed to miss them.

  “Hola,” he called out, lifting a hand. “Where’s the car?”

  One of the guards shrugged. “Leaving?”

  “That’s an affirmative,” Lars said, giving a nod. “Now, if you could just rustle up my ride—”

  “Car would be here if you were leaving,” the guard said.

  “So get the car. Then I can leave.”

  But the guard had obviously not scored high on his SATs. He grinned at Lars, turning to laugh with his friend before saying, “You can leave when there’s a car.”

  Lars spun away, running hands through his hair. He turned back. “So, if the car’s here, I can leave?”

  “Si,” the guard said with a non-committal shrug.

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” Lars muttered as he strode away from them. “Now I just have to find a goddamn car.”

  Surely Count Drugula had a few of those lying around? If he could just find—

  As he walked back inside the villa, a maid scampered past him en route to do something that probably involved a cute little pink feather duster. He caught her sleeve before she could hurry past.

  “Where’s the garage, sweetcheeks?”

  Of the two men he found hanging around the motor garage—when he’d eventually found it—the first gave him a frosty smile and then looked impatient when Lars ambled up to speak to him.

  “Hey, man. You got a smoke?” Lars asked, casual as if he smoked two packs a day.

  The man smiled then, nodding as handed Lars a cigarette and a lighter. Lars gave his head an appreciative duck and lit the smoke.

  “Lars,” he said, sticking out a hand. The man took it. “Fraco.”

  “Hey, so we’re almost done here. Any news on our ride out? Or do we take the same one we came back in?” Lars peered around, but couldn’t see the black SUV anywhere. “That black truck?”

  “¿Que?” Fraco looked around, but his buddy was halfway under a nearby car and the legs sticking out didn’t look even vaguely interested in their conversation. “I ask Don Javier.” Fraco fumbled about his person. For a cellphone, perhaps.

  Lars caught his arm. “Don’s real busy.” He stabbed the smoke toward the villa. “Bit of a shitstorm up there. We were supposed to meet someone halfway with our rental. Sure they’re still waiting for us. We just need to get there.”

  Fraco gave his head a slight shake, eying Lars warily. “Don Javier okays every trip.”

  Lars took a drag of his cigarette, and spoke as he was exhaling. “It was okayed. But then there was that guy, and the message…” he threw up his hands in annoyance. “We got places to be, man.”

  “Where is your friend?” Fraco asked.

  Good fucking question. Probably racing after Cora on a goddamn white stallion, shiny suit of armor and shit. But he said, “On his way. Look, my wife’s gonna kill me if I’m not home in time for dinner. It’ll be third night this week. I’ll be sleeping on the goddamn couch for sure.”

  Fraco gave a smoker’s laugh that turned into a smoker’s cough, and waved them out of the garage, following a few paces away. “Hey, David?”

  A mumble emanated from somewhere under a nearby car. Then a clang clang clang of something being forced open or closed or possibly just apart.

  Fraco muttered something unpleasant under his breath. “I guess…” he ran a quick hand through his hair and then clapped Lars on the shoulder. “Let me get it.”

  “That’d be swell,” Lars said.

  Who the fuck said swell these days? But, apparently, smoke-toking Lars who had somewhere important to be did.

  Lars headed back to the circular drive. Relief washed him in an icy wave when a black SUV appeared, crunching over the gravel.

  “Jerry,” Fraco called as he climbed from the SUV. “They’re headed back.”

  The guard looked utterly disinterested in this piece of information. Lars put his hand on Fraco’s shoulder, squeezing once, and ground his cigarette out under his heel.

  And then, when he should have been getting into the car and driving as fast out of h
ere as he could without drawing suspicion…he couldn’t fucking move. Something pulled at him, kept him rooted.

  He can look after himself.

  He thinks you’re a fucking coward.

  She probably doesn’t even think about you at all.

  But not a single one of those thoughts did anything to dispel the urge to go back inside the villa, grab Milo by the scruff of his neck, round up darling little bunny, and haul them out of here with him.

  He must have lost his mind. Maybe it was the first sign of starvation.

  “I’ll be right back,” Lars said, giving Fraco a wide smile.

  The guard eyed Lars suspiciously when he walked past. “You’re not leaving?”

  “Fetching my friend,” Lars said, giving him a wave.

  The guard settled his rump back against the pillar and returned to his day dreaming.

  “Jesus, that was too fucking close,” Lars muttered to himself.

  Storm the castle. Find the girl. Leave without bumping into any dragons, counts, or fucking kingpins. If he had Cora, Milo would be forced to follow him out. He’d dangle bunny like a fucking carrot, if he had to.

  How the fuck was he supposed to reach the stables ahead of Javier? He’d been tailing him for a few minutes already; the man strode yards ahead, his bodyguards following like twin shadows. If he ran past, the gig would be up. He could really have used Lars right now. He was so good at coming up with distractions. He could divert Javier, leaving Finn enough time to find the necklace and go back for Cora.

  But he’d chased Lars away. Had called him a coward. And his chest still ached with the pain of it.

  Finn stopped walking. Ahead of him, Javier disappeared around a corner.