Disclaim (Deliver #3)

by Pam Godwin

  He continued the flirtatious conversation in Spanish, telling her how sexy she was, how bacano her tits felt, and that her lips were more deadly than his .40 cal. He wooed and winked and charmed the panties right off her skank ass. Hopefully, not literally. Camila still couldn’t see her beyond the door.

  Camila kept her finger off the trigger and her breaths steady, but Nico didn’t let go of her arm.

  “I have an appointment.” Matias rolled the syllables in Spanish.

  An appointment for what? A prostitute? The idea of him fucking other women was ridiculous. Saving them, though? That made so much more sense. But who was he saving them from? Whoever had arrived in those luxury cars? An icy chill rushed through her core and chased the heat from her limbs. She glanced at Nico, but his attention was locked on Matias.

  “You’re no fun,” the woman said. “This way.”

  Matias followed her in and closed the door behind him.

  “Fuck,” Camila whispered, shoving Nico’s hand away. “Are there slaves in there? Is this a whore house?”

  He launched to his feet, dragging her with him, and pivoted toward the side of the house.

  A second later, a solid dark shape darted around the corner from the backyard. Ski mask. Slender build. Large knife in hand.

  Frizz. She recognized the metal buckles crisscrossing his black shirt.

  “Back door?” Nico asked the other man in a hushed voice.

  Frizz shook his head, blue eyes glowing in the dim light from the porch. Jesus, he looked different with his stitched lips hidden and his crazy hair tucked away. He looked…normal. Young. Really fucking young, like late-teens. He was just a baby.

  Had he been rescued from slavery himself? If so, why would he torment the slaves at the estate?

  He held up two fingers and pointed across the yard at the shadowed tree line. Identifying the location of the men Burd had brought?

  Holding down three fingers and a thumb, he pointed his knife at the house.

  Nico nodded and turned toward her, whispering, “Three men and a woman inside. Shoot anyone you don’t know. Try not to kill the female.”

  What the fuck? The gun rattled in her hands. “Why would I kill anyone when I don’t know who they are?”

  Those people could be undercover DEA or FBI or just a family trying to survive amid the violence. They could be the good guys.

  What if that wasn’t it at all? Maybe Matias’ cartel captured women who ran slave rings and sold them as punishment. Her heart pounded. Could she hope for such a possibility?

  Nico lifted a hand to touch the mask on her face and stopped before making contact. “You’re about to find out.”

  Frizz slipped around them and crept onto the porch, his steps silent and movements graceful. Nico followed, and she stayed on their heels.

  They froze at the sound of a wane cry coming from the dark corner of the stoop. Definitely a dying animal.

  Frizz moved first, slinking toward it. Thank fuck, the boards didn’t creak, but she braced for it, tensing for any noise that might give them away.

  She stepped where Frizz stepped and stopped beside him, her eyes straining in the absence of light as she tried to make out the floating shape.

  A lamb. She sucked in a breath through the mask.

  A newborn lamb, hanging upside-down by its back legs. Its front legs scissored weakly, reaching for the floor but not quite touching. Its mewls were so frail and brittle it must’ve been hanging there for a long time.

  Manic energy surged through her blood, begging her to help it. But Frizz beat her there, knife out and cutting it down before she took the first step.

  When he lowered it to the floor, she whispered inanely, “Why?”

  “Dinner.” Nico turned back toward the door.

  Dinner? Fine, then fucking eat it. Don’t torture it first. What the fuck was wrong with people?

  She moved to follow Nico, but her gaze was glued over her shoulder.

  Frizz squatted beside the poor thing, petting it and making shushing sounds. It didn’t even try to move or run away. Probably too weak. Or maybe it didn’t know any better than to trust a guy who sewed up women. Maybe this was an alternative reality, and she didn’t know which end was up. Whatever was going on, watching him soothe that lamb made her chest so tight she couldn’t breathe.

  She joined Nico at the door, and he held up a closed fist, signaling her to stop. His other hand gripped the knob, but he didn’t turn it, didn’t move.

  Her pulse spiked. They’d already used up thirty seconds with the lamb. What if Matias needed back up for…whatever the fuck he was doing?

  Another count of too many seconds stretched by before a scream penetrated the door from within. Nico swung it open, and she followed him through, gun pointed toward the floor and her pulse pounding in her stomach.

  A woman lay unconscious on the floor, bleeding from her temple, but it was the heavy thumps and whimpers coming from the back of the house that slowed Camila’s gait.

  Frizz swept around her and knelt beside the woman as Nico took off down the long hall that led toward multiple closed doors, his pistol trained and ready. He slipped into the first room and shut the door. Grunts immediately sounded through the wall, followed by something crashing.

  With wobbly steps, she moved in that direction, but a hand gripped her ankle, causing her to stumble. She whirled and met Frizz’s wide gaze where he knelt on the threadbare carpet. He shook his head frantically and pointed at the floor beside her feet.

  He wanted her to stay? But Matias was back there. What if one of those grunts was his? She didn’t even know who was in those rooms. Slaves? Being forced at that very moment? Oh God, she hoped she wasn’t right.

  Her hands shook around the stock of the gun, palms soaked in sweat as she inched toward the hallway.

  A different door opened up ahead, and a fat naked Caucasian man stepped out, his penis fully erect beneath his jiggling belly. Her heart stopped.

  He looked at her and narrowed his eyes on the gun she pointed at him. “Who are you?

  The mask protected her identity, and Nico had told her to shoot anyone she didn’t know. But on what grounds? Because the man’s dick was hard? Maybe he’d been jerking off. Completely naked? No fucking way.

  She steadied the iron sights on his chest. “Who are you?”

  CAMILA KEPT THE 9MM leveled on the naked man’s torso, her chest heaving, knees wobbling. She wet her lips, and her tongue brushed against the mask as she slid a finger over the trigger.

  A pained male voice bellowed from the back room, followed by a succession of crashing sounds. The naked man widened his eyes, glanced over his shoulder, and darted that way, toward the last door where the screaming came from.

  Her pulse thundered in her ears as she pointed the gun at his back. Fuck, she’d never forgive herself if she killed an innocent man, but he if touched that door knob, she wouldn’t hesitate to squeeze the trigger.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” She ran after him.

  The next few seconds flashed in the span of two anguished breaths. She passed the fat man’s room in the first breath, glimpsed a baby doll on the floor, a bare mattress, and the lopsided pigtails and tear-soaked eyes of a girl no older nine huddled nude in the corner.

  No no no no! Her second breath came with an explosion of fire as she aimed her horror-stricken fury on the fat man, trained the gun a few inches higher, and sprayed his brain matter across the wall.

  Her next breath died in her throat as she screamed in horror. But nothing passed her lips. Not a sound. Not a breath. Every living thing inside her was sobbing in the room with that little girl. This wasn’t shock. She stood frozen in a place she wasn’t sure she could come back from.

  The remaining two doors opened at the same time. Her arms moved on reflex, the gun swinging left to right as she waited for another naked dead man to step out.

  Nico emerged first, eyes scowling through the ski mask and red dots peppering his gray shirt.

/>   “Camila.” Matias stepped out of the last room, wearing a mask of blood. He raised red-smeared hands and took a limping step toward her. “Lower the gun.”

  What was in those other rooms? She wanted to ask, but her voice had left her. Maybe she already knew the answer. Her brain felt fuzzy, and she shook. Fuck, she shook from head to toe.

  Nico stood nearest to her. Close enough to reach out and grip the barrel trembling in her hands. She let him take it.

  Matias glanced down at the fat man and lifted his eyes to her, wearing a blood-speckled smirk. “You’re so badass.”

  She stared at the body blankly, didn’t feel a twinge of regret.

  Favoring his left leg, Matias slowly erased the distance with his arms stretched open. She walked into his embrace and dropped her forehead on his blood-soaked chest.

  He pulled the mask off Camila’s head and held her against him as footsteps sounded behind her. Tiny cries trickled from the three rooms, and his arms tightened. More little girls. She fought back the rising, burning need to sob and glanced over her shoulder.

  The men who had arrived with Burd strode through the front room. Nico and Frizz stepped aside, their tight expressions no longer hidden by masks.

  The soldiers pulled off their own ski masks, revealing feminine faces and long hair. Not men? The rest of their womanhood remained hidden beneath fatigues and loose shirts.

  Matias shifted Camila out of the way as the women split off into separate rooms. A moment later, Picar shuffled in, carrying a medical bag.

  A tidal wave of questions and confusion slammed into her. Two women and a doctor. Presumably, there were three young girls in those rooms, and two more dead pedophiles. All of this had been planned out and executed with one goal. Matias had come here to save those girls.

  She struggled to stand upright against the pounding, overwhelming barrage of emotions. Working her throat, she couldn’t separate the numbness from her voice. “Can I…do something?”

  What could she do? Comfort the girls? Play nurse? Clean up the bodies? Fuck, she wasn’t emotionally fit for any of that. She needed to sit down.

  Matias turned her toward the front of the house. “You need air.”

  She needed to know he was okay. With a surge of determined concentration, she shifted back to him and crouched to examine his leg. Her fingers slipped over blood in the ripped part of his jeans on his thigh. “How bad?”

  “I’m fine.” He pulled her up and nudged her toward the door.

  As she crossed the front room, she glimpsed worn wood paneling on the walls, ratty furniture, dishes piled on a counter in a kitchen that was more like an extension of the front room with a stove, sink, and fridge shoved against a wall.

  A little pink backpack and a fuzzy stuffed rabbit sat the corner. Her fingernails pierced into her palms.

  The woman lay on the floor, eyes blinking rapidly, face streaked with tears, and lips sewn shut. Just like the slaves at the estate.

  Camila froze as the last three weeks started to click into place.

  “Who is this woman?” She stopped a few feet from Frizz.

  His lips rolled behind his own stitches as he looked to Nico, who stood in the front doorway, smoking a cigarette.

  “That woman,” Nico said through a puff of smoke, “is the girls’ mother. Ages nine, eleven, and twelve. The same girls she offered to sell to our slave ring.”

  His eyes shifted to the hallway. Then he turned away.

  The same girls she’d pimped out to those dead men.

  Camila’s vision turned red with murderous rage. “Why is she still alive?”

  Blood surged to her arms and legs, her hands fisted, and her pulse screamed through her veins. She flung herself toward the woman, claws out, teeth bared, desperate to scratch eye balls, rip out hair, and ram something sharp and lethal down that vile gullet.

  Matias caught her around the waist before she reached the despicable waste of life.

  “Shh.” He turned her to face him.

  “The slaves at the compound…” she choked. “They’re not innocent?” A wave of chills swept through her, followed by a rush of heat as her mind assembled the pieces. “You torture slave traders. Then you sell them.”

  “Oh, I kill them, too, like the one in the back room.” He stared into her eyes, his face splattered with blood and the hazel depths of his gaze stark with sadness. “But every woman and man we capture and sell deserves a fate worse than death. Some traffic humans. Others are like her, sell or whore out their own children.”

  Her stomach swooped and flipped. The ages of his slaves, his complete lack of sympathy for them, his reason for doing it…

  The answer is right in front of you. All you have to do is fucking look.

  He’d wanted her to see a man who loved her so much he would never become a slave trader. A man who loved her to the ends of hell and back as he tracked down the worst kind of monsters and stopped them from harming others.

  She swayed with dizziness, her eyes burning with the onset of tears. “I need to sit down.”

  He moved her outside to the porch, and she instantly glanced at the dark corner, searching for the lamb. It was too shadowy, too quiet, so she stepped in that direction.

  “Frizz wouldn’t have left it there.” Matias’ timbre caressed the rawness of her nerves.

  “Oh.” She frowned. “Do you think…?”

  “He ended its suffering?” He nodded. “And moved it somewhere you wouldn’t see it.”

  She stared out into the gloom of their surroundings, probing for the little lamb’s body. Her stomach squeezed painfully. It was silly to care about a dead animal considering what she’d just witnessed. She must’ve been stretched thin on heartache.

  “Sit with me.” He held out his hand.

  She joined him on the steps, where they sat side by side and gazed at the vastness of the black sky. A moment later, Nico brought out a couple of towels and returned inside.

  Welcoming the distraction, she focused on cleaning Matias’ face, wiping the sculptured edges around his strong jaw, stern brow, and the strands of his thick black hair. His gaze never left hers as she used the corners of the cloth to clear away the splatter around his eyes, perfect nose, the creases in his ears, and his dimples when he smiled gently.

  Then she used the clean towel to dab at the knife wound in his thigh.

  “Picar needs to look at this,” she said with an achy voice, her mind spinning in a million different directions.

  “He’s busy.” Matias grimaced when she pressed too hard. “Frizz can stitch it.”

  “Frizz!” she shouted over her shoulder. When he appeared on the porch, she lifted the towel. “Need you to sew up a stab wound.”

  His eyes glimmered, and he rushed back into the house. When he returned moments later, he carried an armful of bandages and supplies that he’d probably swiped from Picar’s bag.

  He cut Matias’ jeans away from the injury and set to work, cleaning and preparing the wound.

  She lifted Matias’ hand and used one of the bandages to clear away the blood. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Ten years.” His fingers curled around hers.

  “A year after I was captured.”

  “Yeah. It took some time to organize.”

  “Jesus, Matias.” Her heart panged. “You could’ve told me this during any one of our phone calls. I would’ve joined your efforts and helped you.” We could’ve been together all these years.

  He shook his head. “I was in a bad place those first few years. I killed more slave traders than I captured. So fucking reckless and dangerous and angry.” He lifted his chin at Frizz. “This guy kept my head on straight.”

  Frizz paused during a stitch and stared at the ground.

  “You’ve been doing this with Matias since the beginning?” she asked Frizz, studying his youthful face. “How old are you?”

  Frizz closed his eyes, opened them, and reached for the knife beside his knee. Then he lifted
the blade to his mouth and cut each stitch, one by one, pulling away the threads as he went.

  Matias squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back, her insides twisting in knots.

  “I was eight when Matias found me.” Frizz’s voice cracked, soft and chalky with disuse.

  Her heart clenched.

  He glanced toward the house, but his gaze turned distant. “He pulled me out of a place just like this. My old man…” He cleared his throat, his inflection gentle and distinctly American. “My father used to sell me to men like those in there. The men wanted to hear me cry and beg. When I wouldn’t do it, my father hurt me very badly.”

  An ache pressed against the backs of her eyes and seared through her chest. She wanted to reach for him, hold his hand. Matias looked as if he wanted to do the same, but didn’t move, so she followed his lead.

  “I like to sew my mouth.” Frizz licked his bottom lip. “So I won’t forget.”

  “So you won’t forget…?” The lump in her throat burned painfully.

  “I’ll never give them what they want.” He stared at his unmoving hands, fingers clenched around the needle. “They’ll never hear me beg, never force…themselves in my mouth again.”

  She tried to keep the tears at bay, tried not to look at him with pity. All she could think about was an eight-year-old boy, abused and molested, living with a cartel and following the capo around while he slaughtered predators.

  Maybe it was the best form of therapy. Hadn’t she done the same thing?

  “What happened to your father?” She had a damn good guess.

  “Matias castrated him.” Frizz smiled. “And cut out his tongue. He removed other organs, too. Then he killed the bastard.”

  Her stomach curdled. “Is there anything left of the man in the room you were in?” she asked Matias, nodding at the house.

  “Pieces.” Matias looked over at her and shrugged. “I have a really sharp knife.”

  “Good.” She lay her head on his shoulder. “Did the little girl…did she watch that?”

  “I sent her to the closet the second I charged in.” He tensed, relaxed. “Those girls will be removed without witnessing the gore.”