Crazed: A Blood Money Novel

by Edie Harris

  He kissed the tears from her cheeks and jumped over the edge with her, his semen scalding her. It was enough to wake Ilda from her daze, so that when he shifted to lie beside her on the bed, she was already blinking through the aftershocks of a pleasure so inescapably real. His fingers curled around her wrist, slowly, tugging her to his side, but she resisted. Stiffening went against every impulse, every instinct. Her body screamed at her to go where he led her and cuddle against him. In the past, she would have. In the past, she wouldn’t have let him roll off of her in the first place.

  Aware that he permitted her to do so, when his greater strength could have pinned her down, Ilda wrenched herself away and off the bed. Silently, her breathing hectic, she scurried around the hotel room, yanking on her clothing as she found it. The missing buttons on her blouse forced her to knot the tails of her shirt over her belly, but when she turned to face the bed—and the naked, virile man sprawled across it—she felt far more in control. “I can’t help you, Casey Faraday.” The risks were too great, not only to her person but to the life she led in this city where she’d spent thirty-one years under the protection of the Marin cartel. That protection could disappear in an instant, and would the second Pipe learned she was an informant for a joint DEA-Interpol task force. “And you need to leave Medellín.” Saying that hurt, like losing him all over again.

  “I can’t leave.” He pushed up onto one elbow, eyes heavy-lidded as he watched her, but she didn’t mistake his sated, slumberous gaze for relaxation. No, he saw her—maybe even saw through her. “The hostage...he’s my brother. His name is Adam.”

  Unwillingly, Théa’s smiling face darted through her mind, a happy memory from the night of the rehearsal dinner before her intended marriage to Pipe. Beautiful Théa, whose time on this earth had ended after only twenty-nine short years. “You’re telling me Pipe is holding your brother captive.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her voice lowered, and she crossed her arms protectively over her chest where the torn material of her blouse gaped. “He must know who you are, then.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  He hesitated. “No.”

  “Do you understand how dangerous this is?” Realizing her hair was a mess, she combed harried fingers through the curls and quickly braided the mass of it again. Scanning the floor, she searched for the missing hair elastic, glancing up only when Casey cleared his throat. There, dangling from one finger, was the elastic, and she snatched it with a frown. “Do you know what you’re asking me to do?”

  “I know, and I wish to God it wasn’t you I had to ask this of.” Sitting fully upright in the bed, he scrubbed one hand over his buzzed scalp, and it was only then that she noticed the utter exhaustion—that had nothing to do with sex—lurking in the lines of his face and body. “But I need a meet-cute with Pipe, and I can’t just show up like I’m looking for him. He has to think he stumbled upon me himself.”

  Irritation flashed. “And once he stumbles upon you, what do you think he’s going to do, hmm? Just...welcome you back with open arms?”

  Casey met her gaze directly. “No, he’ll probably beat the shit out of me.”

  “Pipe doesn’t beat people.”

  “No,” he agreed through clenched teeth. “He has thugs for that.”

  “You were one of those thugs, once upon a time.” And a spy. She couldn’t afford to forget this fact. Against all better judgment, and before she could second-guess herself, she followed her handler’s orders, despite the sick gnawing in her stomach. “There is a nightclub here in the neighborhood, La Jaula de Oro. Pipe will be there tonight for the nine o’clock show, but he always arrives fifteen minutes early.”

  Panic bubbled when he simply nodded. So. She’d done her duty. She’d made contact, gotten the American spy in with the big, bad drug lord as best she could and now...now she was done. Done with Faraday and his hostage brother, and done—again—with the Casí she’d impulsively married in a secret ceremony four years earlier, when she ought to have stayed firmly in mourning and never dared everything on a love based on lies.

  Rushing to the door, she fumbled with the chain and the lock until the handle gave way, and she flung the portal open. She had to get out of here and never, never look back. Her past was dead, and certainly not gorgeously nude and well-sexed on a cheap hotel bed mere feet away from where she now stood.

  “We’re not done, Ilda.”

  The knot in her stomach twisted as she swallowed back stinging tears. “We’ve been done for years.” She slammed the door behind her.

  Chapter Five

  The back booth of La Jaula de Oro was a special kind of hell.

  On the one hand, he sat far enough from the club’s stage, with its intimate lounge-like setting, that he was nearly out of sight when those at the front of house looked his direction. On the other hand, his wife was up on that stage, and there was every possibility she was unaware of his presence.

  Ilda. Alive. Casey didn’t know whether he wanted to weep with happiness or vomit over how he’d spent the past four years—without her. And not only without her, but under the one-hundred-percent unshakable assumption that she’d died the day of their wedding.

  His fingers clenched around the sweating beer bottle he’d ordered from the friendly waiter upon arriving at the club. Fuck. He’d slept with other women. Only a few, but that didn’t matter. He had broken vows he’d had every intention of honoring for the rest of his life, and just because he hadn’t been working with all the available information didn’t mean he still shouldn’t have held to those vows. But grief was a tricky, sticky thing, and bodies were different than hearts. His body had needed touch—he’d always been a physical man, his desires base and earthy—despite what his heart, his mind, had screamed at him.

  After every instance where he’d found himself in bed with a woman who wasn’t Ilda, he had been wrecked with sadness. Sometimes it would hit right away, as soon as the pleasure dissipated, before the sheets had cooled; sometimes the...the depression—because that’s what this was, damn it, and maybe it was time he admitted to it—would arrive without warning, weeks after the fact, and sideline him in his cabin for days. Sleep seemed to be the only thing that healed him, and staring at her picture in his phone so as to not forget her smiling face, not ever.

  And then he’d be fine. Throwing himself into his work, happy enough and smiling and doing what he had always done best: protecting others. Yet even now, as ecstatic and overwhelmed as he was to discover Ilda was alive, as earth-shattering as it had been to make love to the love of his life—like a dream, a wish he’d never believed would come true—Casey felt those demons hovering again, feeding off of his guilt, his shame. He’d never have thought he could experience such excruciating happiness and still feel the dark taint of pain, like a sickly film clinging to his emotions.

  It wasn’t enough to send him crawling to his bed. It wasn’t enough to distract him from this mission, or make him a liability to those around him...though that wasn’t to say that someday he wouldn’t be. But it was enough to convince him to sit down with the shrink when he returned to Boston and ask about the possibility of meds. His reticence to acknowledge what he saw as an intrinsic weakness didn’t benefit anyone, least of all him.

  For now, however, his head was firmly in the game, the darkness brutally locked down in a sequestered corner of his mind. Sipping the alcoholic beverage he didn’t want but that his cover necessitated, Casey stared up at the woman onstage, a pang thudding through his heart. Perched on a simple stool, wearing an elegant but understated column of royal blue satin, Ilda gripped a microphone and crooned sensual lyrics of love in a time of death.

  Her voice was a miracle. He’d always thought so, but new layers lived in her talent now. She had suffered loss and survived, and still she sang. Low and warm and beautiful and sincere, and not for the first time, he wished he had a better ear, so he could properly appreciate this rare gift of hers.r />
  She was accompanied by a pianist, a hand drummer and a guitarist, but the spotlight focused solely on her, a jewel on that stage. He couldn’t look away, which was the whole point, he supposed. But looking at her made his eyes sting, his breath catch and his chest ache, and he realized more than her voice was a miracle—Ilda herself was. He’d felt just how miraculous only a few hours earlier.

  His dick hardened, and he shifted in his seat, the booth creaking beneath him as he tore his gaze from the stage and scanned the room. The club was tastefully decorated and incredibly clean, the waitstaff and bartenders in tidy all-black uniforms. He didn’t remember this place from the last time he was in Medellín, but then, he’d not spent much time in the Parque Periodista neighborhood. His days had been tied up in Pipe’s various activities, most of which centered around the hacienda—Pipe’s sprawling estate on the city’s outskirts, tucked into the hilly, wooded landscape and highly guarded. Casey had lived on the grounds while under with the cartel, as did most of the brigadiers, and only once had he spent the whole night away from his bunk.

  The night of Pipe and Théa’s rehearsal dinner. The night Ilda had asked him to stay. The night the Orras cartel had launched an offensive strike and murdered Théa as her escort delivered her to her downtown penthouse, mere hours before she and Pipe were to be married.

  A dark day, leading to the darkest Casey had ever known. He didn’t have all the pieces yet, couldn’t put together the puzzle of his own wedding day and what had happened to Ilda. How she had survived. How he could have possibly left Colombia while she was still alive.

  He’d never forgive himself for that.

  Which explained why he had sent off a frantic request to Della as soon as Ilda had fled his hotel room, demanding satellite footage of the chapel for the twenty-four hours preceding and the forty-eight hours following his marriage. Luckily, his cousin had only treated him to minimal lip over his request and promised that the video would be in his inbox by tomorrow morning.

  Until then, he had a job to do.

  Another sip of beer, and his gaze flitted back to the stage. Ilda had finished the song and smiled softly at the appreciative applause that broke out, but Casey didn’t join in. Not because she didn’t deserve applause, but because clapping didn’t fit with his cover as Cortez.

  Casímiro Cortez had been a thug with a hard-on for machine guns and an inappropriate obsession with the boss’s sister-in-law to-be. He’d proven himself a coward at the outbuilding four years earlier, when the spies were snatched and several brigadiers killed in the firefight ascribed to the Orras cartel. Presumed dead until now, Cortez had come back from the grave with his tail between his legs, and where else should he be but lurking creepily in the periphery of his ex-lover’s place of employment?

  Going in, Casey hadn’t planned on using Ilda—but then, he hadn’t known she was around to use. Being here made a sick kind of sense; Casey banked on the fact that Théa had let slip to Pipe the nature of Ilda’s relationship with him before she’d died. He needed to appear lovesick, and desperate, and lounging angrily in the corner of the club was pretty desperately lovesick behavior, if you asked him.

  No matter what Ilda had said, they weren’t over. Not even close. She was his fucking Helen of Troy, and he’d raze this godforsaken country to the ground in order to get her back in his arms for good.

  But first, he had to find Adam’s scrawny ass and save it, no thanks to the man sitting alone at a small table to the right of the stage. Felipe Marin Donado wore a tailored suit, the jacket unbuttoned and white dress shirt opened casually at the throat. Pipe had always been a well-dressed man, his lean frame ideal for the current trend of slim-cut business wear, and despite the fact that he was in his mid-forties, he was incredibly fit. And strong. And, objectively speaking, handsome, his thick black hair just gone gray at the temples.

  And staring up at Ilda, his smile was not the least bit brotherly.

  Casey knew that look. Casey owned that look, damn it.

  The most powerful man in Colombia—in South America, truth be told—watched Casey’s wife as though she belonged to him. To Pipe. But...that wasn’t possible.

  It couldn’t be possible.

  Dread curled low in his stomach as he glowered at Pipe, for the moment uncaring how he appeared to the club-goers at large. Pipe’s hand lay flat on the pristine tablecloth, fingers tapping along with the beat of the percussion, a single tea light working in conjunction with glow of the stage lights to cast his face with enough warmth to clearly display his expression. His mouth was curved, the lines at the corners of his eyes crinkling in genuine pleasure.

  Fucking hell. Pipe was in love with Ilda.

  Swallowing the black, possessive rage that threatened, Casey tossed back the rest of his beer and signaled the waiter. He couldn’t afford to waste another moment, not when he was feeling so unstable—and hell, he probably ought to look into meditation classes when he got back home, too, just to be on the safe side.

  Had he mentioned how much he hated Colombia? Because Jesus Christ.

  The waiter approached. “Another Costeña, sir?” He moved to take the empty bottle from in front of Casey.

  Showtime. Swiping his arm over the tabletop, Casey sent the beer bottle flying, enjoy the satisfyingly loud crash of breaking glass. “Not interested in your cheap beer, amigo,” he growled, faking tipsiness. “How much for a bottle of top-shelf tequila?” Tossing down a handful of pesos, he crossed his arms over his chest and fixed the poor waiter with a belligerent stare.

  The waiter scurried away without touching the bills, murmuring that he would return shortly, and Casey began the mental countdown. Heaving an irritated sigh, he pulled the burner phone from his pocket and focused every ounce of his attention on the screen, checking fútbol scores and shooting off a text in Spanish, which would ping off a program on Della’s computer and send an automated response back to his cell, inane and untraceable.

  A throat cleared to his left, and he looked up into the forbidding face of Manuel, Pipe’s second-in-command...and one of the bastards who’d attacked Adam. “Cortez. You look pretty good for a ghost.” He propped his hands on his hips, staring impassively. “Boss wants to talk to you.”

  Casey made a show of hesitating before pushing out of the booth, but Manuel didn’t move out of his way. “What?” he snapped, as though he didn’t know what was next.

  Without a word, Manuel patted him down, starting with Casey’s torso, then moving to his arms and his legs. Under normal circumstances, Casey was armed to the teeth with sidearms, knives and other tools, but as Cortez, he’d only ever carried a 9mm, tucked into the waistband of his cargos. Manuel relieved him of the pistol, tucking it into his own belt. “Follow me.” He turned on his heel and walked toward the stage.

  Casey trailed behind, praying he wouldn’t be forced to sit at that table with Pipe, mere feet from where Ilda sang. But no, that wasn’t what Pipe wanted either, because Casey saw him stand and blow a kiss—a motherfucking kiss—to her before disappearing around a black curtain to the right of the stage. Casey kept his gaze on the back of Manuel’s head, battling with every step not to look at the goddess in blue satin, whose eyes he could feel on him for the first time since the hotel. Don’t look at me, baby. Please don’t look.

  Manuel led him past the curtain behind which Pipe had disappeared and through the rear exit, dumping them out into an empty alleyway.

  Except it wasn’t empty. Pipe stood there, flanked by two brigadiers Casey didn’t recognize. And he wasn’t pleased. “Casímiro. I thought I’d buried you.”

  Before Casey could speak, Manuel slammed his leg against the back of Casey’s knees, knocking him to the ground. His kneecaps screamed against the uneven concrete pavers, his hands shooting out to brace his fall and scraping roughly, tearing open the heels of his palms. Almost instantly, Manuel grabbed him by the neck of his T-shirt, yanking backward so Casey knelt upright in front of Pipe. “I said, I thought I’d buried you.”
r />   “Yeah, well, you didn’t,” Casey muttered, knowing if he came on too subservient, Pipe wouldn’t believe him for a second.

  Pipe nodded, and one of the brigadiers lumbered forward to plow his meaty fist into Casey’s gut, but Manuel’s choking hold on him kept him from folding into the punch. The pain doubled when a second blow joined the first, followed by a punishing uppercut along his jaw.

  He bit his tongue, teeth snapping, and he grunted, trying to breathe through the burn but doing nothing to defend himself. If he’d thrown his arms up or fought back, no doubt the second brigadier would have laid into him, too. As it was, Casey could endure a beating, had known this was in store for him. Didn’t mean he enjoyed getting his ass handed to him, though.

  Another couple of bruising blows along his ribs, and then the brigadier shifted back, leaving Casey panting heavily as he locked eyes with Pipe, an expression that could only be termed disappointment coloring Pipe’s aquiline features. Unwillingly, Casey felt a twinge to his conscience, which was pretty sick. But during his time with the Marin cartel, he’d had what he considered a good relationship with the merciless drug lord. Pipe rewarded loyalty and intelligence—so long as you weren’t too intelligent, of course—and Casey, as Cortez, had offered both. A part of Casey had actually respected the man for what he was: a steadfast leader and astute businessman. The cartel functioned with military precision, and Casey, as a former Army sergeant, appreciated the order and organization intrinsic to the Marin cartel.

  That part of him disliked disappointing the man who was, essentially, his commanding officer, but he deserved it. Or rather, Cortez deserved it, and it was Cortez’s story he needed to sell. “You done beating on me?”

  Unsurprisingly, that earned him a hard cuff on the head from Manuel, who still gripped the back of his shirt. Yet Pipe chuckled with real amusement. “You always were a mouthy bastard, Cortez,” he said lightly before sobering. “I was grieved by your death, my friend. Perhaps you care to tell me how it is you’re not in the grave in which we buried you.”