by Logan Fox
Some quack had performed a lobotomy on him, hadn’t they? Had they at least gotten rid of his demons?
He wanted to laugh. Couldn’t summon the will.
Milo had the demons, not him.
Milo.
His throat was raw dry, his mouth stuffed with invisible cotton. He slid his tongue around his palate, but even that hurt.
Why did his face feel so stiff?
An aching arm lifted, and he touched fingertips to his cheeks. Swollen. Hot. Flesh too tender for him to do more than brush his fingertips against it.
Someone had fucked him up good. Someone dressed all in white.
That trickle of memory turned into a flood.
A linen suit splashed with blood. A pissed off angel who’d lost his wings, and no fucking wonder since he’d obviously been batting for the other theological team all along.
He couldn’t summon the memory of a face, hard as he tried.
With a monumental effort, Lars pushed himself up.
His vision cleared a little.
A room. Familiar. Hospital-like in its clean lines and minimalist sterility.
The steady bleep-bleep of machinery drew his eyes. And then he looked down at himself. Heart rate monitors snaked from his chest, an IV drip from a vein in his arm.
The fuck…?
Before the blood-soaked man in white, what was there? Nothingness, and then…Angel.
That Latino motherfucker had betrayed them. Again. But for the last time.
The motel. That seedy room where his heart had thumped so hard in his chest he thought it would explode. Fear. Not for himself, but for Cora. That Zachary West had found them, and would take her. Would do to her what he’d no doubt done to Angel. Because he’d seen the bruises on that guy’s body—they were fresh, still healing. So violent as to be perverse.
A soft murmur of voices came to him. Then footsteps.
A darkly tanned face swarmed into focus. Lars blinked at it, his eyes moving down to a crisp white coat. For a moment, he wondered why there wasn’t blood on it.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Where am I?”
“Texas.”
“I’m in a hospital?”
“Close enough, Mr. Eklund.” The doctor gave Lars a humorless smile.
“Where are they?” he asked, trying to prop himself up.
The medic shrugged, making a note in his file. “Why don’t you focus on recovering, Mr. Eklund?”
“Fuck you, where are they?” Lars wished his voice was steadier.
The doctor looked up and sighed. Then he gave his head a shake and moved to the other side of the room.
A few feet away, a curtain had been drawn around another cot. The room held four, all their curtains drawn, but he’d thought he was alone.
The doctor pulled away the curtain.
Lars tried to sit straighter, but that made the room spin.
Milo lay prone on a cot, a pipe down his throat and two more up his nose. Beside him, a machine pumped oxygen into his body. His face was bruised and lumpy and swollen. There were stitches above his eye and through one lip. Some of his hair had been shaved, and more stitches were evident in that strip of pale skull.
“He’s in a coma,” Lars said.
It wasn’t a question, but the doctor still nodded. “Chemically induced. Until he’s more stable. There may be some memory loss, perhaps even brain damage. We’ll know in a few days when the swelling goes down and we bring him out. For now, he just needs rest. And a lot of it. You both do.”
The doctor started pulling the curtain closed, but Lars let out a rough, “Please.”
The man glanced at him, a slight frown on his forehead, and then left the curtain open as he walked back to Lars.
“Cora?” Lars asked, managing to tear his eyes away from Milo a few seconds later.
“You mean, Eleodora?” the doctor corrected calmly, running the back of his pen against a nearby monitor before jotting down another figure on his file.
“Is she all right?”
The doctor’s frown deepened. “Why wouldn’t she be? She’s with Don Javier.”
Lars let out a grudging laugh that turned into a cough. “’Course.”
The doctor cocked an eyebrow at him, and then went over the bed opposite. Lars caught a glimpse of a man laying in the cot before the doctor pulled the curtain closed behind him. The two men murmured at each other, but too low for Lars to make out anything.
Lars’s eyes flashed back to the window, to the tree’s shadow. He couldn’t keep staring at Milo, wondering if that pump would malfunction and stop sending that valuable air into his lungs.
God, what a fuck up.
Why were they still alive? Was Javier going to use them as collateral?
But they’d managed to break Cora out once; how could he know they wouldn’t do it again?
He watched the tree’s shadow as the sun rose, and then sank again hours later.
Did she even know they were still alive? Would she care if they weren’t?
His heart squeezed in his chest, and he lay a trembling hand on it.
Jesus, now he was getting feels. Which was the last thing he needed in his fucking life. He let his head flop to the side and stared across the room at Milo.
Looked like they’d both been dealt a shit hand this time.
69
So fucking special
Javier’s hands chilled the back of Cora’s neck as he guided her ahead of him. Her crutches click-clacked against asphalt; they’d driven in a golf cart what felt like close on thirty minutes, winding through Javier’s compound as they headed further and further away from the villa, before reaching their destination.
Here, a small parking bay had been laid out in front of a pair of wide gates that blocked whatever was behind them. Natural rock formations created a rough wall that spread out to both sides. Those gates rattled slightly; a wind had picked up on the last few minutes of the drive, as if the lack of any human structures teased Mother Nature into a playful mood.
When Javier’s sicarios unlocked the gates using an electronic keypad, a dry wave of heat slammed into Cora.
There were a pair of cameras on poles beside the gates. They turned a little when Javier led her forward.
A chain link fence lay straight ahead, with another gate and more cameras. Again, Javier’s men opened the gate for them, but this time they didn’t follow Javier when he herded her inside. There was a short flight of concrete steps leading to a platform. But Cora couldn’t look away from what lay beyond. The size alone was too staggering to comprehend.
Row upon row of white flowers in an endless sea of sage-green.
She’d never seen poppies before, but that was all they could have been. Nothing else made sense. There were metallic structures built along the rows, as if screens could be pulled over the rows of plants to protect them from the sun, the rain…or DEA agents flying by in helicopters.
A railing spanned the length of the platform and both sides of the stairs. When she felt cool steel beneath her hands, she realized she’d grabbed hold of the railing for balance.
“Your father was never fully upfront with you.” Javier released the back of her neck and came to stand beside her. He gripped the railing too, but his face was carved with a pride so deep it made his eyes sparkle when he turned to her.
The air out here was so warm, but so dry.
She couldn’t speak, could only watch as Javier turned back to his crop. In the far distance, she could see figures moving about, but they were mere specks in a sea of white and green.
“He was always too old fashioned, your father. When we were starting out, we smuggled weed and coke over the border, like everyone else.”
Javier glanced at her, then at the crutches. He took them away from her, resting them against the railing and drawing her closer with an arm around her shoulders.
Like a proud father displaying to his daughter the expanse of their kingdom.
His voice dropped low. “But these days, you don’t
need a drug dealer to buy weed. You just go to a dispensary. And cocaine?” He shook his head, jarring her slightly. “Coke has to come all the way from Columbia or Peru. You can’t grow it in Mexico’s climate, or this.”
He waved a hand to the poppies. A wind swept over the crop as if he’d beckoned it into motion, the flowers dancing like a Mexican wave. A few petals began falling, shed from the seed pods they were obscuring, and these fluttered in the wind like snow.
“But heroin…everyone wants heroin.” Javier’s voice was a low murmur now.
Cora could feel excitement coming off him like pheromones. It made goosebumps break out over her skin.
It was so quiet here. No sounds except the wind. So quiet, she could hear him breathing. Would anyone hear if she screamed? Would the two sicarios waiting outside the chain link fence hear it if she did? Or had Javier instructed them to stay outside no matter what?
Javier’s arm became heavier as he lifted his fingers and began stroking her shoulder. She swallowed, glanced at him under her lashes. But he was staring down at the poppies, perhaps not even realizing what he was doing.
“They’ll be ready for harvesting in a few days. Our first shipment soon thereafter.”
He looked down at her then, catching her staring at him. Taking her other shoulder in his hands, he turned her to face him and drew her close until there was no more room between them. His body was warm, firm, richly scented with cedarwood.
Her heart began pounding.
Javier slid his hands into the crook of her neck, and stroked her jaw with his thumbs. “So young. So beautiful. Birthed into a power you can’t begin to imagine.”
He must have seen the question in her eyes. He smiled beatifically as he smoothed her hair over her scalp.
“You just became the queen of a drug empire so vast, Pablo Escobar would be kneeling at your feet.”
What the hell was she supposed to say to that? The best she could come up with was a mumbled, “But…I…I don’t want—”
Javier released her, and lifted a finger in the air to silence her. Strange—he was only wearing one of his rings today. His hands looked surprisingly slim without them. He put a hand in the breast pocket of his linen suit and drew out her Taurus.
“A queen should never go unprotected,” Javier murmured, twisting the gun so the light caught on its inscription.
Then he reached around her waist. His fingers skimmed her skin as he lifted the back of her shirt.
She shuddered involuntarily as the cold steel of her pistol slid down her spine and nestled in the small of her back. Javier’s face was so close, she could taste the sweetness of his breath.
He turned his head to her. She closed her eyes, fully expecting that full mouth to brush her cheek, her lips, her throat.
Instead, he whispered into her ear. “But if you ever try to kill me with this, I will flay your lovers alive.” He drew back, a twinkle in his dark eyes. “Which will seem a pleasure compared with what I’d do to you.”
Epilogue
A crow landed in a flurry of wings on the eave of an airport hangar’s glaringly-bright roof. It strutted for a few paces as if the corrugated steel was too hot for its claws and then cawed aloud.
A second crow joined the first, landing a few feet away. They studied each other for a brief moment and then fluffed their wings. The first crow cocked its head, scanning the abandoned airport’s dusty ground in search of food.
It found nothing.
A third crow alighted on a nearby roof, cawing at the first two. They all fluffed their wings in way of greeting, and together studied the ground.
The second crow hopped off the roof, alighting effortlessly on the dusty soil. It strutted a few feet, eyeballing the vast, empty blocks of steel. Then it hopped into one of the open hangars. Inside, it came to stop some feet away from a dark, dusty shape on the floor. The body lay in a large, uneven circle of congealing blood.
The crow hopped around it before landing on a bare, dusty foot. It studied the body, cocking its head this way and that, and fluffed out its feathers a little. Flies buzzed over the shape, lethargic, as if they’d already spent their eggs in dark, moist places.
The raven’s friend came into the hangar behind it, and approached another nearby bundle with the same predatory caution. This body was larger, swaddled in brighter cloth. The crow pecked at an unmoving finger and then hopped onto a shoulder as it studied the large, ginger-dusted head.
It pecked at the closest staring eyeball.
The third crow joined them a few minutes later, as the first bird was reaching the end of its inspection of the dark-clothed shape laying in the blood. It had just spotted its eyeball—this one still lidded—and was making a beeline for the tasty morsel.
At its first peck, the shape under its claws twitched violently.
All three ravens swept from the hangar with an offended chorus of caws, calling down doom and destruction on the man who dared play possum with them.
They collected on the roof again, settling their feathers as one of them gave itself a quick preen.
Seconds later, a trio of black vehicles pulled into the empty airport. The ravens watched unimpressed as men piled out of the cars and headed into the hangar were all their tasty treats lay waiting for their return.
When the last of those bodies had been retrieved, and the vehicles had left, the ravens descended into the hangar again.
But now, all that was left was a puddle of drying blood and a few of the braver flies.
~ THE END ~
Grab the next book in the series by clicking the link below:
Dark Twisted Love (Book 3)
Also by Logan Fox
Dark Rapture
Dark Rapture 2
A desperate stripper. A secluded manor owned by three billionaires. And a savage evil sheltered deep within its luxurious walls.
http://smarturl.it/ldfox-darkrapture
Hush Money
Dark Rapture 1
A prequel to Dark Rapture.
http://smarturl.it/ldfox-hushmoney
Mister Sugar
Standalone Psychological Thriller
A seductress hunting for her sugar daddy strikes gold with Mr. Sugar. But he has skeletons in his closet...
http://smarturl.it/ldfox-mrsugar
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About the Author
L. D. Fox writes deliciously dark and twisted stories for people that, like her, enjoy reading it.
Having grown up on names like Graham Masterton, Dean Koontz, James Herbert, Stephen King, Robert Jordan, and Terry Pratchett, her stories are an eclectic mix of the sadistically twisted, the epic, and the darkly comedic. She strives to create characters that are as immersive as the worlds she raises around them. Expect more than your average amount of plot twists, superb dialog, characters you'll either love or loathe, and a book hangover that's guaranteed to last at least few days, if not longer. She doesn't hold any punches - nor should she, for that's what she expects in the books she reads and what she offers to her readers in return.
She hails from the four-seasons-in-a-day suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. She's so busy writing she doesn't have time for much else except the occasional indulgent Netflix binge. She loves hearing from readers, so don't be why to contact her and tell her what you thought of her writing.
ed by the Beast (Dark Twisted Love Book 2)
