Venom & Glory (Venom Trilogy Book 3)

by S Williams

  After landing on my private airstrip, we load in another van and drive through Lantía, the city I have admired since I was a niño.

  I grew up here during my teenage years. Back when my life was easy. I was always on the beach, always playing fútbol, living a careless life. But then my father got deeper into the business. Life became even more dangerous. We bounced from house to house like a game of ping-pong.

  The threats started coming left and right. My freedom, as I knew it, was over. Just like that.

  As we pass by one of the elementary schools, I remember the teacher my father had to take and beat down because he would constantly grip the back of my neck and leave bruises. He pulled me from public school and had me homeschooled that same month. To this day, I’m not sure if that was a wise choice for him.

  My thoughts were always closeted. I had no one my age to talk to, besides Thiago, and I only saw him once a week.

  Fuck.

  Thiago.

  Mi primo. My throat thickens, remembering his eyes that day. The blood. His words. He was a fool. He thought I didn’t need him. He was wrong. We had our differences—I have differences with everyone—but he was family. The only family I had left, besides my mother.

  I rub the back of my neck, looking out the window, at the children playing outside, some of their parents watching from the shade of their porches.

  It doesn’t take long to reach the path leading to my favorite mansion. If I thought the rides were quiet before, it’s even quieter now. I don’t hear a single breath, just the crunch and pops of the rocks beneath the tires.

  The palm trees clear up and the home appears.

  My home.

  The creamy stucco was always my favorite, the roof a dark chocolate, offsetting the overall appearance. There are no lights on. The house looks completely vacant and dark inside. Every window is pitch black, the curtains drawn.

  Guillermo pulls up to the front of the house and parks.

  “No cars,” Clark says, peering around. “Sure about that lead, man? Or are we wasting our time?”

  “Yes, I’m fucking sure,” Guillermo grumbles.

  “Unlock the doors,” I order. The doors unlock and I ease out, the bottoms of my boots crunching on gray and ivory pebbles. My eyes shift up to the open gate ahead. My men know never to leave my gates open. Someone has trespassed and may very well still be around. “Keep quiet. Don’t shut the doors.”

  Gianna steps out of the car, leaving the door open for Clark to follow after her. Patanza comes out behind me, strapping her AK-47 around her. She looks up at me and then over at Gianna, who side-eyes me.

  “Someone was here,” Patanza murmurs, looking at the open gate. We get to the gate, and I look down when pebbles transition to sand. There are thin, straight tracks of a wheelchair, along with footsteps.

  A noise sounds from a distance, a familiar one. The creak of my backyard bridge. Loud and rickety. Mamá has bugged me to get it fixed for years, but I kept it that way so no one could sneak to or from my house without me seeing them.

  As a child, it would wake me up at night, and sometimes I’d see my father walking to the shed, going to handle business.

  Gianna rushes ahead as soon as she looks up from the tracks and hears it.

  “Gianna!” I snap in a low voice, but she ignores me, still running.

  30

  DRACO

  “Shit!” Clark hisses. He takes off after her, and Patanza runs after them. I rush ahead, snatching the gun from my holster and hustling across the thick sand.

  All I hear is the roar from the ocean and the howl of the wind as it whips against me. I see Gianna with one of her pistols in hand now, running through the sand, up the hill that leads past the shed.

  What the fuck is she doing?

  I gain some ground, running past Patanza and Clark, finally catching up to Gianna and gripping her shoulder. Yanking her around, I grip her face and force her eyes on mine. “What the fuck are you doing? Slow the fuck down before you end up killed!”

  “No,” she says through ragged breaths. “He’s here. Let’s settle the score.” She snatches her body away from me and gives me her back, charging ahead again. Fuck. She never fucking listens.

  “Both of you stay back. Patanza, tell Guillermo and Sebastien to keep watch up front. If you see anyone you don’t know around here, you kill them.”

  Patanza bobs her head and takes off.

  Clark throws his hands in the air. “Well hurry after her! She could be walking into a fucking death trap!”

  My nostrils flare as I glare at him for a brief moment.

  But he’s right. He’s fucking right.

  She’s being a reckless bitch, and she will die if she doesn’t slow the fuck down. I turn, sprinting through the sand and jogging to the cement steps a few feet away from the brown bridge. Just as my feet hit the solid ground, I spot Gianna standing in the middle of the pathway.

  “Gianna,” I mumble, stepping up to her side, but she doesn’t look at me. Her eyes are fixed on something else.

  I look with her, and when I do, I can’t believe what the fuck I’m seeing.

  In my own backyard.

  As clear as day.

  A tall man with a straw cowboy hat is walking through my garden. He has on a plaid shirt, his hair pulled back into a slick, inky ponytail. He’s tall. Lean. But not a fucking match for me. I could drop him in a second.

  He isn’t what surprises me either.

  No. What surprises me most is the butchered man sitting in the wheelchair.

  How he sits there, his back toward us, his dark hair shifting with the wind, barely touching the nape of his neck. He’s looking down at something.

  The man in the cowboy hat grips the handles of the wheelchair and starts to turn him in our direction, but I lift my gun and find my target, shooting him right through the fucking head before he can get the chance to see us.

  I run up the hill, through my bed of flowers, as the no-armed motherfucker I had locked in my shed for over six months stares right up at me. His eyes are terrified, his face paling beneath the bold, golden sun.

  My shadow hovers over him, and seeing him like this—alone, weak, and easy to kill—stirs something up inside me.

  My blood boils, my fingers tightening around the gun.

  This motherfucker is the reason I am here. He’s the reason I lost Thiago. He got away and told that bitch everything he knew.

  “Surprised to see me, pinche cabron?” I shove my gun into his cheek, and he breathes a little harder, dropping his eyes.

  His head moves sideways, and when Gianna emerges from behind me, her pistol in the air and pointed at him too, he sighs.

  “Just my fucking luck, huh?” He huffs a laugh, lowering his gaze to his lap.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I ask through bared teeth.

  “For all you know, I could be the bait for a trap.” He smirks.

  “For all you know, you could be dead within the next second,” Gianna snaps back, breathing harder. “Where is she?”

  “Oh, come on, Gianna. You know I’m not going to tell you that.” He looks down at his lap again, and that’s when I notice the skull.

  Trigger Toni’s skull. I see the initials from this angle.

  My eyes shift over to Gianna, who is focused on the skull, too. Tears line the rims of her eyes, but she keeps her arm leveled and her gun steady.

  “Why do you have that?” Her voice cracks with the demand.

  “He was my cousin, Gia. Your husband—even if it was for less than thirty minutes. It’s all that’s left of him. I had to come and get it.” He smiles sheepishly, looking at me again. “Your men? They talk a lot in that cell you had me locked in. It was my only entertainment, really—that and getting Gianna to trust me enough to eventually set me free. Toni always did say she was pretty damn gullible. I just didn’t think, being Lion Nicotera’s daughter and all, that she’d be that easy to fool. But I guess there’s a reason he’s dead now, to
o.” He sighs, and Gianna nearly freezes up with the words he’s spewing. “Anyway, your men mentioned you buried his skull in this garden, but not before going into great detail about what was done to him before it was buried. The finger cutting, eye gouging, head scalping, and teeth pulling. The acid.”

  I lower my gun and grip the collar of his shirt. “I don’t have time for your fucking mind games.” I growl. “Where the fuck is Hernandez?”

  He shrugs. “I have no idea.”

  “I will find her. And when I do, I will make sure she feels every ounce of pain I deliver.”

  “What did she do exactly?” he asks, like he’s truly curious. “For you to be so angry, I mean?” I see Gianna tense up through my peripheral. “So what, she killed your cousin. Is he enough reason to start a war? You killed my cousin, who was more important and more powerful than that piece of shit cousin of yours ever would have been. Trigger Toni was going to rule the fucking industry and then you came along and ruined everything—El fucking Jefe.” He leans up, staring hard into my eyes. “You will go down burning with this stupid bitch at your side. And when you do, she will laugh. She will laugh her ass off and relish in her victory while sleeping naked on a bed made of money. After all, it’s all she’s ever wanted, besides power: for you to go down, for you to be forgotten. Forever.”

  The urge to grip his throat and crush it until he turns blue consumes me, but it’s too late. Gianna steps beside his chair, points her gun to his temple, and shoots him. His blood splatters, some hitting my face. Most of it lands on my shirt and hand as his body slouches back in the wheelchair.

  I blink hard and step back, brows furrowed, glaring up at her.

  She grimaces down at his limp, bloody body, and then at the skull. Putting her gun back into the holster at her waist, she snatches the skull up and hurries through the garden to the double doors that lead to the basement.

  She stomps down the steps, and I run after her, reaching the floor of the basement and watching as she rushes around, looking for something. She tosses the skull down on the floor and continues searching for something—I have no idea what—until she finds what she’s after.

  When she grabs the handle of a sledgehammer and lifts it up in the air, a shrill cry floods my eardrums. Her cry is louder than any noise I’ve ever heard come out of her, the hammer all the way in the air. It comes flying down with full force, crushing the skull into pieces. She does it again, and this time the hammer breaks the skull into many fragments.

  Her breathing is wild, chest heaving, loose wisps of hair now hanging in front of her face. Her eyes are deranged, darker than I’ve seen them, and for a split second, they are foreign to me.

  This isn’t the girl who was terrified of me. The girl who looked like she wanted to jump a bridge and end her life while under my roof.

  No.

  This is a woman—a powerful woman who has finally found her strength. A woman who knows all about the dirty ways of this fucked up world and is tired of putting up with its shit.

  “Fuck Henry,” she pants, and the heavy end of the hammer hits the ground as she stands up straight. “And fuck Trigger Toni.” Her eyes pull up to mine, still panting. She shifts sideways, swallowing thickly.

  I want to tell her how stupid she is for doing what she just did—killing the only source that could have gotten us to Hernandez—but I don’t, because she did exactly what I would have done.

  She killed him.

  And with no remorse in her eyes.

  No fallen tears.

  No regrets.

  She pulls her gun out again and storms past me, rushing up the stairs.

  Before I go, I look back at the shattered skull. The pieces of him. How he was whole before and had a little meaning, but now, he is nothing but a shattered, worthless pile of shit.

  When I make it up the stairs, Gianna is digging through Henry’s pockets. She fishes out his cellphone and his wallet.

  “What the fuck happened?” Clark asks, trudging up the hill. When he makes it up to where we are, he looks down at Henry with a screwed up frown. Pointing at him, he says, “Whoa! What the fuck happened to him? He has no fucking limbs!”

  I ignore his exclamation, focusing on Gianna again. She’s scrolling through the cellphone now. Her eyes light up several seconds later, and she points at the screen.

  “What did you find?” I ask.

  “Someone just sent him a text, said they’re on the way to get him. We have to go.”

  “Come on.” I rush her way, yanking the cellphone out of her hand, sliding it into my back pocket, and then clutching her wrist, running down the hill and across the wooden bridge. Our feet drag in the sand with the weight of our boots, but I don’t stop, not until we’re all in the van, loaded up, and driving away from the house.

  Guillermo takes the hidden dirt road I created for getaways. When we reach a safe distance, I release a sharp breath, pulling out the cellphone.

  “There was something else. A message from her,” Gianna murmurs without looking at me. “She told him to meet a carrier named David. Maybe we can call the number she messaged him from—distract her. Have your men track her location.”

  “My tech guys are in Sinaloa. We won’t make it there fast enough, and it’s way too dangerous for you there right now. They catch sight of you or Clark and they’ll be onto us—they may even kill you on sight. Most of those men are not loyal to me there because they wish to be me. We’ll have to ditch this phone soon.”

  “Shit,” she hisses.

  “Don’t worry about it right now, reina. Her time will come. Trust me.”

  Her eyes hold mine, her teeth sinking into her bottom lip. “Reina,” she says softly, but it sounds more like a moan than anything.

  She is reina. Always has been, even during her stupidity.

  She should know it—the power she possesses—and she shouldn’t doubt it.

  But I still need to keep my distance. Instead of giving her all my attention, I look down at the cellphone, retrieving mine and taking pictures of his previous locations.

  Fucking idiot, using an iPhone like he was free of troubles. Once she finds out about Henry, she’ll ditch the phone she’s using. She’ll be pissed, and I really don’t give a fuck.

  They thought it was over when they took my cousin from me. They thought they had the upper hand by gaining more territory.

  Wrong.

  This shit has just begun.

  31

  GIANNA

  Halfway during the ride to the airport, Draco tosses Henry’s phone out of the window.

  After doing what I did, I expected to be trembling with paranoia. I expected myself to question what I’d just done—especially after crushing Toni’s skull . . . but I haven’t. Honestly, I don’t think I ever will. I’ve changed. I realize that now.

  I am not the woman who was kidnapped, tortured, and trapped in that shed. I am stronger. Smarter. Colder.

  Power intrigues me. Death no longer affects me. The crown is so close to my fingertips—I feel like I can already feel the smooth gold and the precious jewels. Once we get rid of Hernandez and her crew, the crown will be mine. Ours.

  We arrive at his villa in Puerto Vallarta again after a flight that was a little chattier coming back than when we left.

  As soon as Guillermo parks, everyone climbs out of the car, I with a sense of triumph. I’m still pissed she wasn’t there. We need to find her and get this over with already. Such a coward she is, hiding away.

  I follow Draco’s lead to the door. He retrieves a key from his pocket and sticks it into the lock, leading the way inside. I glance over my shoulder and Patanza is behind me, Clark only a step behind her, looking at her ass.

  “Look away before I stab your eyes out, gringo.” She rolls her eyes, entering the house.

  Clark chuckles, but definitely doesn’t stop his staring.

  Draco walks into the living room, heading for a corner table set up with tequila. A heavy sigh escapes me, and as badly as I wa
nt to toss my body on the couch and rest, I don’t bother. I need a shower. I need to think.

  Draco pours himself a shot of the tequila, releasing a long sigh.

  I start to walk to the stairs, to the bedroom I was staying in for the past four nights, but Draco calls my name, stopping me in my tracks.

  I look over my shoulder at him. He’s in front of the wide glass door now, shot glass in hand, ready to be taken in one smooth gulp.

  “To my room,” he commands without looking at me.

  I could question it, but I don’t.

  His room means privacy.

  All I can think about is how much we need it right now.

  I turn and go up the stairs to my room for a change of clothes. I walk back down to his bedroom afterward, which is much nicer than mine, set up with a king-sized bed and draped with a Mexican-styled comforter and throw pillows to match. The headboard is wide and thick, and seems to be made of glass and wood.

  The floor is made of copper Mexican tile, and there is a wraparound terrace that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. A table is set up out there, topped with unlit candles and clean plates, merely for decoration.

  There is a lighter on one of the nightstands and I pick it up, sparking six of the candles in the room.

  I then walk to the terrace and let the wind sweep over me. It feels amazing. Too bad I can’t fully enjoy these blissful moments. This paradise. I catch it when I can.

  With a sigh, I turn around and walk to his bathroom, starting up the shower and scrubbing the blood off my body, the hot water soothing my sore muscles.

  I scrub hard—so hard my skin starts to turn a light shade of red. I don’t stop scrubbing until I hear a noise outside the bathroom.

  I rinse and then grab a cotton robe, stepping onto the glossy tile floor and walking out to the bedroom.

  Draco stands in front of the entryway of the balcony, his back to me. His hair is a mess—disheveled and wild. He’s grown facial hair, which doesn’t look bad on him at all.

  I have never seen him like this. He always used to look so well put together. Clean, neat, and shaved. Now, it seems he couldn’t care less. And maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s too focused and determined to worry about his appearance at the moment.