Chapter
1
“We should have put a bullet in that asshole’s body for every woman we found in his basement before we killed him.” Lucas’s low, angry voice echoed through the unusually silent van we were riding in.
I could not blame him for his disgust. I wished we had filled the deranged pervert with a hundred bullet holes, made him look like bloody swiss cheese. Circumstances required us to do otherwise, though, to save an innocent life.
We had closed in on a Russian diplomat’s house, taking out his security team, and then infiltrated his residence, looking for a kidnapped woman supposedly sold to him as a sex slave.
What we had found as we descended into his expansive, custom-made dungeon was the stuff of nightmares. It was a literal playground for a twisted man who lived to inflict pain and suffering on others for his own satisfaction. Metal chains and shackles hung from ceiling beams and were also bolted to the floor in a few places. A Saint Andrew’s cross sat in the corner, covered in blood splatters, the shades ranging from a fresh red to a dried dark brown. The amount of blood on the piece of equipment was sickening. Pulling my eyes away from the ominous cross, I crept stealthily along after my teammates.
Along the back wall hung a comprehensive collection that made my stomach roll. Whips, crops, floggers, chains, ball gags, restraints, dildos, and a number of other things that I didn’t recognize, nor did I want to know what they were.
The area was expansive enough that we had to split up into two teams. I went left, following Riley and Arturo, while Lucas, Jaxon, and Chase went right.
As I passed one of the couches towards a hallway on the left, I saw a bridle and butt plug with an attached tail to it. Apparently, someone was into pony play.
I was never going to be able to look at the horses on my dad’s farm the same way again.
Without an in depth inspection of the residence, the only things we could see were all of those implements that had been meant for pleasure yet had been turned into something deviant and ugly. What the fuck would we have found if we dug deeper?
I didn’t want to find out.
No, I wanted to get in, see if our missing woman was still alive to be rescued, and then get the fuck out and go home to my woman—my very pregnant woman who had been way more understanding than I had expected when I disappeared for weeks at a time during the last four months while working these missions. What kept me going during the mission was the thought that, the faster we found the woman, the faster I could get home. It was the only thing that kept me from waging my own bloody path of destruction in my search for the sort of monster who would torture women that way.
When we had gone nearly to the end of the hallway, the sound of flesh slapping flesh reached our ears from the last doorway on the right. Riley tried to quietly turn the doorknob yet found it locked and ended up kicking it open instead. I had barely made it into the room when the situation deteriorated to life or death.
Our target had grabbed the woman he had been abusing and pulled her in front of him as a human shield with a knife against her throat. That knife of his had evidently been very busy before we arrived.
The woman he held was covered in weeping cuts, a red trail from her breasts to her thighs. The scary part about her obvious torture was that the tears streaming down her face were silent. She didn’t even whimper when he roughly hauled her by her hair in front of him to save his sorry hide. It was as if he had trained her to keep her misery to herself. Anyone who had lived through that kind of hell didn’t deserve to die when freedom was standing right in front of them.
For a few seemingly endless seconds, I looked into the woman’s green gaze, seeing only my wife.
My gorgeous Belle had been kidnapped eight months prior by a ruthless cartel drug lord we had been investigating for black market weapons deals. Belle still carried scars from a mad man’s knife, much like the silent, defeated woman in front of me would carry for the rest of her life.
As I watched between one blink and the next, Riley took the kill shot, splattering half of our subject’s head on the wall behind him. The woman collapsed to the floor in a heap of sobs; however, those cries had not been ones of sorrow. No. With a look of relief shining in her eyes, she shed tears of joy. Of freedom.
It had taken four months—four long months —to track down the women a Cuban Don named Lazaro Sandoval had sold over the last couple of years. It had not been easy, but with this mission, we had finally ended our recovery of the women. One by one, we had located them, dead or alive.