Corrupted Vows by Kiana Hettinger

Chapter Three

Caitriona

The lights that surrounded Nacio’s estate were bright this evening.

Not quite like spotlights, but I could easily make out the enormous peach and white hibiscus flowers that lined the long winding drive up to the main house. It still looked like a tropical oasis to me—so long as you didn’t pay attention to the armed guards posted all over the property. There weren’t as many as usual, which meant Nacio still had them busy securing routes and territory he’d taken from an enemy.

Usually, I wouldn’t know anything about that, but this last enemy was different. Not a rival or a threat to his empire, it was the man who’d murdered his wife and son. Though I’d been spared the details, I could only imagine what he’d done to the guy once he’d gotten his hands on him. I’d seen some of Nacio’s handiwork—to say it wasn’t pretty would be an understatement.

The car rolled to a stop in front of the estate’s side entrance, and I tried to tamp down the nerves that fluttered in my stomach. It was more than just flutters; it felt like there was a giant sharp-beaked bird flying around in my stomach, trying to wreak as much havoc as he could before he ran out of oxygen.

“I should warn you, Phoenix, this man is looking rather worse for wear,” Nacio said.

The bird in my stomach didn’t like that one bit. “He’s still in one piece, right?”

He shrugged. “Mostly.”

“Oh good,” I quipped.

It wasn’t that I was against what Nacio did—it would make me kind of a hypocrite if I was—but I didn’t exactly get off on seeing a guy with his fingers missing and his skin peeled back. I’d yet to vomit in Nacio’s interrogation room though, so… there was that.

I took a deep breath. “All right. Consider me warned.”

Julio—one of Nacio’s men I saw most often—opened the car door, and we stepped out into the oasis where everything was quiet, peaceful.

The only sound was the gentle trickling of water from the koi pond. Even when we stepped through the side entrance of the massive house into the foyer that separated the main living area of the home from the basement, there was nothing but silence.

I focused on breathing as Nacio punched in the code for the basement door. Already, my palms had grown sweaty, and I could feel my pulse throbbing in my temples. How much easier it would have been to turn around, to leave, to forget about what I’d find on the other side of that door.

The moment the door opened, the wretched mewls of a wounded animal echoed up the stairs. But it wasn’t an animal. It was a monster; a monster who was now suffering for the pain he’d inflicted.

Nacio led the way, and I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other, following him down the dark wooden staircase.

Halfway down, the mewls turned into screams. A man’s scream, not a woman’s, but the agony in the sound tried to drag me back there.

Standing in the open stairway, I could feel the walls of my room closing in on me, sucking the air out of my lungs. I could feel the rough cement rubbing against the tattooed flames up my arms. I could feel the grimy mattress beneath me, ready to eat me up like a hellhole just opened up.

I stopped moving and put my hands over my ears, muffling the sound. One deep breath, and then another. The scream tapered off. My walls and mattress disappeared.

“Phoenix, are you sure?” Nacio asked, lingering on the step below me.

“No,” I confessed, proof of just how much the screams were affecting me.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, but there was no conviction in his voice.

Nacio knew as well as I did that I had to do this. I’d seen the man’s photo by accident this morning; a grainy surveillance photo on Nacio’s desk, but I’d have recognized that face anywhere. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I wasn’t the only girl he’d made scream.

The man’s scream came again, but this time, the sound spurred me on. Someday, I’d hunt down every man who’d ever visited that house. I’d make them pay for the screams they’d drawn from every girl who’d lived there, who’d died there. Maybe then, they’d finally stop screaming inside my head. Maybe then, they’d be at peace.

“I’m fine, Nacio. I’m ready.” I let out a sharp exhale.

He searched my face for a moment before nodding and continuing down the steps.

I squared my shoulders and followed him to the landing where there was a small room that led to the final door. The last barrier to the concrete-walled bloodstained interrogation room beyond it.

Outside it, Nacio handed me the Glock I’d used for this very same purpose more than once. The metal was cold and unwelcoming, but its weight in my hand was familiar.

The moment he opened the final barrier, the whimpers coming from inside stopped. So quiet, I swear I could hear the drip of blood onto the concrete floor from the chin of the man suspended in shackles in the middle of the room.

Even with both his eyes and jaw swollen and bruised, and shy a few fingers and a toe, I recognized Pedro. Tall and wiry, with cold, deep-set eyes and Santa Muerte tattooed across his chest. Pedro was the first, and he’d come back often. Again, and again. Always ruthless. Always relentless.

My stomach twisted as I felt him everywhere, inside me, all around me. I could smell his sweaty musk and taste him like no time had passed since he’d last used me.

I stepped further into the large, open room, so big my footsteps echoed off the walls.

I knew there were other people here, but the moment Pedro looked at me, everything else faded away.

It took him a moment of staring back at me before his brown eyes widened and his cut-up lips parted in surprise. Blood trickled from his mouth, but he seemed not to notice. Good—he recognized me.

The surprise faded quickly, and even broken and bleeding, his face twisted into a haughty sneer. “Come back for more, hermosa?”

Beautiful—that’s what he used to call me, because he said no girl looked as beautiful wearing his bruises as I did.

The name was like a blow that shot me all the way back. Back into that room. Back to the mattress he’d shoved my face into until he felt like letting me up for air.

I could feel his weight on top of me, hear his grunts in my ear, feel the bite of his teeth into the back of my neck as he tore me apart.

“Phoenix!” Nacio’s voice called me back from my hell as one of his men shot a fist into Pedro’s jaw.

I blinked and looked down at the gun in my hands.

They’d tortured him already. All I had to do was pull the trigger, but I was shaking. He’d rattled me.

“Let me do this, por favor,” Nacio said, holding out his hand for the gun.

The girl trapped in that room would have handed it over.

She would never have had the backbone to take a man’s life no matter how much he deserved to rot in hell. But that coward was gone, and good riddance to her.

“No,” I said, pleased when my voice didn’t tremble as much as my hands.

If ending their lives didn’t make the screams stop, if it didn’t make the memories go away, then nothing would. And I needed them to stop one day.

I needed to believe that someday, I could be free.