What was in those other rooms? She wanted to ask, but her voice had left her. Maybe she already knew the answer. Her brain felt fuzzy, and she shook. Fuck, she shook from head to toe.
Nico stood nearest to her. Close enough to reach out and grip the barrel trembling in her hands. She let him take it.
Matias glanced down at the fat man and lifted his eyes to her, wearing a blood-speckled smirk. “You’re so badass.”
She stared at the body blankly, didn’t feel a twinge of regret.
Favoring his left leg, Matias slowly erased the distance with his arms stretched open. She walked into his embrace and dropped her forehead on his blood-soaked chest.
He pulled the mask off Camila’s head and held her against him as footsteps sounded behind her. Tiny cries trickled from the three rooms, and his arms tightened. More little girls. She fought back the rising, burning need to sob and glanced over her shoulder.
The men who had arrived with Burd strode through the front room. Nico and Frizz stepped aside, their tight expressions no longer hidden by masks.
The soldiers pulled off their own ski masks, revealing feminine faces and long hair. Not men? The rest of their womanhood remained hidden beneath fatigues and loose shirts.
Matias shifted Camila out of the way as the women split off into separate rooms. A moment later, Picar shuffled in, carrying a medical bag.
A tidal wave of questions and confusion slammed into her. Two women and a doctor. Presumably, there were three young girls in those rooms, and two more dead pedophiles. All of this had been planned out and executed with one goal. Matias had come here to save those girls.
She struggled to stand upright against the pounding, overwhelming barrage of emotions. Working her throat, she couldn’t separate the numbness from her voice. “Can I…do something?”
What could she do? Comfort the girls? Play nurse? Clean up the bodies? Fuck, she wasn’t emotionally fit for any of that. She needed to sit down.
Matias turned her toward the front of the house. “You need air.”
She needed to know he was okay. With a surge of determined concentration, she shifted back to him and crouched to examine his leg. Her fingers slipped over blood in the ripped part of his jeans on his thigh. “How bad?”
“I’m fine.” He pulled her up and nudged her toward the door.
As she crossed the front room, she glimpsed worn wood paneling on the walls, ratty furniture, dishes piled on a counter in a kitchen that was more like an extension of the front room with a stove, sink, and fridge shoved against a wall.
A little pink backpack and a fuzzy stuffed rabbit sat the corner. Her fingernails pierced into her palms.
The woman lay on the floor, eyes blinking rapidly, face streaked with tears, and lips sewn shut. Just like the slaves at the estate.
Camila froze as the last three weeks started to click into place.
“Who is this woman?” She stopped a few feet from Frizz.
His lips rolled behind his own stitches as he looked to Nico, who stood in the front doorway, smoking a cigarette.
“That woman,” Nico said through a puff of smoke, “is the girls’ mother. Ages nine, eleven, and twelve. The same girls she offered to sell to our slave ring.”
His eyes shifted to the hallway. Then he turned away.
The same girls she’d pimped out to those dead men.
Camila’s vision turned red with murderous rage. “Why is she still alive?”
Blood surged to her arms and legs, her hands fisted, and her pulse screamed through her veins. She flung herself toward the woman, claws out, teeth bared, desperate to scratch eye balls, rip out hair, and ram something sharp and lethal down that vile gullet.
Matias caught her around the waist before she reached the despicable waste of life.
“Shh.” He turned her to face him.
“The slaves at the compound…” she choked. “They’re not innocent?” A wave of chills swept through her, followed by a rush of heat as her mind assembled the pieces. “You torture slave traders. Then you sell them.”
“Oh, I kill them, too, like the one in the back room.” He stared into her eyes, his face splattered with blood and the hazel depths of his gaze stark with sadness. “But every woman and man we capture and sell deserves a fate worse than death. Some traffic humans. Others are like her, sell or whore out their own children.”
Her stomach swooped and flipped. The ages of his slaves, his complete lack of sympathy for them, his reason for doing it…
The answer is right in front of you. All you have to do is fucking look.
He’d wanted her to see a man who loved her so much he would never become a slave trader. A man who loved her to the ends of hell and back as he tracked down the worst kind of monsters and stopped them from harming others.
She swayed with dizziness, her eyes burning with the onset of tears. “I need to sit down.”
He moved her outside to the porch, and she instantly glanced at the dark corner, searching for the lamb. It was too shadowy, too quiet, so she stepped in that direction.
“Frizz wouldn’t have left it there.” Matias’ timbre caressed the rawness of her nerves.
“Oh.” She frowned. “Do you think…?”
“He ended its suffering?” He nodded. “And moved it somewhere you wouldn’t see it.”
She stared out into the gloom of their surroundings, probing for the little lamb’s body. Her stomach squeezed painfully. It was silly to care about a dead animal considering what she’d just witnessed. She must’ve been stretched thin on heartache.
“Sit with me.” He held out his hand.
She joined him on the steps, where they sat side by side and gazed at the vastness of the black sky. A moment later, Nico brought out a couple of towels and returned inside.
Welcoming the distraction, she focused on cleaning Matias’ face, wiping the sculptured edges around his strong jaw, stern brow, and the strands of his thick black hair. His gaze never left hers as she used the corners of the cloth to clear away the splatter around his eyes, perfect nose, the creases in his ears, and his dimples when he smiled gently.
Then she used the clean towel to dab at the knife wound in his thigh.
“Picar needs to look at this,” she said with an achy voice, her mind spinning in a million different directions.
“He’s busy.” Matias grimaced when she pressed too hard. “Frizz can stitch it.”
“Frizz!” she shouted over her shoulder. When he appeared on the porch, she lifted the towel. “Need you to sew up a stab wound.”
His eyes glimmered, and he rushed back into the house. When he returned moments later, he carried an armful of bandages and supplies that he’d probably swiped from Picar’s bag.
He cut Matias’ jeans away from the injury and set to work, cleaning and preparing the wound.
She lifted Matias’ hand and used one of the bandages to clear away the blood. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Ten years.” His fingers curled around hers.
“A year after I was captured.”
“Yeah. It took some time to organize.”
“Jesus, Matias.” Her heart panged. “You could’ve told me this during any one of our phone calls. I would’ve joined your efforts and helped you.” We could’ve been together all these years.
He shook his head. “I was in a bad place those first few years. I killed more slave traders than I captured. So fucking reckless and dangerous and angry.” He lifted his chin at Frizz. “This guy kept my head on straight.”
Frizz paused during a stitch and stared at the ground.
“You’ve been doing this with Matias since the beginning?” she asked Frizz, studying his youthful face. “How old are you?”
Frizz closed his eyes, opened them, and reached for the knife beside his knee. Then he lifted
the blade to his mouth and cut each stitch, one by one, pulling away the threads as he went.
Matias squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back, her insides twisting in knots.
“I was eight when Matias found me.” Frizz’s voice cracked, soft and chalky with disuse.
Her heart clenched.
He glanced toward the house, but his gaze turned distant. “He pulled me out of a place just like this. My old man…” He cleared his throat, his inflection gentle and distinctly American. “My father used to sell me to men like those in there. The men wanted to hear me cry and beg. When I wouldn’t do it, my father hurt me very badly.”
An ache pressed against the backs of her eyes and seared through her chest. She wanted to reach for him, hold his hand. Matias looked as if he wanted to do the same, but didn’t move, so she followed his lead.
“I like to sew my mouth.” Frizz licked his bottom lip. “So I won’t forget.”
“So you won’t forget…?” The lump in her throat burned painfully.
“I’ll never give them what they want.” He stared at his unmoving hands, fingers clenched around the needle. “They’ll never hear me beg, never force…themselves in my mouth again.”
She tried to keep the tears at bay, tried not to look at him with pity. All she could think about was an eight-year-old boy, abused and molested, living with a cartel and following the capo around while he slaughtered predators.
Maybe it was the best form of therapy. Hadn’t she done the same thing?
“What happened to your father?” She had a damn good guess.
“Matias castrated him.” Frizz smiled. “And cut out his tongue. He removed other organs, too. Then he killed the bastard.”
Her stomach curdled. “Is there anything left of the man in the room you were in?” she asked Matias, nodding at the house.
“Pieces.” Matias looked over at her and shrugged. “I have a really sharp knife.”
“Good.” She lay her head on his shoulder. “Did the little girl…did she watch that?”
“I sent her to the closet the second I charged in.” He tensed, relaxed. “Those girls will be removed without witnessing the gore.”