"Should I tell my wife how you like to sell children into sexual slavery?" Rafael asked, tearing down the doubt I had regarding my involvement in his crime. "How you like to have your men impregnate women so you can tear the babies from their arms while they scream?" I reached down to touch my stomach, my fingers curling into the soft flesh. To the child that would be inevitable given Rafe's determination to get me pregnant. To think of someone taking that away from me was unimaginable, even if I hadn't thought I wanted children.
I'd kill anyone who tried.
Rafael turned back to me, something dancing behind his eyes that I was certain I wouldn't come to enjoy. "Show me your darkness,mi reina," he murmured, echoing the words he'd given me when he gave me the chance to take my freedom back. The chance to stab him in the heart and walk away from the life of death and destruction he offered me. He came to stand behind me. His blood-soaked hands stretched around me, wrapping me in his embrace as he lifted my hand to wrap around the hilt of the knife.
With my breath caught in my lungs, Rafael's blood from the barbed wire covered my skin. He lifted my other hand, wrapping it around the hilt and covering me with his massive grip. The man hanging in front of me eyed the knife, dragging his eyes up to look at me as he barked out a sharp laugh. "You let yourcuntof a wife do your wet work now,El Diablo?" he asked, wheezing as he tried to breathe through the pain of near dismemberment. His stomach sagged as if the skin was only one cut away from splitting in two.
I shook my head as Rafe took the first step forward, bringing me closer and closer to the man he wanted me to kill. "I'm not you," I whispered.
"You're right," Rafael murmured in my ear as we came to a stop. One of his men who had been lurking at the door to the shed positioned a metal chair beneath Maxim's body as Rafe nodded, another working to lower the restraints until he dropped into the chair with a thud. With him sitting in the chair in front of me, Rafael shuffled me forward a few more steps as Joaquin stepped up behind Maxim's chair and drew his arms up over his head. Restraining him while Rafe guided my hands to line the blade up to the left of Maxim's chest and parallel to the ground. "You're my Queen."
He helped me slide the knife forward slowly, the tip popping through the resistance of his skin as Maxim groaned. A vision of Rafael's eyes stared back at me, framed in a little girl's round face as I thought about all the children he'd torn from their mothers. My hands slid forward slowly, sinking through flesh as Maxim gaped up at me in shock and held my gaze. I hit bone, his rib blocking the way as Rafael shifted me lower and helped me glide between his ribs.
Maxim's eyes went slack as I drove forward, slowly puncturing his heart with the knife. I watched as the life bled from his eyes, his head dropping forward as his final breath wheezed out of his lungs.
I dropped my grip on the handle, stumbling back into Rafe's body as he drew me into his arms and held my head against his chest. "There'smi reina," he murmured softly, swaying back and forth with me in his grip as I gripped his shirt in my blood-soaked hands and wept.
For the girl I'd been. For the girl who would never exist again.
El Diablohad been reborn in flames.Mi Reinahad been reborn in water.
But our love was born in blood.