Chapter 11

LEO

My phone began to buzz in my pocket. When I pulled it out, it displayed an unknown number on the screen.

“Who’s calling?” Luca, who was driving the car while I sat in the passenger seat, asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied, swiping to answer.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Hello, Leonardo,” a deep voice said after a few rings. “It’s Andrea Martinez.”

I instantly gestured for Luca to stop the car and sat up straight.

“I don’t doubt that you have heard of me, so I won’t bother explaining who I am in the same way you don’t need to explain who you are.

“How brilliant it is to finally get the chance to speak to you, the most famous alpha in the world,” he continued.

“Cut the shit.” I growled. “Where is my mate?”

“Ooh, a temper just like your luna.” He laughed. “And I’m here with her right now in fact. You see, I know about your little phone call earlier, and I’m pissed—”

“What have you done to her?” I said, beginning to feel the blood inside me boil.

“It isn’t what I’ve done that should worry you but what I’m about to do. She’s caused me a lot of trouble, and now she has to pay,” Martinez replied. “So, I’m going to fuck her, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

I clenched my fist around my phone. I just about managed to stop myself from crushing it right there and then, but I shook with fury all the same. Never had I felt so much anger toward another singular person.

I heard a muffled cry come from Ella. The pain and desperation in her voice was real and something you rarely heard from Ella Jones.

“You know who I am, Martinez—”

“I am well aware,” he replied. “Leonardo Loren. The most ruthlessly terrifying man to ever live.”

“Then you’ll be well aware of what I do to people that do things that anger me,” Leo said. “And touching my luna is top of that list.”

“You’ve got nothing on me, Loren. Even if you do find me, you’re alone, outnumbered, and we have guns,” he said in an amused tone. “And relax, I’ll ensure that she has fun. After all, it is the last thing she’ll do before death.”

I then heard the ripping of clothing.

“Get your hands off my mate,” I ordered.

“I know you’re not used to being disobeyed, but on this occasion, you’re just going to have to deal with it. I don’t answer to you, Loren.”

“Leo, please go,” Ella said. “I don’t want you to hear this.”

“No,” I stated. “Fifty thousand dollars and you stop immediately.”

“You’re going to have to go a bit higher than that, Alpha. I own a drug cartel, fifty thousand is but a drop in an ocean,” Martinez scoffed.

“One hundred thousand.”

“One fifty and I let you say goodbye,” Andrea said.

“Three hundred and you don’t touch, kill, or hurt her, and you give her back to me,” I said.

“Your mate is worth far more than that in the sex-trafficking business,” he said. “She’s very pretty, by the way.”

“How much do you fucking want?” I growled.

“How about... if you meet me in Hermosillo with six hundred in cash tomorrow afternoon? I will ensure that she is delivered back to you alive. For an extra two hundred thousand, you can have her untouched,” he replied.

I glanced at Luca. He was looking incredibly concerned because he knew, as well as I did, that getting eight hundred thousand dollars in cash in less than twenty-four hours was going to be a huge problem.

“Yes or no, Loren? It is my final offer,” he said.

“Deal,” I replied finally. “Eight hundred thousand dollars.”

What choice did I have? I couldn’t let him hurt Ella, and if nothing else, it bought us time.

“Two o’clock. Don’t be late,” Andrea said, before hanging up.

“Alpha—” Luca began.

“I don’t know,” I interrupted, saving him from even asking the question. “I have the money, but getting it here and in cash is almost impossible.”

I put my head in my hands, taking deep breaths to try to calm down and clear my mind to think logically about this.

“Do we even know that we can trust him to keep his word?” he asked.

“We need a plan. And fast,” I replied.

There were a few moments of silence before I spoke again.

“I know a few packs down here,” I said. “They’ve been fighting with Martinez’s cartel for years. We should contact the alphas. They might have some idea about where we should even start and, if nothing else, lend us the money.”

“Good idea,” Luca agreed.

ELLA

“There is no way he’ll get eight hundred thousand in cash in less than twenty-four hours,” Andrea said to me an hour later.

He’d tied me to a chair and had been sitting a few meters opposite with his feet up on the table, staring at me relentlessly.

“Don’t underestimate him,” I warned.

Andrea let out a short laugh. “You’ve got girlfriend goggles on. He’s not all you think he is, sweetheart.”

“You don’t know him,” I spat.

“True, but I know what I’ve heard. And did he really kill your brother?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

I paused for a moment and swallowed. “Yes.”

“Oooh!” he exclaimed, taking his feet off the table and sitting forward with a tantalizing expression. “Awkward!”

“Must you torment me?” I asked wearily.

I was just about through the pain of Connor’s death. The last thing I needed was for a psychotic Mexican drug dealer to drag it back up and smear it all over my face.

“I agreed not to touch you. Nobody said anything about emotional torture,” he replied. “Now tell me, when, where, how, and why?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I said.

“Do you have a choice?” he asked, picking up the gun. “Don’t think that I won’t shoot you because I don’t always keep my promises. So, let me break it down for you, when?”

“Just over a week ago,” I said quietly.

“Oooh, nice and fresh and double awkward. How?” Andrea replied as if this was the best entertainment he’d had all year.

I looked down trying not to remember the image of my brother’s death.

“Please stop—” I began.

“Uh, uh, Blanca,” he said, waggling the gun at me. “You don’t get to choose what we talk about. Now tell me, how did your mate kill your brother?”

“He snapped his neck,” I replied.

“Ehh, boring and lacking creativity,” Andrea articulated. “If it were me, I would have made a game out of it…or a show at the very least,” he added with a sadistic grin.

“Of course, the end result is the same, but why not have some fun out of it? Did you know that I have a lion?”

~The guy is fucking insane. I’m in the company of an absolute nutcase.~

And a nutcase that sure knew how to pick at a person’s weakness.

“Why did he do it?” he asked. “Why would he bring such grief and sadness upon his own mate? Is it that he is no better than me? A cruel, ruthless creature?”

“He isn’t cruel nor ruthless but vindictive, impulsive, and protective over his pack. He and my brother never got along, and there was conflict between them since day one.”

“Why’s that?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but our families have a history of not getting along. Leonardo’s father had mine exiled, and when he gave his alphaship to his son, he tried, unsuccessfully, to kill my father,” I explained.

“So not only did your mate kill your brother, but he tried to kill your father too?”

“That was six years before we even knew we were mates,” I replied.

“Even still, how can you forgive him for that?” Andrea said. “And for your brother. That was only a week ago.”

I stayed quiet.

“And what ticked him over? What made him finally do the deed after all these years?”

“My brother had me kidnapped and then used as bait to start a war against his pack,” I stated matter-of-factly.

“I heard about a war involving the oh-so-famous Stella Pack, but I didn’t really care enough to find out the details, but wow! Your brother waged war against your mate? I’m not surprised he killed him.

“I would have done the same…in a much less painless way of course, but we don’t need to get into that again,” Andrea said.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and tried to settle my murderous thoughts.

“You poor baby. Constantly caught up in all this war and violence. I heard the alpha of what was once the Ayas Pack kidnapped you and held you hostage too, yes?”

“That was years ago,” I mumbled.

“And what about your encounter with the Italian Mafia?” he asked. “I wonder how much they’d pay for Luna Ella Loren…”

“How do you know so much about me?” I asked.

“I like to know a little about my enemies, and your alpha is pretty high up the list,” he said.

“I asked you how not why,” I replied, fighting at the ropes around my wrists once again.

Andrea lifted his arm and pulled the trigger on the gun. The bullet streaked past me and hit the box I was leaned against just a few inches from my head.

“Stop trying to escape,” he hissed. “It is futile and boring to watch.”

I sat wide-eyed, absolutely unable to move. Now I knew he wasn’t fucking around at least.

“Anyway, back to your life. So, you have eight kids: five boys, three girls. Eldest, Cato Leonardo Loren, is only seven years old, then the rest of their names and ages escape me.

“The heir is the only one really on my radar,” Andrea said as if he hadn’t just almost shot me in the head. “How does it feel to be the mother of the most wanted seven-year-old in the world?”

“I haven’t really had the chance to be his mother recently, so I wouldn’t know,” I replied quietly.

“Well, if Leonardo turns up with eight hundred thousand dollars in the next…,” he began, looking at his watch, “twenty-one and a half hours, you can go home. I highly doubt he will, though. Getting that much in cash in such a short amount of time would be a struggle for me, and I’m the owner of a drug cartel that deals purely with cash.”

“What does a nineteen-year-old do with eight hundred thousand anyway?”

“Well…firstly, I will employ some new guards,” he said, looking at the blood smears on the floor.

“Then I will get a new exporter; then I will pay the best hunters in Mexico to find your cousin, Romano or Luca or whatever his name is, and kill him,” he continued.

“After I have finished up clearing the mess you have made in less than a week, I will buy some better hand soap for that bathroom; a new shirt without blood stains.

“Perhaps a few prostitutes, maybe give Pedro a pay rise, a trip to Seattle, I hear it is very nice there and especially in the mountains and forest a few hours from the city.

“Then I might dig a tunnel from Mexico to America so that my exporters don’t have to fuck around hiding bodies of dead border control. Might also buy some fertile land in the south and find some men to grow my own wolfsbane.

“José’s is good value, and it works, but he comes with a lot of baggage, and I’m sick of dealing with it for him.”

“What sort of baggage?”

“I spend half my time killing his enemies. He has acquired a lot over his time in this business and isn’t strong enough to fight them alone,” he replied, leaning back and putting his feet on the table again.

“Would you not rather spend your money on a house? This warehouse isn’t particularly cozy and homelike,” I replied, looking at the gray corrugated ceiling, cobwebs, and stacks of boxes.

“I have a house, and we were going to spend the night in there, but then you used my sixty cents to call your alpha so…,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “You would have loved the hot tub. I can imagine it now.

“You in a bikini…no, forget the bikini…just you and me. Oh, how you would have moaned. I live alone, miles from another house. We could have had amazing sex and been as loud as we liked.

“I bet you don’t get to do that with your eight kids. To scream with pleasure. Embrace the sensation. It could have been the best experience of your life, but no…you went and blew it for us both.”

I shuddered, officially grossed out.

“That would never have happened,” I snapped. “I have a mate, and I hate you.”

“Well true…but pleasure is pleasure, sweetheart. I could pin you against these hard metal walls and pound you for ten minutes straight, but you’d still cum.”

Again, gross.

“You have high opinions of yourself,” I replied. “And are you accustomed to the word ‘consent’?”

“You may not have realized it yet, but I am not a good man, Blanca. I’ll do what I want regardless of anything else.”

“Why?” I asked.

He looked confused. “What do you mean why?”

“How can you just do things without even thinking about how it affects others?”

“Because I don’t give a shit about anyone else unless they are useful to me, or they have some kind of value. Not caring makes life so much easier, Blanca. You should try it sometimes.

“Look at what mess your feelings have got you into,” he said, looking around at the warehouse.

His lips then slowly curled into a smile, and I snapped my eyes away from him, refusing to give him the satisfaction of my attention.

A few seconds later, the door to the warehouse opened.

“José, mi hermano!” Andrea exclaimed, getting to his feet. “It’s been so long!”

“You owe me five thousand dollars,” José said bluntly without even a smile, clearly not becoming a victim of his false hospitality. “I want it.”

“Ah yes,” Andrea said. “I will find that for you now.”

“Gracias,” José replied with a nod.

Andrea walked to the door, and José began to follow him, but his eyes then shifted down to me, and he hesitated.

“I thought she was your little errand girl?” he asked, looking at the bruises on my face and then the ropes around my wrists.

“She was,” Andrea replied. “But then she decided to be a bitch and lie to me.”

“About what?” José asked.

I looked up at him, confused as to why he was showing so much interest and also because I had yet to figure out how I recognized him.

“About who she really is,” Andrea told him.

“And that would be?”

“Alpha Loren’s Luna.”

Of course, José already knew that for whatever reason unbeknownst to me.

“In fact, just watch her while I get the money,” Andrea said. “I can’t risk her slipping out of my grasp.”

José nodded, and Andrea left.

“So, he found out,” he said after a few seconds of silence.

“Yeah…”

“Surprised he hasn’t killed you yet.”

I let out a stifled laugh. “He’s having too much fun.”

“As evil as ever I see,” he replied. “You’ve really got yourself in a situation, haven’t you?”

“If my mate brings eight hundred thousand dollars in cash to Hermosillo by two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, he’ll let me go.”

“Do you think he can?” he asked.

I looked up, expecting a sadistic expression or at least a bit amused by my misery, but instead, he seemed genuinely concerned.

For a split second anyway, before he blinked and switched back to the same stony look he had had in my previous encounter with him.

I shrugged. “He certainly has eight hundred thousand dollars, but since this is 2019, he doesn’t store it in cash, and even if he did, it would still be two thousand miles away. So I don’t know. I’m not getting my hopes up.”

“Well, I wish you the best of luck,” he said with a nod before the warehouse returned to silence.

“Since I’m going to die, you might as well tell me how I recognize you and how you knew my name,” I said a few moments later.

The longer I stared at his familiar face, the more my curiosity ate me up inside.

“I knew your father,” he said. “He was a drug addict. I was his dealer, and over the years, we became good friends. When your mate tried to kill him, and he had to disappear, he made me promise to watch over his family.

“Obviously, I didn’t do a very good job because his mate ended up living a destitute rogue, one child is dead, and the other is screwing and has eight children with the very man that tried to kill him.”

Just like finally remembering what that important thing you went upstairs to do after ten minutes of racking your brain, the memories flooded back to me in all the satisfying glory.

It may have been years ago, but I can picture him visiting my dad in our home when I was little, and I believe he may have even babysat Connor and me a couple of times while our parents were out.

He stood out like a sore thumb with his thick accent and Hispanic appearance. How could I forget him?

“I remember you, but you didn’t go by the name José back then, did you?” I asked. “Michael, was it?”

“Yes, well, I used my white middle name when I was living and dealing in the US. Your country is super racist, by the way,” he replied.

“If you made a promise to my dad, why aren’t you keeping it?” I asked.

“I gave up long ago trying to help a family so resolute on self-destruct. And when I made that promise, you were a kid. I’m not going to suddenly start risking my life and job for you now.

“You aren’t my responsibility, and I have no interest in helping you.”

“You know,” I began. “Andrea just told me that he’s planning on buying fertile lands in the south to grow his own wolfbane. He says you come with too much baggage.

“If you ask me, that sounds like you’re gonna lose them both anyway.”

José’s eyes flickered, and he stepped forward.

“He said that?”

I nodded.

“But if you helped me, I can assure you that you are rewarded so well that it doesn’t matter.”

José looked down at me and narrowed his eyes. He was obviously considering it, and the glimmer of hope it gave me made my heart jump. Before he could respond, the lock on the warehouse door clicked.

“All you have to do is find my mate and tell him where I am, and he will do the rest,” I whispered seconds before Andrea reappeared.

“Does the girl amuse you?” he asked as he handed José a large duffle bag.

“Yes. Very much so,” José said, before finally looking away from me. “Thank you,” he said to Andrea through gritted teeth before leaving the warehouse quickly.