Devastate (Deliver 4)

When she smiles, I feel a peace unlike anything I’ve felt in my life.

Van’s words hit him with soul-deep comprehension.

Lucia’s smile was his responsibility, his goal, his everything. Her life, her health, all of her was his to protect.

She didn’t belong to Matias or Badell or any other man. If anyone even thought to lay claim to her, he wouldn’t step aside. He wouldn’t back down. He would fucking fight for her with every breath in his body. She was his.

I love her.

Not the kind of love he’d flirted with before. What he felt for Camila paled in the dense, feral glow burning in his chest. This was deep, consuming, world-changing love. His past, present, and future, his entire existence took on new meaning.

His reason for everything was right here, in this room, dragging herself toward him. Her pain was his pain. Her tears, her happiness, her fate—all of it was his. Protecting her wasn’t an obligation. It was his purpose.

It was the most significant thing he could ever do.

In that moment, he knew he would endure anything to make sure she smiled again. He would kill, bleed, cry, break, and die for her. There was nothing, absolutely fucking nothing he wouldn’t do for her.

Fortitude built in his mind and girded his spine. It wasn’t just a willingness to fight for her. It was an insistence.

“You know why I’m here.” He leveled Badell with a look that encapsulated the depth of his conviction. “As for finding out what I’ll do for her, the answer is yes.”

“Yes?” Badell’s eyebrows rutted together.

“Get her and Van out of here. Give her the treatment, let them go, and my answer is yes to anything you want from me.”

Lucia burst into a sobbing wail and sped up her harrowing crawl.

“Fascinating.” Badell stepped out of her path, studying her as she closed the distance.

“Tate.” She collapsed beneath him and slid a trembling hand over his bare toes, along the arch of his foot, and curled cold fingers around his ankle beneath the jeans.

His eyes burned, and his heart rate skyrocketed. God how he wanted to cradle her against him and console her. He wanted to clutch her hair and press his face to hers and smell her and hold her and kiss her. His inability to do so filled him with such maddening anger he couldn’t form words over the scalding heave of his breaths.

Across the room, Van wore a bleak expression, but there was something else in his eyes. His strength and redemption was rooted in his love for his wife. He understood.

“The human spirit intrigues me.” Badell closed the blade on his finger and pocketed it. Then he leaned down and gripped Lucia’s hips, lifting her until she was eye-level with Tate. “Show me what you want, Lucia.”

Her hands immediately slid around Tate’s torso, and tears streaked her ashen cheeks as she tried to pull herself against him.

Badell adjusted his hold, hooking an arm across her stomach and giving her what she sought—contact, connection, togetherness.

Tate clutched the chains that suspended his arms and pressed toward her, chest to chest, breathing her in. Their lips met, and he fed her what they needed. Commitment and unity. Substance and meaning. Promise and love. His tongue rubbed against hers, dedicated, possessive, licking away the salt of her grief as everything inside him roared with desperation.

It was a kiss that would carry them through the night. A kiss that hoped for tomorrow. A kiss that would survive the end of time.

Too soon, Badell pulled her away and carried her back to Van.

“No! No, please!” She sobbed, thrashing her head and feebly wheeling her arms. “Let him go! Let him go! You can’t do this.”

She continued to cry as Badell positioned her on her side with her cheek on Van’s thigh, facing Tate. The placement was deliberate and cruel. He wanted her to watch.

“You think you love her.” He returned to Tate, his dark eyes gleaming with morbid curiosity. “I’m not convinced.”

“Do we have a deal?” He gritted his teeth.

“She’s a beautiful woman. And compassionate. If you’re into that kind of thing.”

“Give her the medicine, Badell.” He yanked at the chains, coughing against the agony in his ribs. “She needs it now!”

“I understand your urgency.” Badell cast her a passing glance. When he turned back, the indifference in his expression faded, replaced with impatience and a hint of anger. He sucked on his teeth, his voice dropping an octave. “Once I’m convinced of your feelings, when I fully understand the lengths you’ll go for her, I’ll give her the medicine. Then I’ll let her leave. I’ll set her free.”

Lucia screamed her protests, her words too hoarse to be discernible.

“How can I trust you?” His heart stammered, dying a thousand deaths.

“Lucia?” Badell called over his shoulder. “Have I ever broken a promise to you?”

“No,” she wept weakly, miserably.

“We should get started.” He removed the blade from his pocket and attached it to his finger. “She doesn’t have much time.”

CHAPTER 24

Tate memorized the delicate lines of Lucia’s face, the fall of glossy black hair around her tiny shoulders, and the love glistening in her deep brown eyes. He devoured her pain and beauty, anchored himself to it, to her, as hands grabbed him and spun him toward the wall.

The hands, as he’d learned when he was driven to the compound, belonged to Armando. Badell’s torturer. The man who raped Lucia just hours earlier.

While Armando adjusted the chains, Tate played out all the slow, agonizing ways the rapist would die. Didn’t matter the method. Blood would spill. More blood than that which coated the wall inches from his face.

Why was there a sheet of wood on this wall and not the others?

“The chains usually prevent movement.” Badell tested the links that ran from Tate’s wrist to the ceiling. “But you’re a big guy. Strong.”

His hand vanished from view, and his footsteps shifted behind Tate.

A featherlight scratch moved across his shoulder blade. Chills swept through him, stealing his breath.

It’s the razor. He knew it. His clenching muscles knew it, and he tried to relax, to convince himself to accept it. But dread turned his body into a shaking block of ice.

“Nooooo!” Lucia screamed just as shocking, fiery pain seared through his skin and muscle.

His head fell back as violence and fury roared from his throat. It was so excruciating his limbs convulsed and slammed him against the wall.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Breathe. It was just one cut. Just one. I’m better than this.

“See, if you buck like that, you’ll rip the chains from the ceiling,” Badell said at his ear. “I can’t have that.”

He was still heaving with blinding pain when Armando wrestled his forearm against the wood above his head. Blinking away the spots in his vision, he watched in horror as Armando stabbed an icepick through his arm and pinned him against the wood board.

The pain was unimaginable, shooting through him in shocking quakes of agony. His head hung on his shoulders, and his knees buckled, causing his weight to pull on the arm nailed to the wall. Nausea rose, and his vocal chords shredded. He tried to stifle his screams, but they were constant. Or maybe it was Lucia. Her anguish had become one with his own.

When I fully understand the lengths at which you’ll go for her, I’ll give her the medicine.

He needed to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. In and out. Stay alert. Focus. He was strong.

As his lungs found their pace, he planted his feet beneath him, lifting on toes to minimize the movement of the icepick through his arm.

“Why do you care if I love her?” he growled in a thick, guttural voice. “What do you gain from this?”

“Your loyalty to her intrigues me. I want to examine it. Challenge it.” Moving into his line of sight, Badell studied him with a pensive expression. “To truly understand the veracity of love, a man must be tes

ted. He must pay for it.”

What is the price you’re willing to pay?

Cole’s question repeated in his pain-addled mind, and he spat the words. “I’ll pay, you son of a bitch. Just name the price.”

“The price of love is devastation.”

“How the fuck would you know?”

A muscle bounced in Badell’s cheek. “I’ve paid it a thousand times over.”

The sick fuck wasn’t capable of love. Not that it mattered. He was lord and king here, Hell’s monarch in human flesh. There would be no mercy.

And so it began.

The blade sundered his flesh from neck to waist, striping, curving, digging, cutting. Cutting. Cutting. Hours of continual pain immersed him in a bottomless pit. He went into shock, but it didn’t numb the insufferable misery.

He kept his feet firmly beneath him and cheek pressed against the wood, staring at the metal handle protruding from his forearm. Every breath caused slight movement, shifting tendon and bone around that spike.