Page 1 of The Red Queen

Prologue

Desiree Garza looked down at the body of her lover. The man she had been with since she was ten years old. He was unrecognizable, but she knew it was him. Couldn’t be anyone else. His custom-made rhinestone encrusted cowboy boots were still on what was left of his feet. Even the spurs were intact. As though his killer knew the boots were his signature and put them back on the body after they finished butchering him.

She dropped to her knees next to his broken corpse, reaching for him. Then she stopped. There was nothing much left to touch. It was all dried blood, broken bones, and carnage. Instead, she lifted her hand to her mouth, covering it, and moaned, her eyes moving from Nico’s body to the house. Not a house anymore. A shell that used to be her home.

The same as her love.

Mateo Gutierrez had burned it to the ground, then dumped Nico’s body in the ashes on the doorstep and walked away. The surrounding area was littered with the bodies of their cartel. Mateo had decimated the organization, razing it to the ground. She had been out of the country inspecting their shipment operations overseas, or she would also be dead. Mateo was probably hunting her at that very moment.

He’d been hunting them for two years. Since their failed strike against the Sotza organization. If they’d succeeded, then Nico would still be here, and they would now have operations in Venezuela and Mexico.

Nico had been bitter after their failure. He’d felt humiliated and had taken his rage out on Desi. She didn’t care. She was used to it, even expected it, and sometimes liked it. She wore her bruises proudly, as a sign of her resilience.

From the day Nico had walked into her mother’s home and taken her away at the age of ten, he’d beaten her. At first, she’d hated him for it, had even tried to fight back. He’d laughed and beat her even harder. Later, when he deemed her old enough, he’d included sex in the beatings.

After a few years of using her as his personal sex slave, he’d seen her potential as more than a release for his frustrations. He’d started teaching her self-defense, which had morphed into teaching her offensive moves, then weapons. When she was nineteen, he taught her the ins and outs of his cartel business. Then, a few years later, gifted her with the position of his second-in-command.

Her loyalty was unquestionable. He’d ensured it by beating it into her, then healing her and giving her everything her heart could desire. She wasn’t stupid. She knew she loved him because he put himself in the position of being the only person she could depend on.

He’d twisted her into his own personal devil, and she didn’t care. It was the only life she knew.

She stood, took one last look at her home of twenty-five years, her dead lover, and then turned and walked away. Charred wood crunched beneath her boots and ash flew up into the air as she walked, swirling around her and clinging to her hair.

She climbed into her jeep, a gift from Nico for her thirtieth birthday, turned the key, and left. Soon she would return, and when she did, she would have the resources to rebuild the Garza cartel from the ground up. She would wipe out her enemies and create new alliances. Powerful alliances.

Her life was her own for the first time, and she was going to enjoy it.

Chapter One

Six Months Later

He cut her finger off.

Mateo cut her fucking finger off.

God, it hurt. It’d been everything she could do not to scream when he’d done it. She’d wanted to show him she could handle his gruesome brand of torture. But fuck, the pain was unbearable. She wished she could pass out, but Nico had forced her to become resilient. Years of beatings meant she could withstand almost any pain.

On top of the severed finger, she was also suffering from two gunshot wounds, one in the shoulder and one in the fleshy part of her thigh. Possibly a concussion too. She’d hit her head hard while fighting with Mateo’s fiancé.

She was bound to a chair, her neck strapped in place. She couldn’t check on her wounds or stem the flow of blood she felt dripping from her hand to the concrete floor.

Her vision was blurry, so she almost missed the man as he walked into her cell. She blinked rapidly, trying to bring him into focus. He was a stranger.

She’d been waiting for Mateo to come back and finish her.

“What do you… want?” she demanded, silently cursing a voice gone tremulous from pain.

Instead of answering, he stopped behind her.

She tried to turn her head, to follow him with her eyes. She didn’t trust him. He was friends with Mateo and Raina, her targets. She’d seen him around the mansion, but had ignored him, as he wasn’t the one she was interested in. He looked relatively unscathed for living through the bomb blasts she’d set off in the house and on the grounds.

She felt his fingers on the back of her neck, then the strap holding her head in place released. She swiveled her head, glaring at him, intent on biting him if he made the mistake of getting too close.

He didn’t.

She could see him now though, and up close he was far more intimidating than he’d been at a distance when she was surveilling the house. He wasn’t overtly powerful like Nico had been. This man was tall and slim with an air of deadly ruthlessness about him. His brown eyes were chips of granite, while the lines of his face were implacable. His lips were thin and cruel, his nose an arrogant blade, hawk-like. He had dark grey hair, curly, long enough to touch the collar of his shirt.

He wore a white untucked dress shirt, now stained and ripped, probably from the bomb blasts. It was also wet, making his chest and arms visible through the thin fabric. Lean, wiry muscles roped his arms, and his belly was as solid as a man thirty years younger.

---