Prologue #5
Her voice didn’t waver or crack. “By ordering me to strike her a hundred times in the face, you are asking me to kill my own colleague. You’re making me responsible for her death.
” She met his gaze without blinking. “I doubt even you could take half that many full-force blows to the face without losing consciousness—let alone survive them.”
I stared at her, stunned—not by fear, but by the steel in her tone. The clarity. The refusal to be broken easily.
For the first time, Chapo’s expression darkened.
“If I were you,” he said softly, “I would speak to Alonso Chapo with more respect.”
He reached into the pocket of his jalabiya and produced a small remote control.
My pulse spiked.
He pressed a button.
A large flatscreen mounted on the wall flickered to life.
The image was steady. Clear.
An elderly woman lay in a hospital bed, frail and small beneath thin sheets. Tubes ran into her arms. An oxygen mask covered most of her face. Monitors beeped softly beside her, green lines pulsing with fragile rhythm.
A sign on the wall behind her read:
ST. MARY’S MEDICAL CENTER – LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
My stomach turned to ice.
A man in scrubs stood beside the bed, one hand resting lightly on the oxygen tube. He looked directly into the camera.
“Should I remove it, boss?” the doctor asked calmly, his voice tinny through the speakers.
The room went dead silent.
Elena went rigid, like a wire pulled too tight.
“Don’t you dare touch her.”
Her voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It carried the kind of terror that comes from knowing exactly how much there is to lose.
Chapo’s smile widened, stretching into something openly predatory.
On the screen, the doctor’s fingers moved with deliberate slowness. He peeled the oxygen mask away.
The effect was immediate.
The old woman—Elena’s grandmother, her only family left in the world—jerked weakly against the sheets. Her chest hitched, ribs straining visibly beneath thin skin. She sucked in air that never seemed to reach her lungs. The sound that came from her throat wasn’t breathing. It was drowning.
Wet, rattling coughs echoed through the speakers.
Blood flecked her lips.
Elena made a broken sound somewhere between a gasp and a sob.
“No—no, please—” Her knees buckled, and she staggered forward a step, eyes glued to the screen. “She’s all I have,” she whispered, the words barely audible. She looked at me, desperation naked and raw, then at Amy—
Amy still wouldn’t lift her head.
Shame wrapped around her like chains.
“Please,” Elena begged, turning back to Chapo. Tears spilled freely now, streaking down her cheeks. “Put it back. I’ll do anything. Anything you want.”
On screen, the coughing worsened. The woman’s mouth opened in a silent scream as her face darkened, lips turning blue. Her hands twitched weakly against the sheets.
Elena screamed.
“Please!” She lurched toward the screen as if she could reach through it, fingers clawing at empty air. “I’ll do it! I swear to you, I’ll do it—just put it back!”
The doctor hesitated, eyes flicking sideways toward the camera.
Elena collapsed.
She dropped to her knees hard enough to bruise, sobbing violently, forehead nearly touching the floor. “Please,” she whispered, over and over. “Please... I’ll do what you want. Just don’t let her die.”
Chapo raised two fingers.
On the screen, the doctor immediately replaced the mask.
The old woman sucked in air in a desperate, shuddering rush. Her body sagged back into the mattress, limp, eyes fluttering as color slowly returned to her skin. The monitors steadied—but barely.
She looked unconscious now. Or close to it.
Elena stayed on the floor, shoulders shaking, breath coming in ragged sobs.
“I do not make empty threats, Miss Vasquez,” Chapo said softly, almost gently.
“You have three seconds to begin.” His eyes sharpened.
“And do not comfort yourself with the thought that once your grandmother is gone, I will lose leverage. You will still belong to me. I can do far worse than kill an old woman.”
Elena pushed herself up slowly.
Her face was hollow. Empty. Something essential had cracked and drained away.
She turned toward Amy.
Her hands trembled violently at her sides as she took one step. Then another.
Amy finally lifted her head.
Their eyes met.
There was no anger there. No accusation.
Just understanding.
The first punch landed with a sickening crack against Amy’s cheek.
Her head snapped sideways, blood spraying across the concrete.
“Amy, I’m so sorry,” Elena choked, even as her fist drew back again.
“Amy!” I roared, throwing my weight forward, zip ties biting deep into my wrists. I felt skin tear. Warm blood ran down my forearms. “Elena, stop! That’s an order!”
She didn’t hear me.
Her eyes were glassy now, unfocused—trapped in a looping nightmare of a hospital bed, a blue face, a mask being torn away.
The second punch split Amy’s lip wide open.
The third crushed into her eye socket, swelling it shut almost instantly.
I screamed until my throat burned raw. “Elena! Stand down! That’s an order—stand down!”
She didn’t stop.
Each blow snapped Amy’s head back and forth, ropes creaking under the strain. Blood poured freely now—from her nose, her mouth—spattering her chest, dripping to the floor. Her movements slowed. Then weakened.
Then stopped.
Still Elena swung.
Amy’s body went slack, head slumping forward, held upright only by the ropes cutting into her wrists. Blood streamed down her face in dark rivulets. I couldn’t see her eyes anymore. I couldn’t tell if her chest was rising.
“Stop!” I bellowed, voice breaking. “She’s down! She’s unconscious—stop!”
Elena kept going.
Her punches were mechanical now. Automatic. Like a machine that didn’t know how to shut itself off. Each strike was fueled by terror, by the image of her grandmother suffocating again and again.
One of Chapo’s men cleared his throat.
“Ninety-eight,” he began, voice flat.
“Ninety-nine.”
“One hundred.”
Elena didn’t stop.
“One hundred and one.”
“One hundred and two.”
The guards shifted uneasily, exchanging glances. This wasn’t what they’d expected. This wasn’t clean. This wasn’t controlled.
At one hundred and fifteen, two of them finally stepped in, grabbing Elena’s arms and hauling her backward.
She fought them at first—wild, feral—then collapsed between them, body folding in on itself. She stared at her fists, slick with blood, shaking uncontrollably as sobs tore out of her.
Amy hung motionless in the chair.
Silent.
Unmoving.
The room felt dead.
The only sounds were Elena’s broken crying and the faint, wet rattle of my own breathing as panic clawed up my throat.
The world ended in that basement.
It didn’t shatter all at once. It collapsed slowly, like a building whose supports had been cut one by one, leaving only the sound of something massive giving way.
Amy sat slumped in the metal chair ten feet away, her body still bound upright as if the ropes were pretending she was alive.
Her head lolled forward at an angle no neck should bend.
Blood slid from her chin in thick, uneven drops, striking the concrete with soft, obscene little taps—too quiet for something so final.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Her face was no longer a face. It was a ruin—swollen beyond recognition, skin split open in jagged lines, one eye completely lost beneath purple-black flesh.
Teeth glimmered through torn lips where a mouth used to be. The sister I had grown up with, who had laughed too loudly and lived too recklessly, who stole my boots when hers were wet and slept through gunfire like it was rain—
She was gone.
Beaten to death by the fists of someone I had once trusted with my life.
Elena.
The name curdled in my mouth, bitter and toxic.
I didn’t care that she had been coerced. I didn’t care that the oxygen keeping her grandmother alive—each fragile breath tethered to that tube—was being threatened with removal. I didn’t care that she had cried, that she had begged, that she had broken under the weight of it all.
She had kept swinging.
Long after Amy stopped fighting.
Long after her body went slack.
Long after any human being with a soul would have stopped.
One hundred and fifteen blows.
The guards had counted every one.
“No...” The sound that tore out of me didn’t feel like it came from my throat. It felt ripped straight from my chest, raw and animal. “Amy... no... no, no, no...”
My vision blurred, the room swimming as memory surged forward uninvited.
Her voice echoed in my skull—bright, teasing, alive.
You’ve been worried since the moment we got sent on this mission, she’d said that last night in the safe house, straddling the chair backward like she owned the place.
She’d smirked at me like death was an inside joke.
Yet we’ve lost so many, and I’m still here.
Honestly, Rus, it’s too late for me to die now.
She’d flicked her hair back carelessly, eyes glittering with confidence.
We’ve got the blueprint. Secret tunnel. No guards. We grab the bastard—alive or dead—drag his pieces home as proof, and I’m finally free of this shit.
She had been so certain.
So impossibly alive.
Now she was the first to fall.
I had watched men die before. Good men. Brave men. Friends who’d bled out in my arms or vanished in fireballs I still dreamed about. I’d made peace with the idea that this job would eventually take me. I was ready for that.
But not her.
Never her.
I was supposed to go first. I had sworn it—to myself, to whatever gods still listened—the day we shipped out. If death came for one of us, it would take me. That was the rule. That was the promise.
I failed.
Rage and grief collided inside my chest until I couldn’t separate them. It was all one burning mass, tearing me apart from the inside. And beneath it—hotter, sharper, more focused—was a fresh hatred that eclipsed everything else.
Our father.