Chapter 33 Mateo
MATEO
*Pop* ?The bubble I had made with my gum echo-ed loudly and awkwardly through the empty tech lab.
“You can go,” Taylor said flatly, and I smirked at her show of loyalty to Ronan.
“Nah babe, you said you weren’t done. Plus, Zerkos practically told you to brief me in his stead, didn’t you hear him?” I shot her my dimpliest half-smile and shook the hair out of my eyes as I folded my arms behind my head.
I threw my feet in the chair in front of me and settled in for the rest of this story.
I knew my Sunshine was hiding something big, but hot damn, I wasn’t expecting cártel big.
Knowing she was mixed up in something so fucking dangerous, even though I wasn’t quite sure how, somehow made her even hotter.
I wondered what my shrink would have to say about that one. I made a mental note to call Barb in the morning and bring this up. She loved when I got all self-aware on her.
“No, I didn’t, babe,” she shoved my feet off the chair as she barged through my legs, nearly knocking me off the chair with her sheer strength reminding me that she probably got more pussy than I did. At least these days that was true.
There was only one that I was interested in.
“Finish it,” my tone became harsher, and her expression morphed from one of annoyance to one of fear. I didn’t care if people thought Zerkos was the leader, but I refused to let anyone treat me otherwise, least of all Taylor Constance.
Sure, I had a broken mind, but Ronan was a lost little kid who got thrown into a war with a broken heart and Taylor had no sense of self-worth from spending the majority of her life in the closet, too afraid to be herself.
But the three of us looked out for each other, and never once did I let them down in all of our time together.
She knew better than to withhold from me.
“Well, wipe that smug look from your face, cuz we’re getting to the bad shit. I’m gonna hop over the crap you don’t care about because I know you. You don’t give a damn about the technical details,” she said, pointing a remote to one of the screens, getting some financial records up.
“To make a very, very long story short, I dug up as much as I could on Rafael, finding some ghost identities that tied to some bank accounts, one of those bank accounts led me to this warehouse.” The remote clicked and she pulled up an aerial view of a warehouse from a satellite.
“It’s just a packaging and processing plant for some popular Mexican candy Paleta Payaso. It’s a clown on a stick in case you’re wondering. I googled it,” she turned on the image on the largest screen for me to see the chocolate-covered clown face on a popsicle stick.
“Obviously, that’s not all they’re doing in there, so naturally I hacked my way into The Lacrosse.
” I twisted my face in confusion, letting her know I didn’t have a clue what some indigenous sport had to do with this, “It’s a satellite that’s powerful enough to see some underground areas.
I was in there for a total of sixty-three seconds before they booted my ass out and we almost risked the FBI dropping down our roof next.
” I shot her another look, shocked that she had the audacity to make jokes.
“Ok, too soon, I know. I’m using dark humor to cope, don’t kill me.” She raised her hands in the air defensively, and I was starting to understand why Ronan went all berserk and left before she got the point.
She’d been cooped up in here, way too long, and the info dump was just falling out of her mouth like rapid fire at this point.
Note to self; Taylor needs a vacation.
“What’d you find?” I tried to steer back on track while her attention deficit riddled brain went everywhere but where it needed to.
“Listen, I’m pretty scared of what I’ve found, if this family has the heavy hitting power they do, I don’t want to be on their shit list. But I’ll tell you what I didn’t find.
I didn’t find an entire underground network system full of intricate tunnels leading all over Mexico as well as through the border.
I didn’t find dungeons upon dungeons full of drugs, money, weapons and holding cells.
I most definitely did not find a video of Mr. Flores torturing a little girl.
” Her voice wavered with her words as the seriousness of the situation began to settle in.
“What the fuck did you say?” I asked her because it sounded like she said this Cártel family was torturing children.
“I was able to hack into the mainframe of the security system for one of their dungeons. I don’t know what the deal with it is, but it’s like the whole thing is completely unmanned.
The live feeds show it’s just sitting there abandoned, or maybe locked up since the dude is dead now, but no one is there.
There’s no way anyone is there, they would have booted me and shut down the whole thing within a minute of me forcing my way into their system.
The fact I was able to spend hours trudging through their surveillance history let me know that place was a dead zone.
But when I went digging through the server?
I found all sorts of hell in there. I watched maybe five or six seconds of it before I stopped and told Ronan to come down here, no one has seen it yet.
” She opened up the file and clicked on one of the many surveillance videos named after a random series of numbers.
CF113 came on, and right away I recognized her.
She was so young–maybe thirteen at best– but I knew that dark hair and the “eat shit” look in her eyes that she gave to anyone who wasn’t serving her every whim.
She was hanging by the wrists in iron shackles that were fastened to the dungeon’s stone wall. Her toes didn’t touch the ground, letting me know her little body was probably in excruciating pain from the positioning.
The man, the same one from the previous photos, stood across from her.
He was decades older in the videos, but I could see clearly now that it was him, Rafael Flores.
I feared for the young version of Cecilia, and I fiercely needed to know what she could have possibly done to earn herself a place as a prisoner to the Cártel when she was just a little girl.
I was losing my calm, anger was taking over me as the man walked closer to her and he reached out his hand like he was waiting for someone to place an object in it.
That was when I noticed they weren’t alone in that dungeon.
No, resting against the wall, looking calm and with a “no fucks given” attitude, was none other than Cézar fucking Villalobos.
He grabbed a cattle prod from a wall laced with weapons and handed it over to Flores who didn't hesitate a second before pressing it against Cecilia over and over again until urine dripped down her legs freely.
Watching her tiny body shake from the electric current running through her, wave after wave with no pause forced bile to the back of my throat.
The high-pitched whining in my head threatened to explode alongside my rage. I looked into the face of the motherfucker in disbelief. I had risked plenty of my own men’s safety just days ago by abandoning the high-rise and helping him on his renegade motorcycle club mission.
The thing’s I did to that girl.
Cézar’s words repeated in my brain, and I nearly broke my teeth from clenching my jaw so tightly.
I had thought he was implying something sexual happened between them, I thought he was trying to get under Ronan’s skin.
But there he was, leaving a permanent mark in her mind and her spirit that I could now see clear as day for what it truly was.
Emptiness.
Nobody that had been meant to care for her had ever given this girl a morsel of love, affection, or security. And while I knew how that could feel, I didn’t know it on the level that I was seeing here.
Taylor grabbed a nearby trashcan and heaved loudly into it, apparently not lying when she said she only watched five seconds of footage. She wiped the tears from her eyes as her gaze met mine and she tried to play off like this wasn’t fucking her up to watch, but I knew better.
This was as dark as it got, a world where kids couldn’t get to be kids was hell incarnate. Unfortunately, I had already seen hell, and it had only numbed me enough to come back here to suffer the rest of my bullshit reality.
My stomach churned when Cézar released her from her shackles and she immediately slammed her knees into his balls. A glimmer of hope surged through me as he collapsed in pain, but my gut sank once the head of the Flores family plunged his fist deep into her belly, throwing her against the wall.
Cézar took a seat on her chest as she collapsed to the ground under his weight, his legs pinning both her arms down while she shook her head side to side violently without ever screaming a single plea to stop.
Almost as if she knew what was coming, she took a big breath before Cézar threw a piece of fabric over her face and Rafael Flores began to slowly pour a large container of water over it.
“Fuck,” I mumbled, my stomach feeling queasy watching a thirteen-year-old little girl getting water boarded in a torture dungeon.
“Turn that shit off, that’s a fucking kid,” Taylor reprimanded me as if I was enjoying watching this any more than she was.
“It’s not just a kid Taylor. It’s her. Cecilia,” I explained.
“Oh…Shit!” She said, her eyes widened with realization, and she took a seat again as if this was now the most important assignment she had ever been given.
“Turn up the volume, he’s saying something.” I instructed her, not being able to make out what this Devil in disguise of a man was saying.
Cézar had thrown a few more punches at her until she stopped coming back up, and she sat there, beaten, broken, and abused. As she looked into the man’s face, Taylor adjusted the sound so we could listen.
“Can you translate?” I asked her and she nodded her head.