Breaking Point Read Online Free PDF

pair of handcuffs to the one with the tattoo, motioning with a jerk of his head toward the adobe shed.
    Words poured out of her. “Please let me go! I don’t know who you are or what you want, but my newspaper will pay ransom to get me back alive. Please call them! Mi periódico pagará dinero para mí—mucho dinero. ”
    But no one was listening to her.
    In a heartbeat, her wrists were cuffed, and she was being shoved and dragged across the courtyard toward the shed. One of them opened the door, and the man with the skeleton tattoo shoved her inside.
    It was a jail—or they’d turned it into a jail. Three cells that might once have been horse stalls lined the back wall. The stone floor was covered with mouse droppings, spiders clinging to webs along the edges of the low ceiling. Then something ran across the floor in front of her.
    A scorpion.
    Her empty stomach lurched.
    One of the men opened the first cell—a dark, windowless space, no bigger than the walk-in closet in her bedroom at home and hemmed in along the front by thick iron bars.
    Hush now! Have a good death, a peaceful death.
    “Please don’t put me in there! Please don’t!” Her heart pounded, panic buzzing in her brain. And as they closed the door behind her and left her in the pitch-black, she heard herself scream. “ No! ”
     
    IT WAS THE sound of her first strangled scream that had woken him. It had been the feral scream of a woman trying to survive. Then a moment later she’d spoken, her voice soft, young, feminine, her accent unmistakably New Orleans.
    Natalie Benoit was her name, and she was what the Zetas hated most after honest cops and soldiers—a journalist.
    Zach had found himself sitting upright, straining to hear while Zetas whose voices he didn’t recognize—newcomers—joked about raping her, clearly enjoying the rush of having her at their mercy, their laughter colored by lust. Rather than crying or begging for her life, she’d tried to bargain her way out of the situation. Either she had a lot of guts, or she hadn’t understood a word they’d said. Given how poorly she spoke Spanish, he was willing to bet it was the latter.
    Then one of the bastards had struck her—hard from the sound of it—and two of the men had begun to argue.
    “ ¡La putita me rompió la nariz! ” The little whore broke my nose!
    Zach had found that remarkable. Good for her.
    “¡Deja tu verga en los pantalones o te corto los cojones! El Jefe la quiere para si mismo—sin violación. ” Leave your prick in your pants, or I’ll cut off your balls! The chief wants her for himself—untouched.
    The words had hit Zach square in the chest.
    If Cárdenas wanted her as his personal sex slave, she was as good as dead.
    A burst of AK fire had ended the fight.
    I don’t know who you are or what you want, but my newspaper will pay ransom to get me back alive. Please call them! Mi periódico pagará dinero para mí—mucho dinero.
    Her naiveté had been painful to hear. Clearly, it hadn’t yet dawned on her that life as she knew it was over. But the men had long since quit listening to her. Instead, they’d talked casually about what they hoped Cárdenas would do to her, bile rising into Zach’s throat at each graphic and brutal description.
    Cárdenas had a reputation for abusing women. Zach had heard that he sacrificed women to La Santa Muerte —that macabre cult saint of Narcotraficantes , Holy Death—as a way of giving thanks for his success in the cartel wars. To think that Zach had been this close to taking him, to ending his reign of terror . . .
    Gisella should be in that cell now, not Natalie, whoever she was.
    Please don’t put me in there! Please don’t!
    She’d become almost hysterical the moment they’d brought her in here, her scream when they’d closed the door and walked away laced with primal terror. And for good reason. This filthy, dark place was probably beyond her worst nightmares.
    Now she was in the cell next to his, separated