I couldn’t stop seeing her eyes.

“Franco didn’t get a chance to rape her,” The Doctor went on, smiling slyly. “But I still think we should let him suffer, don’t you?”

“As much as humanely possible,” I said, my jaw clenching. My hands kept opening and closing, making fists. “I want to do everything that I told him I would do.”

“Either he wanted to test you or he had a death wish. Regardless, the man is a dumb fool and we don’t need dumb fools in our family, now do we?”

I shook my head absently, not really listening. I was already fantasizing about my revenge. I looked over at him. “You can revive him, right, if he dies or passes out?”

He chuckled. “Well, I can’t revive him if you remove his head, so save that for last.”

“That is the plan.”

He got up, a gleeful tone to his voice. “Tell me what tools you need and I’ll set things up in my office.”

The Doctor’s office was in the small guest cottage on the property. It’s actually where the Doctor lived. I wanted his torture house to be as far away from me as possible. Screams were so disturbing when you were trying to eat dinner, though now I wished his office wasn’t soundproof. I decided I would leave the doors and windows open and let everyone hear exactly what we were doing to Franco.

“I want a saw,” I said. “A very rough, strong saw. The kind that really rips flesh and gristle and bone. I want a jar of acid, something to dip toes and fingers and tongues in. I want a cattle prod. I want a red hot poker. My Taser gun.”

“I see. Would you also like a rat and a bucket? Medieval torture never goes out of style.” He went over to the door. “Franco is unconscious upstairs, but I’ll get him down. I stopped the bleeding because I wasn’t sure what you wanted to be done with him. He’ll be awake and ready for you by the time you come by.”

I swallowed hard, the anger continuing its course up and down my body, firing off in electric flames. I was going to make Franco pay. I was going to make him regret he ever looked in her direction. Then I was going to make Luisa see what I do to those who hurt her. I was going to make her look at him. And then she’d know exactly what I’d do for her.

This was all for her.

* * *

Luisa

The screaming started at four in the morning, about two hours after Franco had attacked me, and continued on well into the afternoon. At first it rattled me, bringing back memories of being at Salvador’s and the torture I had to hear, and it kept me from sleeping.

Not that I could sleep at first anyway. I knew Este and Juanito were always around, watching me. I suppose their job now was to protect me since Javier was out exacting torture, but that didn’t mean I trusted them. Who would protect me from them? Still, Juanito seemed safe enough, maybe because he was young and reminded me of a boy I grew up with. And to his credit, Este didn’t appear to hold any grudges over me attacking him again.

After a while though, I was able to rest, my head on the island in the middle of the chef’s kitchen. When I woke up around ten a.m., light streaming in the kitchen, Juanito was serving me tea and toast, the latter which I refused. I had no appetite. It was then that I noticed the screams were still coming from the cottage—the doctor’s office—though they were weak now and sporadic. They no longer had an effect on me. I was able to ignore them, and perhaps, if I was honest with myself, I was starting to enjoy them.

Just a little bit.

I had been lying awake in bed, daydreaming about a life I never had, when Franco came and knocked on my door. At first I thought it was Javier, coming to stay the night with me. It was so embarrassing when he turned me down, and I hated myself for being so needy and vulnerable in front of him. I just didn’t want to be alone. I had my reasons and my reasons all came true.

Once I saw it was Franco, I screamed. I could see it in his eyes, that vile tar, that blackness, what he had come for. I expected him to lumber toward me with his injured foot, but he was fast. He threw me out of bed and onto the floor, and after he punched me a few times, my cheekbones taking most of the hits, he started strangling me with one hand. With his other hand he squeezed my breasts painfully and started to yank down my underwear.

With Salvador, I had learned to stop fighting back. I learned to stop struggling. He had always told me it was his right as my husband to do whatever he wanted to me and that I had to do whatever he wanted to him. Even if I had been one of his whores, he would probably say the same thing. It was his right simply because he was Salvador Reyes.

But I wasn’t going to let Franco rape me, not without a fight. So I struggled. It was all in vain. His grip on my throat was so strong that I felt all the life drain out of me. The edges of my vision grew black as I gasped for breaths that I couldn’t take in. I thought I was going to die on that floor, completely helpless while he had his way with me.

The thought of dying like that did something to me. It made me so afraid that I couldn’t even function.

When Javier came in and shot Franco and I was free, my first instinct was to get away, to escape. All the formalities and politeness, and yes, lust that Javier seemed to show for me didn’t seem to matter anymore. He was supposed to protect me, and I was a fool to believe a lion would ever shelter a lamb, especially from his own pride.

But, of course, there was nowhere for me to go. There was no escape from the golden prison. So Esteban and Juanito took me down into the elaborate, shiny-clean kitchen where they looked me over and took care of my bruises. And as they did so, as the screams of Franco began to ricochet throughout the surrounding jungle, a dark mass against the hazy blue of the pre-dawn sky, my fear began to melt away. It began to change inside me, as if all the chemicals were taking new forms and shapes.

My fear turned into anger. And when I woke up to Franco’s waning screams of agony, I let the anger wrap around me like a cloak.

Javier had asked why I wasn’t angry enough.

It was because I didn’t let myself be.

But now, it was a part of me. The coil had unraveled. And I wasn’t letting it go anywhere. Not anymore.

I was halfway through the cup of tropical green tea—judging by the excess amount of boxes in the cupboards, I gathered it was Javier’s favorite—when the Devil himself showed up, standing in the hallway.

Javier had never looked worse. His white dress shirt was stained with blood, as were his jeans. He had circles under his eyes, his hair was messy and damp, and his gaze was blank, as if he were sleepwalking, even though he was looking right at me.

“Luisa,” he said in a rough, strained voice. “Would you like to see what I’ve done to him?”

I stared right back at him.

“Yes,” I said without hesitation.

He looked taken aback for a moment—perhaps he wasn’t expecting me to want this. But I did. I wanted to see what justice looked like. I wanted to see what his anger was capable of.

He glanced briefly at Esteban and Juanito, perhaps delivering wordless orders. I got out of my chair and joined him at his side. We walked down the tiled hallway, past large rooms that held many secrets, until Javier opened the French doors out into the blinding brilliance of the backyard.

The gardens around the lawn and the pool area were absolutely beautiful and impeccably landscaped with the most exotic and colorful flowers you could imagine. There were bushes of red bougainvillea and white gardenia, pink plumeria, blue and purple orchids, magenta and yellow hibiscus, and birds of paradise, all of them expertly blending into the lush green grass and flowerbeds. Hummingbirds and butterflies filled the air, and dragonflies darted above a pond filled with koi fish and floating white lotus.

For a moment I was so stunned by their beauty and elegance, how tenderly cultivated and cared for they were, how seamlessly they seemed to thrive, that I forgot why we were outside. But beyond the dazzling blooms and shining heat of the morning sun, there were cries of pain and a man being tortured, and I was yanked back into reality.

I wanted to say something to Javier, ask about the garden, tell him how gorgeous it was, but now was not the time. As usual, I was caught between beauty and depravity.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit fearful as we approached the cottage, the door wide open, beckoning us into the darkest places. Javier put his hand at my elbow and gently pulled me to a stop just outside.

“Are you sure you can handle this?” he asked, his eyes focusing on my bruises.

I raised my chin. “Yes. Don’t worry about me.”

He squinted at that, studying me, perhaps worrying after all.

“Very well,” he said. “Come on in.”

The first thing I noticed when we stepped inside was the strong smell of ammonia that burned the inside of my nostrils.

The second thing was how spotlessly clean the room was, considering the messy state Javier was in.

The third thing was what made me fall ever so slightly into Javier. His hands went to my shoulders, and he held me up, and I willed myself to stay conscious, to take it all in, even though it was all too horrible to take.

On a metal table in the middle of the doctor’s office, lay Franco. He was completely naked—but he wasn’t complete. His feet and hands were gone, bloody, cauterized stumps in their wake. His genitals had also been removed in a choppy, ragged manner. His torso was covered in hundreds of festering burn marks. Remarkably, he was alive. His head was propped up in a vise-like clamp that pressed down on his head and up on his jaw, his eyes staring at me, dull and milky.

The doctor was standing over him with a syringe poised at his heart, ready to inject him with the drug that would prevent him from losing consciousness. Judging from the amount of needle marks on his chest, this had been done many, many times.

The closest thing I had seen of torture myself was when Salvador was about to perform the “double saw” on an informant. It was enough to see the man, hung naked from his feet, upside down, with the saw positioned between his legs. I knew that was one of the most gruesome torture techniques, and I thanked my lucky stars I had gotten out of there before I saw any blood spill.

What Javier did didn’t seem that much better. And because Franco was still alive, I knew it wasn’t over yet.

“Take a good look at him,” Javier said in my ear. “Look at his face. Look at the monster that he is.”

I did. And I didn’t just see Franco. I saw Salvador too. I saw Salvador’s men. I saw Bruno. I saw all the men who ever wronged me, all the faceless cartel men out there who were wronging women left and right.

And I tried to imagine seeing Javier there, too. After all, he had kidnapped me, tortured me, humiliated me, and in the end, broke his promise to protect me.

But I just couldn’t. The man had a hold on me that I couldn’t even begin to understand.

“Franco,” the doctor said to him. “That over there is Luisa. Do you remember what you did to her? What you wanted to do to her? Javier warned you, did he not? You were a dumb fool for breaking the rules—all along you knew this was the price you’d have to pay.” The doctor looked at me, his voice chillingly glib. “Luisa, if you can perhaps give him a smile. It will be the last thing he sees.”

I wasn’t sure how it was possible, but I managed to plaster a smile on my face. It might have even reached my eyes.

“How beautiful,” the doctor commented. Then he reached over, and with two quick twists of a lever on top of the clamp, it tightened around his head. There was a crunch as all the teeth in Franco’s jaw shattered, blood pooling out of his mouth and onto his throat, then a faint, wet pop as his eyeballs fell out of his sockets, dangling by their optic nerves.

That was all I needed to see. I turned around, glancing up at Javier who was watching me with an unreadable expression.

“I’m ready to go now,” I said quietly.

Javier nodded and looked over me at the doctor. “Keep him alive for a bit longer. Then remove his head. With the knife, not the saw.”

“Yes, Javier,” the doctor said, a trace of awe in his voice.

I stepped out back into the sunshine and heat and the birds that called out their beautiful song from the nearby trees. Had all that just happened? How did so much ugliness co-exist with this?