Page 93 of No Sweeter Poison

“We’re not the only ones who know what his bitch looks like. But he needs us to tell him who does.”

Beni’s eyes widen but he immediately smooths over his expression. Unlike my associate, I’ve never been good at controlling my temper.

With one swift kick, I break the legs on his chair, grab him by the front of his shirt and submerge him into the water, going so deep that the waves catch me at the hips.

“Alejandro!” Vincenzo exclaims. “Enough. You’ll kill him.”

“We need them alive,” Beni reminds me. “He needs to tell us who else he told.”

All I see is red. It blurs my vision and colors the water beneath me.

I’ve felt anger before. Hatred, annoyance, even fury. This is something else.

A quiet, lethal rage that slips into my bloodstream and poisons the heart and mind until every organ in my body shuts down one by one. I have no idea the limits of my own strength nor can I control myself when I keep Ibanez under the water for several seconds too long. When I finally bring him back to the surface, he’s only half conscious and coughing up a lung.

“Stop, stop!” Montenegro shouts. “We don’t know anything, I swear!”

Montenegro is barely older than twenty-one and a contract hire. Ibanez has history with the Sandovals which means he’s loyal.

Ibanez won’t let a little drowning get between him and whatever it is he wants to say to me. “I was the one who did surveillance before the hit. The girl wasn’t part of the plan but I figured if we were taking you out, might as well put a bullet in the whore too.” He smiles wide, his gums bloody, and half his teeth already bashed in. “Ojo por ojo. You fuckers killed Gato and Nacho during the shootout on the beach six years ago. They were like brothers to me.”

Laughter leaves my lips. It carries on the wind and despite the summer heat, goosebumps surface on Ibanez’s arms. “By the time I’m done with you—”

“Go ahead,” he seethes. “Because I’m not telling you who hired us and neither is he.”

My grip on his shirt tightens. “I don’t need you to tell me it was Sandro.”

Montenegro sputters beside us. “Wh-what? Sandro didn’t hire us.”

Ibanez’s eyes fly open. “Luis!”

“I don’t even know who that guy is.” He shakes his head frantically. “Look, I’ll tell you everything okay? We got hired to do the hit and then everything went wrong. We knew you’d come looking for us so we went into hiding but then that guy—Sandro—started looking for us to. I don’t know why.”

“Shut up!”

I shove Ibanez’s face underwater.

Montenegro swallows the lump in his throat before continuing. “I really thought she was going to kill us when we fucked up the job.”

Vincenzo takes a step forward. “She?”

“She found us in Portugal and wanted to know how it went down. Then Nando—”

“Alejandro.” Vincenzo warned.

I lift his head above water for thirty seconds then shove him back in.

Montenegro continued. “I told her the truth. That I wanted to call the whole thing off because I saw a woman in the car with you and that wasn’t part of the plan. It was supposed to be just you; the moment someone else compromised the hit, we were supposed to call the whole thing off but Nando didn’t want to. He split up the group—some of us wanted to follow orders but a few others knew Nacho and Gato and wanted revenge for the shootout.”

“He hit you guys from behind…” Vincenzo’s gaze cuts to mine. “That’s why everyone started spreading out. Some cars left and others stayed.”

Montenegro nods. It makes sense considering how disorganized the entire thing was. Hit from the back, sides, front, and left on the side of the road like a game of bumper cars. Fucking amateurs.

I lift Ibanez’s head out of the water. “You’re one dead son of a bitch,” I ground out. “We don’t shoot at civilians!”

In this part of the world, in my grandfather’s territory, we have an honor code. No one does business in our territory unless they abide by the rules of the land. If the godforsaken Russians and the damned Irish and the mother fucking Chinese can follow the rules, then there’s no excuse for anyone else to break them.

I grab him by the back of the neck, my other hand fisted in his hair, as I toss him out of the water and onto the beach. The wooden chair he was sitting in falls apart and Beni keeps him lying flat on the sand with the barrel of his gun resting on the back of his skull.