Destroy For Her - R.B. Hilliard Page 0,4
because she was in love with him, but because he was her ticket out.
It took her two weeks to sell her house and another two to close. She didn’t tell the club she was leaving. It was an awful thing to do, but she just couldn’t. She left Alex a note, and she ran.
The house in Mexico was gorgeous. It was a giant hacienda, a pink stucco palace right on the beach, surrounded by exotic flowers and plants. Back in Texas, Carlos had lived in a condo. It was nice but nothing like the place in Mexico. He’d told her that he owned his own business, that he was looking to expand, and had finally been given the opportunity. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder . . . what kind of business had guards who carried assault rifles, saluted every time they passed him by, and called him Teniente—which meant Lieutenant in English? Sage wasn’t aware that he’d been in the military. When she mentioned it to him, he laughed and called her a silly girl. She should have packed her things and left right then and there. She should have known that he wasn’t a lieutenant in the military but a lieutenant in a freaking drug cartel. By the time she figured it out, it was too late.
She thought back to the day everything changed. She and Petal were playing in the pool when Carlos came storming from the house. Before she could ask what was wrong, he ordered her inside.
“We’re playing, Carlos,” she’d told him. The next thing she knew, his fingers were in her hair. “You’re hurting me!” she shouted as he yanked her out of the pool by her hair.
“What the hell?” she screeched. His hand connected with her face in a hard and brutal slap.
When Petal started crying, he ordered Sergio to take her to her room. This, of course, only made her cry harder.
“Go, baby. I’ll come see you in a minute,” Sage told her.
“The next time I tell you to do something, do it!” Carlos growled.
“Fuck you!” she screamed back at him. This earned her another slap.
“Filthy-mouthed puta,” he hissed. “I will enjoy breaking you.”
The truck braked sharply, jostling her injured wrist, and she was wrenched from the memory as a bolt of pain zipped through her body.
“Sorry,” Alon called back to them.
“Are we there yet?” Petal whispered.
“Not yet. It’s light enough to see now. Why don’t you read the book Rosa packed for you?”
Once Petal was settled with the book, Sage closed her eyes and tried to sleep but her mind wouldn’t let her.
Why didn’t I leave? She must have asked herself that question a million times. Deep in her gut she knew things weren’t right. During their first month, before the pool incident, Carlos did things that made her uncomfortable. Like the time she smiled at one of his men, only to discover that the man went missing the next day. Or the time they were having sex and Carlos told her that he was going to carve his name across the butterfly tattoo on her back—a tattoo that had both Gibbs’s and Petal’s names on the wings—in order to make her forget about those low-life, filthy bikers. Instead of listening to her gut, she’d made excuses. She’d chalked it up to possessive, jealous boyfriend talk—something she understood from spending over a decade tied to a motorcycle club. She convinced herself that it would get better, but it only got worse.
Her thoughts drifted to her daughter and to all the shit her little girl had seen. Carlos hadn’t touched Petal. Sage would have killed him if he’d tried, but Petal had seen him hit Sage multiple times. The two times Petal tried to intervene, Carlos had her locked inside her room. If that wasn’t bad enough, the asshole then tried to turn Petal against her. He told Petal it was Sage’s fault that he beat her, that Sage was too willful and needed a strong hand to guide her. Strong hand my ass. Carlos Diez was a manipulative piece of shit who got off on abusing women. In the seven years that she and Gibbs were together, he’d never laid a hand on her. Ever. Their relationship was far from perfect, but deep down, Gibbs was a good man. Carlos was not. How she’d missed that was beyond her.
After the pool incident, he’d profusely apologized for his behavior. He claimed he was stressed about his new position and wanted to impress