Kiss_Bang (Lost Devils MC #1) - Madison Faye
Chapter One
Hush
Muscles burn—clenching, rippling. My rough hands, bruised, and calloused, feel nothing of the hardened, broken concrete floor. Knuckles scrape the grit, and my jaw grinds tight as I keep pushing. Up, down. Up, down.
I grunt, the only real sound I make these days. Or for the last few years. After all, the dead don’t speak.
I push again, my body moving like an oiled machine as I push up and then back down. My breath scatters concrete dust and grime on the blood-stained floor, but it’s all the routine. It’s my eternity now. In here, in this cage, surrounded by brick and metal bars, I’m a chained beast. In here, I’m a demon barely contained from the outside world. I stand, and sweat drips down my brow, burning my eyes, but I don’t give a shit. I look up through the thin bar at the top of my prison, where I can see one star shining, like a tease of a freedom I’ll never know.
After all, I’m already dead, and right now, I’m in hell.
Believe me, I deserve it.
In my past life, the one that was taken from me in a hail of bullets and blood, I was not a good man. I was a savage, and an outlaw—a monster of a man. I ran with a crew of likeminded men back then, but they, like every aspect of that old life, are long gone and long dead.
There are footsteps, and I go still. The darkness surrounds and cloaks me, and I slow my breathing, my ears attuned to the approaching footsteps. It’s Carlos. After years in his hell, I know them all by the sound of their footsteps or the way they fucking breathe. Carlos isn’t the worst, but he and I both know I’d tear his head off with my bare hands if these bars were to fail.
There’s a pause, but I already know what’s coming. The little bitch thinks it’s funny when he does this. He thinks he wakes me, but I don’t sleep at all anymore. I wait, but I don’t have to wait long, because there it is. With a clang, he raps a policeman’s baton against the bars on my cell door. Of course, he and the rest of them would only pull this shit with me in a cage like this. I’m over seven feet and two-hundred-fifty pounds of muscles and savagery.
“Hey, culero,” he cackles.
I’m silent.
“Hey! Puta!”
I still say nothing in the darkness, and he bangs on the bars again, rattling my cage.
Provoking me.
Waking the demon beast lurking inside of me.
“Hola, cabron!” He cackles again. “Hey, asshole!” His voice gets a little less humor in it when he switches to English.
“Hey, you little bitch,” Carlos spits. “I’m talking to you. Wake up, asshole.”
He wants me to react, but I won’t. They learned long ago what I’m capable of, and I know for all of his cocky bullshit, Carlos is standing behind the line someone’s been smart enough to spray-paint on the floor outside of my cell door. It’s the line where my arm can reach through the bars. Miguel, one of Carlos’s buddies, helped them discover that line with my hand around his neck about a year back. Though in here, I’ll be honest, time has no real meaning.
Time doesn’t matter to the dead.
This place isn’t really Hell, of course, and I’m not actually dead. Just close to it, as this place is as close to Hell as you can find in the land of the living. This hell is an abandoned fort from the Mexican/American War, owned by a man Carlos and his buddies would call the devil. But I’ve met the devil, I know him well. And in this hell, it isn’t Jorge Del Campo.
In here, the devil is me.
Jorge is the head of the Del Campo cartel, which is without question one of the bloodiest, most ruthless drug cartels south of the US border. It doesn’t matter how I crossed him—the money owed, the debt that will never be paid. None of my old life matters anymore. What matters is the day-to-day of this hell. Sleep, maybe, wake, be angry. Eat, perhaps. Pace my cell, shadow box with my demons and ghosts. And then, it’s time to fight. That’s why I’m really here. I’m his beast.
His chained dog.
Jorge has four things he cares about in life: Money is one. Power is second. And the fights are third. In his desert compound out here at the edge of hell, he attracts all