Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(117)
But there was something different about this one, something that drew him more than could be explained by the proud, upward-tilting chin, the narrow waist, and the firm little tits and ass.
As Jennifer stood, Eduardo moved past the Don, gently grasping her extended hand and raising it to his mouth. The trick with a woman’s hand was to let your warm breath stroke the tiny hairs on its back, barely allowing your lips to graze it. When done correctly, the quick contrast of warm breath and cool lips raised goose bumps across her body.
Eduardo lifted his gaze slowly, rewarded by the sight of the gooseflesh tightening on those slender arms. Gotcha. Then his eyes locked with hers.
For a moment he was held by them, a gaze so intense that he felt as if he had been strapped into a chair and jolted with fifty thousand watts of juice. A force moved in his head and it wasn’t him.
As a boy in Lima, in the madness and desperation that had taken his mother, she had turned to the old ways, searching amongst the lost souls of the poor for someone who could teach her the dark magic of the Incas. And as she pulled her young son from one rat-infested barrio to the next, she had found a native woman who taught her the Inca rituals.
Some scholars thought the Inca Empire had been built by their attainment of enlightenment, a knowledge of science akin to the Egyptians. But the Inca had built their empire on fear. They worshipped it. Their elaborately designed rituals produced fear beyond that ever achieved by any society before or since.
Eduardo knew. After all, Inca rituals required a subject. And his mother had kept her own small subject close at hand.
It was often said that when a man is first exposed to wickedness, he is appalled. But if he remains associated with that wickedness for long enough, he comes to accept it, then finally to embrace it. Eduardo had found the same to be true of fear.
In those years of ritualistic torture at the hands of his mother, Eduardo had come to accept his own fear and to worship it in others. She had taught him well. He almost regretted killing the witch. Almost.
Eduardo felt a sudden cold sweat dampen his skin. As hard as it was to believe, this girl had the talent his mother had tried so hard to attain, the ability to join minds with another. In his head he could feel her, her touch strong but soft, seeking to know him, but for what purpose?
Rather than resist the intrusion, El Chupacabra opened himself wide. The girl’s powers were so strong he felt that he may not have been able to resist them anyway. Why not let her see the whole package?
A sudden change in the intrusion pounded his head. She was scrambling now, no longer seeking to burrow more deeply, her efforts reduced to a desperate scramble to break the connection.
Fear. Its glorious purity flowed from her mind into his, each wave so intense that it threatened to bring him to climax where he stood, amid the orchids and roses on Don Espe?osa’s private patio. When he was a teen he had first experienced that rush of sexual release as he plunged the knife again and again into his mother’s dying breast. It was as if he had been sprinting, his heart hammering in his chest, filling his arteries and vessels with a thunder that demanded release. He hadn’t felt anything this intense since that first kill, but here it was again.
As close as he had come to all his special victims, seeking to immerse himself in the ritual of fear, those experiences now seemed empty. Here was pure, fresh terror, dripping directly into his mind in a way he’d never dreamed possible.
Then it was gone. The girl, whose hand he still held, slumped toward the ground.
Eduardo caught her as she fell, guiding her unconscious body back into its seat.
“What the hell?” Don Espe?osa’s gasp of surprise brought Eduardo back to the present.
“She fainted.”
“I can see that. Why?”
Eduardo turned his face toward the drug lord and grinned. “What can I say? I have that effect on women.”
Don Jorge Esteban Espe?osa’s brow darkened momentarily, then his expression broke into a grin even broader than Eduardo’s. “Uh-huh. Well, you just keep your dick in your pants. This one’s mine. Besides, I brought you here to get your opinion of the girl, not to offer her up as Chupy bait.”
Eduardo glanced at the girl slumped in the chair and shrugged. “What’s to say? I like her.”
“I don’t give a shit if you want her. I want to know if I can trust her.”
Eduardo studied Don Espe?osa’s angular face. “Trust her? Why?”
Don Espe?osa signaled with his hand and a servant appeared out of the doorway. “Manuel. Se?orita Jennifer está enferma. Llévela a su cuarto.”
“Sí, se?or.”
As the servant lifted Jennifer in his arms to carry her back to her room, the drug lord nodded at Eduardo.
“Walk with me.”
For forty-five minutes, Eduardo walked with Don Espe?osa, listening intently to his description of how this girl came into his possession, how this teenage girl had hacked her way past the best security the cartel’s computer experts could provide to access his accounts, how she had hacked Bellagio security, and how, given the opportunity, she had turned her talents to frustrating the US DEA and IRS.
It was clear that Jorge Espe?osa had developed strong feelings for this child prodigy. But he was, above all else, a paranoid schizophrenic who could never fully trust anyone. So he had called in El Chupacabra, a man known for his ability to see through the veneer with which people draped themselves, all so that the drug baron could feel safe in his decision to keep the girl, to put her to work for him, to eventually make her the first Se?ora Espe?osa.