Crazed: A Blood Money Novel by Edie Harris

orders, despite the sick gnawing in her stomach. “There is a nightclub here in the neighborhood, La Jaula de Oro. Pipe will be there tonight for the nine o’clock show, but he always arrives fifteen minutes early.”
    Panic bubbled when he simply nodded. So. She’d done her duty. She’d made contact, gotten the American spy in with the big, bad drug lord as best she could and now...now she was done. Done with Faraday and his hostage brother, and done—again—with the Casí she’d impulsively married in a secret ceremony four years earlier, when she ought to have stayed firmly in mourning and never dared everything on a love based on lies.
    Rushing to the door, she fumbled with the chain and the lock until the handle gave way, and she flung the portal open. She had to get out of here and never, never look back. Her past was dead, and certainly not gorgeously nude and well-sexed on a cheap hotel bed mere feet away from where she now stood.
    “We’re not done, Ilda.”
    The knot in her stomach twisted as she swallowed back stinging tears. “We’ve been done for years.” She slammed the door behind her.
     

Chapter Five
    The back booth of La Jaula de Oro was a special kind of hell.
    On the one hand, he sat far enough from the club’s stage, with its intimate lounge-like setting, that he was nearly out of sight when those at the front of house looked his direction. On the other hand, his wife was up on that stage, and there was every possibility she was unaware of his presence.
    Ilda. Alive. Casey didn’t know whether he wanted to weep with happiness or vomit over how he’d spent the past four years—without her. And not only without her, but under the one-hundred-percent unshakable assumption that she’d died the day of their wedding.
    His fingers clenched around the sweating beer bottle he’d ordered from the friendly waiter upon arriving at the club. Fuck. He’d slept with other women. Only a few, but that didn’t matter. He had broken vows he’d had every intention of honoring for the rest of his life, and just because he hadn’t been working with all the available information didn’t mean he still shouldn’t have held to those vows. But grief was a tricky, sticky thing, and bodies were different than hearts. His body had needed touch—he’d always been a physical man, his desires base and earthy—despite what his heart, his mind, had screamed at him.
    After every instance where he’d found himself in bed with a woman who wasn’t Ilda, he had been wrecked with sadness. Sometimes it would hit right away, as soon as the pleasure dissipated, before the sheets had cooled; sometimes the...the depression—because that’s what this was, damn it, and maybe it was time he admitted to it—would arrive without warning, weeks after the fact, and sideline him in his cabin for days. Sleep seemed to be the only thing that healed him, and staring at her picture in his phone so as to not forget her smiling face, not ever.
    And then he’d be fine. Throwing himself into his work, happy enough and smiling and doing what he had always done best: protecting others. Yet even now, as ecstatic and overwhelmed as he was to discover Ilda was alive, as earth-shattering as it had been to make love to the love of his life—like a dream, a wish he’d never believed would come true—Casey felt those demons hovering again, feeding off of his guilt, his shame. He’d never have thought he could experience such excruciating happiness and still feel the dark taint of pain, like a sickly film clinging to his emotions.
    It wasn’t enough to send him crawling to his bed. It wasn’t enough to distract him from this mission, or make him a liability to those around him...though that wasn’t to say that someday he wouldn’t be. But it was enough to convince him to sit down with the shrink when he returned to Boston and ask about the possibility of meds. His reticence to acknowledge what he saw as an intrinsic weakness didn’t