Cartel

  Terrified, and not expecting the sudden movement, I fought as hard as I could — which wasn’t very hard with the way I was positioned and my hands useless in front of me. Still, I gave it my best, turning my head and sinking my teeth into the leg of whoever was holding my head painfully close to their crotch. I gagged on the taste of dry cotton as fingernails dug into the back of my neck.

  ‘Fuck!’ the man roared, wrenching me back from his leg. A hand pushed my face forcefully away, so that I landed on the other side of the back seat, the back of my head slamming into the window.

  I brought the back of my hand up to my face and tried to wipe some of the cotton lint out of my mouth. As I did, I glanced over at the man who would become my damnation.

  I knew straight away who I was with, and the reality of my hopelessness began to sink in to my gut, hot and prickling. Emilio Ross, infamous kingpin of South America’s most powerful drug cartel, the Il Sangue Cartel, and my father’s long-time employer. With his dark eyes and pointed European nose, he reminded me of a wolf. And I was the goddamn lamb. Well, this lamb was going to put up a fight, even if it killed me.

  ‘Guess I won’t be putting my dick in your mouth without a gun to your head,’ he observed in English, goading me. He was probably in his late fifties, and my stomach turned at the thought of anything of his anywhere near my mouth. His eyes were dark brown with tiny flecks of amber in them, amber that reminded me of fire. Asshole.

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ I responded in Spanish, sarcasm so thick it almost dripped from my lips. ‘I wonder if you can pull the trigger before I bite your dick off?’

  My mama always said it would be my mouth that got me into trouble. And my mama was always right.

  The fire-eyed man laughed.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Mariana,’ Emilio Ross said casually, his voice deep and loud. ‘I haven’t seen you since you were a small girl.’

  I still remembered the last time we’d spoken. I couldn’t have been more than eight, and he was visiting my father. I had scurried away to my room after being forced by my father to say hello. The fact that Emilio remembered the fleeting visit troubled me greatly.

  ‘Not long enough, obviously,’ I said to him, still speaking in Spanish.

  He drew his brows together, smiling. I amused him. ‘Do you speak English, puta?’

  ‘I speak Fuck You,’ I replied, in perfect English.

  He chuckled. ‘You’re not like your father,’ he said, his gaze moving from my eyes lower, lingering on my lips and breasts before flicking back to my face. A smirk grew on his mouth like a jagged crack in his face.

  ‘No,’ I replied flatly, still in English. ‘I’m not.’ After a year at an American boarding school and two more in a stateside university, English came to me just as quickly as my native Spanish tongue.

  ‘You must know that your father owes me a lot of money, puta?’ There he was, calling me a bitch again. I suspected it was because he only knew a few Spanish swear words.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ My nerves started to rattle and fray, and my mind along with them. Papa and his stupid, selfish gambling.

  I was pretty smart, good with numbers, and I’d been doing some creative accounting with my father’s finances for years, but there was no denying that he owed a lot of people a lot of money.

  My father’s casual attitude towards the entire situation made my blood boil. It was fine to risk your life when you were single and unencumbered, but he had a wife and three children to think about. It didn’t seem to mean anything to him, though. He kept gambling and taking money from loan sharks until there was nothing left to lose. When he stopped being able to pay the bookmakers back, things had gotten really ugly.

  They had started on his fingers. Three months ago, he lost an index finger, and two months ago, a middle finger. It was only a matter of time before they collected the rest. That’s when my brother, Pablo, had been shot in the thigh. Then my younger sister had been followed home by men we knew, men who had grown tired of issuing threats and decided to collect their outstanding debts in the form of my sister’s frightened pleadings. They didn’t rape her, but the threat was clear — they could, and they would, if my father didn’t front up the cash he owed. That was three weeks ago, and after my mother called me in hysterics I had left the relative safety of my stateside university to come home. To try to help my father claw back some control before we were all killed and hung off a freeway overpass as a reminder never to cross the cartel. Since I’d come home I’d been trying desperately to funnel some funds through accounts I had purposely hidden from my father for this eventuality, and pay off the most bloodthirsty of the people he owed.

  Evidently, I was too late. Emilio Ross could tear us all apart if he wanted to.

  I slumped in my seat, all the fight fleeing my body. I stared straight ahead at the back of the black leather seat in front of me, and set my jaw squarely.

  ‘You’re surprised?’ Emilio asked.

  I shook my head from side to side; I was not surprised. I battled to keep the anger from my face, the disgust, but failed. Rage burned in my blood, but not for the man who sat beside me. No, the rage inside me was reserved exclusively for my father. The man who was meant to protect me, the man who had promised to keep me safe when I was a little girl. The man who drank more than he should and laid his fists into me, into all of us, when it got too much. They say every little girl wants to marry her father, but I wanted mine to vanish.

  He was an idiot. A selfish fucking fool. And now I was going to pay for his sins.

  ‘Are you going to kill me?’ I asked calmly, as if we were talking about who had won the soccer game on the weekend.

  He replied just as casually.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He frowned. ‘It’s nothing personal against you, cholita.’ Tough girl, he had called me. I bit my lip and nodded, the sadness in my chest locked tightly away. I refused to show weakness in front of anyone, least of all the man who was probably about to end my existence.

  Esteban. His face floated into my mind and I clamped down the thought. Flecks of his blood still clung to my bare knees. It didn’t matter now; none of it mattered.

  ‘How much does he owe you?’ I blurted out. ‘Are you sure he can’t work the debt off?’

  Emilio’s eyebrows rose, and I heard the driver cough awkwardly up front. I wondered what kind of punishment I’d earned for daring to question the notorious drug lord.

  ‘Tell me,’ Emilio asked slowly. Taunting me. ‘What he can do for me that will be worth five hundred thousand dollars.’

  Oh.

  I returned my attention to the back of the headrest in front of me.

  ‘It’s a lot of pesos, cholita,’ Emilio said, reaching his hand over to squeeze mine. His sympathy was a ruse, nothing more than a macabre gesture to invoke desperation.

  ‘No shit,’ I muttered, the feel of his oily palm on my hand was nauseating. ‘It’s a lot of pesos.’

  I looked down at my bound hands, startled as they shook violently. It wasn’t fear; a lifetime of being a drug trafficker’s daughter had numbed me to many terrors, real and imagined.

  It was anger.

  I was well-acquainted with anger. My mother called me feisty. My father preferred terms like ‘ungrateful’ and ‘whore’. I figured that he was just pissed that when he drank too much and laid his fists into me, I didn’t freeze like the rest of them. I fought back. I gave as good as I got, and I’d put my heavily drunk father on his ass more times than I wanted to remember. Yes, I was angry. I carried my anger with me beneath my skin, and I had for many years.

  Emilio didn’t know that. He probably thought I was just scared.

  Anger, though, would be much more useful if I were to try and overpower him, to somehow catch him off guard.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked softly, trying to appear more scared and defenceless than I actually was. I was petite, five foot two, and I had nothing to fight with except my teeth and a pair of bound hands.

  ??
?Home,’ Emilio answered, apparently not annoyed by my direct questioning. It surprised me that he was so chatty, to the point of being flippant, when he was about to slaughter me and my entire family.

  ‘Maybe I could —’

  Emilio held his palm up. ‘No. There is nothing you can do, cholita. I will kill your father slowly, but I promise you, the rest of your family will die quick and painless. I have no feud with you.’

  I nodded, hardly believing my ears. What was I supposed to say? Thanks for killing me quickly? Thanks for not raping me in front of my father? Thanks for not disembowelling me while my mother cries on the sidelines?

  A glint of silver at the driver’s hip caught my eye as we passed under a bright series of streetlights and I blinked, trying to decide what it was.

  Yes. It was a pistol, silver and sleek. My hands were tied in front of me, and if I could just distract Emilio long enough to grab the gun, I could shoot them both and hope that the car didn’t crash too violently.

  It was worth the risk. We had just made a sharp turn into the road that marked the small town I lived in, and we were less than ten minutes from my house.

  Less than ten minutes from death.

  But Emilio was shrewd, and as I glanced sidelong at him, I could see that he had already anticipated my plan.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I can make your death very painful, cholita. I can take that very gun and rape your mother with it. While you watch. Would you like that?’

  Damn it! He could hurt my father if he wanted to and I’d say the bastard deserved it, but my mother? No. I would not let my mother suffer for me.

  ‘No,’ I replied sadly, deflated. ‘I would not.’

  ‘Well then,’ Emilio said. ‘Let’s just get there in one piece, shall we? Who knows what could happen once we get there. Maybe your father has finally won the lottery.’ He laughed, unfolding a newspaper and turning to the business section.

  The seconds dragged on painfully as terror bloomed thick and fierce in my chest. It curled around my heart like vine tendrils, squeezing until I thought I was having a heart attack.

  Focus. Get him to feel sorry for you. Do something! The voice inside my head screamed at me to take some kind of action. Get him onside. What did men like Emilio Ross want as currency?

  Money, of course. I had none of that. Drugs? I didn’t have any of those, either.

  Sex?

  I shuddered inwardly at the thought of offering my body to the man who was about to execute my entire family. I wasn’t sexually inhibited — I’d started experimenting when I was way too young and now that I was back home, Este and I had been pretty adventurous in the bedroom. And the car. And back up against an alley wall before the fireworks only a few hours before.

  Este. I pictured the way his eyes had blanked out after he was shot. How he was there with me one moment, and dead on the ground the very next, leaving me alone and adrift in this madness.

  It made me want to die with him. But I wasn’t dead. I was here, with this horrid man, and I needed to find a way to survive his wrath before he reached over and snapped my neck.

  Yeah. He looked entirely capable of that.

  I glanced down at his lap and reached out my bound hands tentatively, licking my lips. ‘Surely there’s some way I can change your mind. I could —’

  He just glared at me, a scathing stare that made me wither inside. He didn’t even need to say no.

  I averted my eyes and settled back into the leather seat, donning my resisting-bitch face. I might’ve been terrified inside, but I’d be damned if I would show him.

  ‘You bitches are all the same,’ he said stonily. ‘You think you’ve got a golden pussy, cholita? You think I don’t have access to pretty Colombian chocho?’ He grinned. ‘You think if I wanted yours, that I’d wait for you to offer? No. If I wanted to fuck you, you’d be on your back screaming my name. If I wanted you to suck my dick? You’d be choking on it right now. If I wanted to kill you in this car? You’d be dead already.’

  I stopped myself from reeling off a snappy comeback.

  And his last comment made me wonder. How many people had he killed? How much blood was on his hands?

  As I wiped my own bloody palms on my dress again, I decided I didn’t really want to know.

  The unsealed road closer to my family’s home was corrugated and rough, hundreds of small stones flicking out and flying back at the expensive car, creating a constant metallic dinging noise. Good. I hoped it scraped the paint off the car and made it look like shit.

  Ten minutes could have been ten years, the way it was dragging on. My palms were sweaty and I continued to rub them nervously on my black sundress.

  ‘You’re a long way from Italy,’ I said finally, my curiosity getting the better of me. ‘Colombia? Really?’

  He chuckled, returning to his newspaper. ‘I like the humidity.’

  ‘I bet it helps the coca plants grow nice and tall,’ I replied, suddenly irritated at his casual manner.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered slowly, not moving his eyes from the newspaper. ‘The coca plants that paid for your private schooling, cholita. The coca plants your father gambled with. My coca plants, cholita.’

  I opened my mouth to talk again.

  ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Stop talking. I’m sick of listening to your voice.’

  I closed my mouth and looked outside. We were pulling into my driveway.

  Arriving at my death.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mariana

  A black stretch Mercedes pulled in behind us, reminding me of a funeral heass, and I watched nervously as the three men from the shooting climbed out and made their way over to the car we were in. One of the men who had shot Esteban approached my door, and I nervously twisted the black onyx ring that wrapped around my middle finger. This can’t end well. I thought of fighting for a brief moment, until he jammed the muzzle of a revolver under my chin and pulled me from the car.

  ‘Please,’ I implored Emilio. I hated begging. I’d begged for only one thing in my life, and it hadn’t made a damn lick of difference to the way things turned out. In my eyes, begging was for the weak. But my primitive survival instincts were kicking me in the ribs like painful steel-capped boots. I didn’t want to be executed on my knees and dumped into a hole in the dirt.

  I didn’t want to die, and so I begged.

  Emilio just smiled. His canine teeth showed when his lips drew back, making him look like he was going to devour me.

  Maybe he was.

  The man who had wrenched me from the car shoved me in front of him. ‘Walk,’ he said gruffly, in Spanish.

  I fought to retain my balance, skittering up the steps to my front door. I didn’t want to fall in front of these men. I was already humiliated enough, and falling would only make me an easy target for their boots.

  I stared up at the house I had grown up in. Maybe I was looking at it for the last time. Oh, Jesus. This is happening. They’re actually going to kill us.

  The house was nothing special, a limestone-rendered villa that blended into the hill just like the rest of the houses that surrounded it. A sea of middle-class families, a little better off than those in the slums, but not by much. With the money my father had made over the years in trading powders and people, he could have purchased a house on millionaire’s row by now; had it not been for his crushing compulsion to gamble it all away every night.

  If he had been smarter with his money — if he had done what I had told him years ago — he’d be able to pay off his stupid debt to this deplorable cartel kingpin, and my family wouldn’t have to die.

  On the crumbling mosaic-tiled steps that my mother had always nagged my father to repair, I made a vow to myself. I vowed that before my father got his bullet between the eyes, I was going to make him understand just how stupid and reckless he had been with our lives.

  Seconds later, I was being pushed into the house. The house was like a cool balm after the hot summer night outside. I glanced
down at the orange tiles that lined the floor and remembered how, as children, we would all lay on them on the hottest days, our bare bellies sucking every iota of coolness from their porous depths.

  And now our blood would flood those porous tiles, staining them forever.

  ‘Keep going,’ the man behind me muttered, shoving the barrel of his pistol deeper into my neck. I winced at the pain, walking a little faster lest his trigger finger get itchy.

  I rounded the hallway and saw my mother sitting slumped at the dining table, sobbing as she clutched my sister to her side. Karina was only ten months younger than me, and so two months of each year we were the same age. We had always been a fiery duo, two sides of the same coin in a constant struggle to be the one in charge. We fought more than we ever got along, but I loved her deeply. And seeing the panic in her glazed eyes as she tried to comfort my mother broke my goddamn heart. A man I hadn’t seen before stood behind them, looking bored, clad in black military fatigues and aiming a Beretta sub-machine gun at my sister’s head.

  ‘Ana,’ my mother gasped when she glimpsed me. She pushed on her heels, obviously intending to stand and rush to me, but large hands dug into her shoulders and thrust her back down into her seat.

  I choked on everything I wanted to say right then, but couldn’t.

  Emilio appeared in front of me, blocking the view of my mother and sister.

  ‘Take her in there with the boys,’ he instructed, and terror gripped me as I wondered which boys I was being taken to. I stayed rooted to the spot despite the guy behind me pushing between my shoulder blades with the tip of his gun. I wasn’t about to make it any easier for them to take me to boys who would pin me down and hurt me.

  Emilio smiled, a fake gold tooth catching the light from the old brass chandelier that hung above the dining table. ‘Cholita,’ he mocked, smiling at me. ‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to your father?’

  Oh. Those boys. My father and brother.