Cartel

  I shivered despite the hot Villanueva night, refusing to acknowledge his question, but following him into the kitchen. My heart sank even lower as I saw my brother and father kneeling side by side in front of the refrigerator, a guy in front of them also holding a Beretta sub-machine gun. My brother’s face was cut up and covered in his own blood, and he had thick packing tape stuck over his mouth. I guessed by the way he swayed unsteadily that he’d put up a fight. And lost.

  Another guy stood in the corner, slightly removed, wearing a pressed grey suit and studying his fingernails. My skin prickled as I turned my attention back to the thug who had his gun casually pointed at the male half of my family, as if it were just another day at the office. I was used to seeing AKs slung over the shoulders of mercenaries and guards, not these sub-machine guns.

  Still, it made sense. Emilio was Italian, mafioso, and obviously proud of it.

  I tore my attention away from the gun and back to my father and brother. Pablo was a year older than me, and we’d always been close. He had always been less fiery than my sister and me, much more mellow, and his laidback temperament meant that we got along most of the time.

  ‘Papa?’ I choked. Revulsion and despair engulfed me as I looked upon the man who had raised me. Physically, he was everything Emilio Ross was not — balding, overweight, a sheen of sweat coating his brow as he knelt in one of the cheap suits he wore like a uniform. He’d been on his way out, judging by his slicked-back hair and the fact he was still wearing a suit this late at night.

  Emilio’s men had probably arrived just as he was getting antsy and about to go out and spend whatever cash he had on a losing bet. His biggest weakness was cards, poker, more specifically, but he’d been known to bet on anything and everything. He almost never won any money, and if he did, he just lost it all again. The house always won. Our house always lost.

  Emilio nodded at the guard in front of my father and brother and the guy responded without missing a beat, aiming his Beretta expertly between my father’s eyes.

  ‘Wait!’ I cried, and the thug flicked me a look of derision before returning his attention to my father. I watched in horror as he applied a few pounds of pressure to the trigger, millimetres away from letting the clip loose into my papa’s head.

  ‘Emilio,’ my father said nervously, pressing his meaty palms together in a desperate prayer, ‘please believe me when I tell you I was ambushed by those motherfuckers. They were tipped off!’

  I sucked in a breath, watching Emilio as he stared my father down. ‘You lost us a lot of money, Marco. A lot of money. And you were drunk. You understand?’

  ‘I know,’ my father blubbered, still holding his hands together in prayer. I doubted that Emilio Ross was going to take pity on him because he was begging. ‘I swear, Emilio, I swear I will repay you. Everything of mine is yours. Take my house, take it all.’

  Emilio’s mouth turned down at the edges as if he’d just sipped sour milk. He glanced around at the peeling wallpaper, the dented fridge, and then, he looked at me.

  ‘I’ll take her,’ he said, his eyes lighting up as he pointed at me.

  My stomach dropped. He’ll do what?

  My father’s eyes grew wide. ‘No, please. Anything, Emilio, but not my family. Please, sir, not my family.’

  Sadness washed over me as I listened to my father beg for my life. I might have been mad at him, and he might have been a shitty father, but he didn’t deserve to die on his knees, execution style. It would be like ripping the last piece of his dignity away and grinding it into the dirt he’d be buried in. But it seemed those were his only two options — die in the dirt, or let Emilio take me away and do God only knew what with me.

  ‘Then I kill you all now,’ Emilio said, nodding at the guy with his gun to my father’s head.

  ‘Wait!’ I demanded shrilly, reaching out and closing my bound hands around Emilio’s arm. ‘Take me. I’ll do whatever you want. Just please don’t kill them.’ The words tasted like ash in my mouth as I observed the look in this man’s eyes. Soulless. He was enjoying this.

  ‘Your father has disrespected me greatly,’ Emilio said, shaking my hand off like it was a dead cockroach. ‘Whether I take you or not, cholita, he must pay the price for his mistakes.’

  ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Please just take me and let them go.’ My heart leapt as a spark of something appeared in Emilio’s eyes and he raised his hand to the guard, who lowered his gun slightly and took his finger from the trigger.

  ‘You could kill him,’ I pressed on. ‘He probably deserves it, for what he’s done. But wouldn’t it be so much better to let him live? For him to know, every day for the rest of his life, that his transgressions were paid for with the life of his daughter? For him to suffer, knowing it was all his fault?’

  I was angry, but I could not watch my father — my whole family — be executed in front of me.

  A small glimmer of hope wrapped itself around my chest and contracted painfully; Emilio was listening.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be more satisfying,’ I continued, ‘to destroy him completely, instead of just putting a bullet in his head? Isn’t that too kind a retaliation? Your cartel is named Il Sangue. What is more important to any man than blood, the blood of his family?’

  Emilio’s lip curled.

  ‘If it doesn’t work out, you can still kill us all,’ I pleaded. ‘Please. My mother and my brother and sister don’t deserve to die because of my father’s mistakes.’

  ‘No, baby,’ my father said urgently. ‘Better for them to kill me than put their hands on you. You don’t deserve that.’

  I narrowed my eyes as I took in his stricken expression, softened by booze. I could tell he was struggling to keep up with things since he was half drunk, and that realisation lit my veins on fire as anger burst inside my chest. ‘That’s not an option,’ I snapped. ‘They either kill us all,’ I flicked my gaze to Emilio, ‘or this man is smart enough to realise how much more money he could make from me.’ I swallowed the last of my lingering fear and stood straighter.

  ‘I’ll clean your house, I’ll smuggle your drugs, I’ll suck your dick, I’ll do your books. I’ll fuck your sons and I’ll lick your boots if that’s what it takes. Just please,’ there was that horrible word again, ‘please don’t kill them.’

  ‘Mariana!’ my father yelled. ‘Stop this talk!’

  Emilio frowned, completely ignoring my father. ‘I prefer blondes.’

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes as I tried not to imagine just what this dirty old man preferred doing with blondes.

  ‘For you,’ I said sweetly, ‘I’d wear a wig.’

  That made him chuckle. ‘I like this one,’ he said to my father, jerking his thumb towards me.

  ‘Your girl is a real cholita. Wonder how tough she’ll be when my boys take turns fucking her in her fleshy Colombian ass.’

  My father lunged at him, but didn’t get very far, the guard smacking the bridge of his nose with the barrel of the gun.

  ‘Well, this has certainly been an interesting turn of events. Cholita, I admire your loyalty to your family. It is something your father clearly lacks.’ He glared at my father. ‘So, although your life will never recompense me for the street value of my cocaine, it will more than cover the production cost. I can recoup my initial loss and make an example of you at the same time, Marco.’

  The wolf looked positively excited.

  ‘I told you!’ my father yelled. ‘I have thirty thousand American dollars for you! I’ll wipe my debt clean and kill those DEA fuckers who interrupted the transfer!’

  My heart sank. Thirty thousand dollars. A little under four hundred thousand pesos. It was nothing. It was everything. It was what I was worth in this cruel world.

  Emilio tutted, waving his long, bony finger in the air in front of my father’s face. ‘Thirty thousand was the production cost. Do you know how much money you’ve lost me? That was half a million big ones on the streets, bandito. Half. A. Million. Dollars.’


  He raised his hand in a fist, smashing it down into my father’s nose. Another girl might cry out, struggle to get to her father, maybe mop the blood from his face and kiss his temple.

  But I was not that girl. I was a girl with a rage inside me. Este. Oh, God. I clutched at the small crucifix that hung around my neck and said a silent prayer for Esteban’s soul.

  I pushed down the urge to cry. My mother’s muffled sobs reached me from the next room as I drew a solemn, burning breath into my lungs and tried to stop the room from spinning.

  ‘You are giving yourself to me, yes?’ Emilio asked, clenching and unclenching the fist he’d just hurtled into my father’s face.

  I nodded. Oh, fuck. What am I doing?

  ‘Words, cholita. A nod means nothing in my world.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said defiantly, head high, chin stuck out stubbornly.

  ‘For how long?’ He was testing me.

  The breath hitched in my throat. ‘For as long as you spare my family.’

  He nodded, and began to pace in the several feet of bare floor that separated my father and me.

  ‘And you submit to do anything I tell you?’

  This time it was harder. ‘Yes … Wait,’ I added falteringly. Oh, God. ‘Do you promise not to kill me?’

  It was a silly question to ask a man who didn’t deal in promises but in bloodshed and human lives, but I had to ask anyway. I couldn’t bear the thought of offering up my life, only for it to be taken away at his hand. I didn’t want to hope for nothing.

  Emilio rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I can promise you that if you obey me at all times, you won’t die by my hand,’ he said. ‘But I can’t promise you that you won’t beg me to kill you anyway.’

  His words cut to my very core, and that was precisely the effect he had been aiming for.

  I bit my lip, then cursed myself for showing a reaction. Emilio waited patiently, his eyes only for me as my father bled before us.

  ‘What’ll it be, cholita?’ he asked me. ‘There’s no shame in changing your mind. A bullet would be much less painful.’

  ‘I am yours,’ I conceded finally, my voice quiet but firm. ‘Do with me what you will.’

  Just then, a pathetically inadequate digital rendition of Mozart rose, buzzing, from somewhere on Emilio’s person, and I frowned in confusion. He reached a hand into his suit jacket and withdrew a cellphone. ‘Pronto,’ he answered in Italian, and before he had finished saying the word, a loud voice started screeching on the other end.

  Emilio placed his hand over the receiver and gestured to the guy in the suit, the one who’d been admiring his own fingernails as we spoke of life and death, the one who I’d forgotten was even there.

  He was actually going to answer a call while we were in the middle of talking about my life. Emilio didn’t even look at me, just strode into the next room, speaking a steady stream of Italian that I couldn’t decipher.

  The man in the corner spoke up. The Suit, I decided to call him. I looked at him properly now. He was tall and wiry, with intense sapphire-coloured eyes, a mop of shaggy brown hair and an imposing stature. In another context he might have been attractive; but there was something in his eyes that troubled me. I watched them closely and noticed they never stayed still. Every tiny mood change and thought was expressed through those crazy ice-blue eyes, the subtle shifts in his neck muscles, and the way his long fingers fidgeted with his middle suit button.

  Buttoned. Unbuttoned. Buttoned. Unbuttoned. The guy couldn’t stay still, and when I heard him sniff again, I guessed why.

  He’d been sampling the goods.

  ‘If he let it go to voicemail every time he got a call in the middle of shooting someone,’ the Suit said, ‘well, he’d have a lot of fucking voicemails.’ He tilted his head as he spoke, just adding to the psychotic vibe he was giving off. His accent was distinctly American.

  I threw him a disgusted look before returning my gaze to my father.

  I’m sorry, he mouthed, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. It was a bit late for sorry, and he just looked pathetic trying to apologise while he was on his knees at gunpoint. I shook my head minutely and stared at the ceiling instead, making sure to keep the Suit in my peripheral vision at all times. No way was I turning my back on that crazy-looking bastard.

  Emilio returned to the room, tucking his cellphone into his suit as he walked with purpose. ‘Time to go,’ he barked.

  ‘Can I at least pack some things?’ I asked, my brain screaming at me to stall what was happening. What the goddamn was happening? Este was probably still lying dead in the alleyway, and my entire life was disintegrating in front of my very eyes.

  And the worst part was, I wasn’t even surprised. I’d been waiting for this moment since the day I found out what my father really did.

  Emilio almost laughed. ‘This isn’t a holiday, bambina. You are not a person any longer, do you understand? You just became a piece of property. My property.’

  Panic bubbled within me. ‘Your property is going to be cold at night without her coat,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Please —’

  ‘No,’ Emilio said. ‘Don’t make me shoot you all, cholita. You will obey me.’

  My head was spinning, and for a moment my vision blurred.

  ‘Can I at least say goodbye?’

  ‘No.’ He snapped his fingers, gesturing to me, and the Suit pushed off from the wall he was leaning against, approaching me. No!

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Suit smile. It was so small I barely caught it at all, but it was there. My hands began to shake.

  ‘Enjoying the show?’ I shot, before I could stop myself.

  He laughed, feigning amusement, but the tightly bunched muscles in his neck told a different story. ‘You’re riding with me on the way back,’ he said, his weird eyes going even wider. ‘So yes, I am enjoying this.’

  The smile vanished from his face, replaced by a scowl, as he pushed past me, deliberately knocking me. Motherfucker. The guy who’d been watching guard over my brother and father was suddenly beside me. ‘Walk,’ he said, pushing the tip of his gun into my ribs. I recoiled from the gun, hurrying quickly behind Emilio and the Suit.

  ‘I’ll be okay, Mama,’ I called out in a shaky voice that teetered on hysteria.

  I didn’t look at my mother as I left the house I had grown up in. The house where I had spent almost my entire life. I couldn’t look her in the eye, because if I did, I would have reneged on the deal, ran to her, and let her hold me in her arms as bullets ripped us all apart.

  I looked at the floor instead, and tried feverishly to ignore her sobbing, the protests of my sister, the muttered swearing of my father. I pushed it all away, focusing only on the bright tiles on the floor.

  The Suit appeared in front of me, looking excited as he held a black piece of hessian material in his hands.

  A bag. And I knew exactly where he was going to put it.

  ‘We’re going to have so much fun,’ he said, grinning.

  My hurt blossomed into a steadily increasing rage as he seemed to feast upon my family’s misery. I longed to strike out, to channel my rage physically with a fist to his face, pushing my nails into his eyes until I heard two meaty pops, but I pushed it down, delayed it. Later. Use it later. Instead, I hung my head, and waited as the black bag went over my face. The world turned dark as the thick material covered my eyes, and I struggled to contain my rising panic as ropes at the bottom of the bag were pulled tight around my neck, making it hard to breathe. A firm prod to my back with the gun, and I walked from the only home I had ever known, the last sounds to reach my ears being my mother screaming my name, and my father cursing the cartel.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mariana

  It was entirely disconcerting to be wearing a hood over my head in the back of a car, with no idea where I was going. Even worse, I wasn’t sure who was with me. I guessed the Suit was in the car, but I couldn’t be sure who else was in there. My legs stretched out in front of me without e
nd, suggesting we were in some kind of a limousine. The car drove for what seemed like hours before anyone spoke.

  ‘Excited?’ the Suit asked, sarcasm dripping from his words. I jerked upright at the sudden noise, muffled as it was through the bag on my head. He was somewhere in front of me. We had to be in a limousine. I imagined the fuck-you grin he was sporting, and pushed away thoughts of launching out of my seat and flying at him. I wasn’t even entirely sure if he was sitting opposite me or further away. And even though I was regretting my rash move to offer myself up, I still didn’t want a bullet in my head.

  So instead of biting back at him I remained silent, chewing on my lip to try and distract myself.

  ‘Not in a talking mood, huh?’ he attempted casually. I chewed harder, not wanting to give him anything.

  Cold fingers touched my bare knee and I jumped. He chuckled, but kept his hand there, squeezing my leg.

  ‘You’ve got a pretty face, Ana,’ he said, and my name from his mouth sounded wrong. But not as wrong as what he said next.

  ‘I liked watching you come before,’ he whispered, squeezing my knee hard for effect.

  ‘What?’ I replied sharply, playing right into his game. Damn.

  ‘In the alleyway,’ he drawled, dragging his hand higher up my leg. I clenched my thighs together as tight as I could to stop him from going any higher. I remembered how Este had pushed me up against the wall behind a shop selling tacky tourist souvenirs and fucked me — made love to me — hard and fast, the fireworks in that alley as bright as the fireworks in the night sky. Tears burned at my eyes as I realised that it had only been a few hours ago that he had been alive, warm as his arms held me tightly, and now he was dead.

  ‘You weren’t there,’ I scoffed, my eyes burning, my heart thudding wildly. ‘You were already at the house when I arrived.’

  He chuckled, a sound that made the hairs on my bare arms prickle uncomfortably. ‘I left once I saw your little boyfriend bleed out on the ground,’ he taunted. ‘So, yeah. I saw you in the alley with your skirt up around your head. They have rooms you can rent by the hour, you know?’