Dirty Promises

  And I said yes. The room grew brighter. The sun filled my soul. And I thought I could never be happier.

  We laughed, drunk on love, on the future, and we made love several times that morning. He wouldn’t stop. He was insatiable. I couldn’t stop either. I was just so taken with him that I wanted him to keep taking me. Forever.

  The wedding happened a week later. Needless to say, there wasn’t much planning. When most narcos get married, it turns into a nationwide celebration. Mayors and Sinaloan officials are supposed to show up, as well as the narco families whom Javier had good relations with. They are supposed to be huge feasts, real traditional parties. I should know — I had just that with Salvador.

  But maybe because of my past, Javier opted for something quiet. In fact, it was just me, him, a minister, and Este as the witness. In a small, thick-walled church out in the middle of the hills. At least it had a beautiful view of the valley and Culiacán in the distance. A view of everything that would belong to me.

  And yet I was nervous. Tapping my foot, picking at my simple white dress that was as delicate as a nightgown. I was nervous, because to me, this was it. Javier was it. If anything went wrong, if it all went south, there wouldn’t be anyone else. I wanted him forever or I wanted nothing.

  I had reason to be nervous, it turned out. Because now, as I sat alone at the kitchen table pouring myself another glass of wine, the evening breeze sweeping through the screened window and bringing with it the smell of rain and relief, I realized I had nothing.

  The other night, when he finally succumbed to me, I knew I wouldn’t get another chance again. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. I saw it in his face after we were done. I didn’t care about the pain. I didn’t care about the scarring or the blood. I didn’t care if he hit me (which he didn’t, and wouldn’t, it wasn’t his style). I knew that made me sound like a pathetic, lovesick woman, but it was the truth.

  I just wanted something of him. His attention. Even if it meant his wrath. I wanted it. The feel of his body, his touch, his desire. And I got it. I knew he wanted to make people hurt, so I gave him the chance to hurt me. The conflict showed in his eyes, the slight hesitations he made. He was so afraid of really hurting me, but I wasn’t, because I knew he wouldn’t. He was more afraid of himself than I was of him.

  But with whatever I got, it was even worse when it was taken away. Now I was aching for more and saddled with this uncomfortable feeling that there never would be. That it was over between us. And there would be nothing left for me.

  Juanito strolled into the kitchen to get something from the fridge. Dinner had been served by our cook, Alberto, but I had eaten alone. Esteban ate elsewhere. I’m not sure the last time Javier had dinner with me, and Juanito seemed to fend for himself.

  “Hungry again?” I asked him as he pulled a plate of leftovers out.

  He looked sheepish. “I didn’t eat earlier.”

  I’d never seen him have dinner with us. I wanted to ask Javier how he was being treated — lately his young face looked years older, gaunt and ashen, and his eyes were dull. But I didn’t dare approach Javier with this stuff now. Before Alana, yes. But not after. Funny, I had started to think of life as Before AD and After AD (Alana’s Death). Besides, Juanito was probably getting high on his own supply. Many of the narcos did, though the worst Javier did was drink. Even now, it was only booze that Javier occasionally dipped into.

  That, and murder.

  Juanito was in charge of our finances after Javier was through with them, just going over the boring stuff like an accountant. There’s a price to dealing with large sums of money when you’re trading in a billion dollar industry: you pay the pisa to plazas, dock handling charges, shipping costs, trucks, labor, equipment, security. Juanito was learning where the money went after it came to us. I knew that Javier had plans for him when he was ready, but I didn’t know what they were. For now, he just did whatever Javier passed down to Esteban.

  I patted the seat next to me. “Sit down.” He stared at me, hesitant. I flashed him a smile, which I knew was relaxed and easy, maybe even sloppy, thanks to the wine. I’d already had three glasses.

  “Okay,” he said. He seemed jumpy. He sat down beside me, and it was then that I noticed he had rope burns around his wrists. I stared at them for a moment, trying to figure out what they could be from. He caught me looking and gave me a sheepish look. But he didn’t explain.

  “I don’t think I’ve talked to you much lately,” I said, trying to put him at ease. “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” he said flatly. He smiled and nodded, as if to convince himself. “Very good. Excited about the move.”

  “The move?” I asked, then remembered what Este had said about bringing us to a ranch somewhere when the federale was captured. I’d wanted to talk about it more with Javier but, well, that didn’t happen.

  “Oh,” Juanito said slowly, reading my face. “I meant our move. You’re staying here. Right?”

  I frowned. “I don’t see why I would.”

  He blinked, now unsure. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “What?!” I exclaimed, nearly knocking over my glass. I saved it just in time and swore under my breath.

  “You don’t know?” Juanito said, and now there was fear in his eyes. I was too angry to coddle him.

  I got up, my chair sliding noisily across the tile floor. “Do I look like I know?”

  “Please don’t tell Este I told you,” he pleaded to me, his eyes now filled with fear.

  I pursed my lips for a moment. Why would I tell Este? Juanito should be fearing Javier. And I was sure he would after I was done with him.

  “I’m talking to my husband. Your patron.” And your patron, I thought to myself, who wants to keep you in the dark for as long as he can.

  Not if I could help it.

  I marched out of the kitchen, hearing Juanito curse to himself as I left. I went straight down the hall to my husband’s office and nodded at Diego standing guard outside of it.

  “I need to speak with him,” I said, seething, my heart racing wildly in my throat.

  I couldn’t see Diego’s eyes behind his dark aviator shades which he liked to wear, even inside. I only saw my reflection. I looked like a mess of a woman. I was a mess of a woman.

  “He asked for no one to disturb him,” Diego said calmly.

  “Is he busy getting some puta?” I asked, and he balked slightly at that.

  “I don’t know what Javier does,” he said, even though I bet he knew exactly what Javier did. Bet he handed out the condoms. “But I have my orders.”

  “And you realize I’m not going to obey them,” I told him. “I pay your salary too.”

  He seemed to fall asleep on his feet before I realized he was probably staring at me and thinking. Then he took in a deep breath and knocked on the door.

  Javier immediately barked, “I said fuck off!”

  “He is in a bad mood, senora,” Diego said to me in a low voice. “Things didn’t quite go as he planned today.”

  I raised my brows. “Today?”

  “With the federale.”

  I stared blankly at him. He tilted his head then nodded, realizing I didn’t know anything.

  To his credit, he continued. “Javier was adamant that no one get killed. One of the federales reached for his gun and our sicario reacted. The federale is dead. But we do have Evaristo Sanchez now, as planned. Javier will get over it.”

  “And me,” I said. “Do you know what happens to me? Sanchez is in the desert somewhere, right?”

  “Yes,” he said simply. He didn’t care that he was the one informing me. Perhaps because Diego didn’t fear Javier. Diego certainly worked for him — for us — and was a man to be trusted, but Diego was at least twenty years his senior and had more experience in the cartels and in life, more than Javier had.

  And Javier needed him.

  He went on. “You will have to check with your husband about the details. But if I were you, it shoul
d wait.”

  “It can’t wait. Juanito just said they are leaving tomorrow. You’re going too?’

  His lips came together in a thin line and he didn’t answer, so I knocked on the door instead.

  “Jesus Christ, Diego,” Javier swore from the other side. “What part of fuck and off do you not understand?”

  I knew that Diego was giving me an “it’s your funeral” look under those glasses but I didn’t care. I put my hand on the knob and opened the door.

  I stormed into the room, slamming the door behind me.

  Javier wasn’t with another woman, not at the moment. He had just been standing at the window and staring out at the jungle and the craggy hills that rose above it in the distance, barely visible now in the dusk. An open bottle of tequila and a full highball glass were on the table.

  He whirled around, ready to rage, his amber eyes flashing, but when he saw it was me, he stopped, stunned.

  “Luisa,” he said. Just the sound of his voice made me realize that I hadn’t come to find him in a long time.

  But I wasn’t there to make nice, not now. He might have been mad over some dumb mistake one of our men had made, but I was even more so.

  “Why didn’t you tell me!?” I yelled at him, marching right over to the window.

  He swallowed and took his time before he answered. “About what?”

  I gestured to the room. “Everything. You already got the federale?”

  He swallowed then raised his chin to look down on me. “What’s your point?”

  “My point?” I repeated, flabbergasted. I could feel my throat getting thick, my face growing hot. I prayed I wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t be weak. “My point is … is … Javier, I’m sick and tired of you pushing me away like this. Not telling me anything. We used to be a team.”

  His eyes didn’t change. His face became expressionless, like stone. “There was a place for that. Things are different now.”

  “But I am still your wife!”

  “And you knew what you were marrying when you agreed to become my wife,” he said, an edge now in his voice. “And sometimes, you have to accept that. Accept this.”

  “Accept that you kidnapped a federale without telling me about it, and are now holding him in the desert somewhere, where you are going tomorrow, all while I’m supposed to stay here?!”

  He raised a brow ever so slightly. “It is no place for a lady.”

  “Oh, we both know I am not and never will be a lady,” I said, almost sneering. “You’re just trying to get rid of me.”

  “So what if I am?”

  I froze, caught off-guard. He’d said that far too easily. “Just like that … I’m suddenly someone to be thrown away. You used to love me!” I pressed my hand hard into his chest where his heart should have been.

  With a slight narrowing of his eyes, he said, “This is for your own good. Don’t try and twist it around with some feminine woe-is-me bullshit.”

  “Woe is me?” I repeated incredulously.

  “There are bigger things going on here than just your feelings,” he said, stepping back and away from my hand, like he couldn’t stand for me to touch him at all. “Things that affect us all.”

  “Well how the fuck am I supposed to know that when you don’t tell me anything?!”

  He turned around, chewing on his lip briefly. “You want to know what’s going on?” he asked, his smooth tone suggesting I shouldn’t even be informed. “Our sicarios took Evaristo right out of his apartment outside Tijuana. He’s now at one of our fincas, outside the shithole town of La Perla, where he will stay until he gives us the information we need. When I get that information, I will take control over the Tijuana plaza.”

  “It’s too risky,” I said.

  “And that’s why I never asked for your opinion,” he stated. “Because I knew that’s what you’d say.”

  “Kidnapping a federale, Javier …”

  “It’s already been done,” he snapped. “And he will talk. And we will get what we want.”

  “But I won’t get what I want.” I let my words hang in the air. I wanted him to snap at them. He didn’t, though. Because he knew.

  He looked away. “Is that it?” he said softly. “You wanted to yell at me because I’m trying to keep you safe?”

  “How is keeping me here safe? You think because Artur and some of the guards will protect me? The only person who can really protect me is you.” And what I didn’t want to say was that I was afraid that if he left me here, he’d leave me to die. That it could all be part of some plan to get rid of me. Not the best thing to think about your husband, but I couldn’t help it. I felt lost with rage and rejection, and everything seemed like a threat.

  “The federales could come for Evaristo. They may track us. You would be safer here.”

  “I don’t believe you for a second.”

  “Fine,” he said. His voice was calm, but I could tell from the way he spun his watch around his wrist, the way the muscles in his neck looked strained, that he was close to erupting. “Don’t believe me. All I ask of you, as my wife, is to stay out of my way.”

  I couldn’t help but scoff. “That’s all you ask of me?”

  “Do you see me asking anything else?” His glare, his words, were knife sharp.

  My head shook slightly as I folded my arms and took a deep breath through my nose to try and steady everything that was about to blurt out. “How about turning a blind eye on all the women — the prostitutes, whores, whatever they are — that you’ve been fucking behind my back?”

  To his credit he kept his mask on, but his eyes flinched slightly. He didn’t say anything.

  “You think I didn’t know?” I said, coming up to him until I was inches away. His spicy scent filled my nose, something that would normally turn me on or bring me peace, but now it was bringing me nothing at all. All my rage was making me feel hollow, like it was carving me out from the middle. Still, I wouldn’t let it go. “You’re practically doing it in public, flaunting it, as if you want to prove that you can get away with it, as if you can get away with anything! You don’t care if it hurts me, or maybe it’s that you want to hurt me. Well, you’re doing it. It kills me, Javier. Kills me to know you’ve been unfaithful.”

  I watched him closely, my breath heavy, wanting to see something in his eyes, in his soul.

  But he only swallowed and said, “You don’t understand.”

  “Fuck you!” I yelled, my hands going against his hard chest and shoving him back. “I understand! What the fuck is there to understand?”

  “Calm down,” he said, putting his hands over my arms, but I swatted him away and pushed him back again. The fact that he was basically immovable made me angrier.

  “At least admit it! Admit it!”

  “Fine,” he said, his hand coming over my wrist and holding it hard, the pain almost hard to bear. “I admit it. Is that what you want to hear? Does that make you feel better?”

  “No,” I practically spat at him.

  “Does the fact that most of them don’t walk out of here alive, does that make you feel better?”

  “It makes it worse.” I grimaced, shaking my head vigorously. “You’re using your sister’s death as an excuse to be an asshole, a monster.”

  That got his attention. His pupils turned to tiny pinpricks in the amber. I regretted it, but there was too much anger and adrenaline rushing through me to back down now. I would not cower to him.

  “What did you just say?” he said through clenched teeth.

  Of course, now he was mad. He was upset. I practically had to throw rocks at him to get him to feel something.

  I straightened up and looked him dead in the eye. “Sometimes I wish your sister died long before I met you, as at least then I could have had an idea of what kind of husband you were going to be.”

  I didn’t see the hit coming. There was just a crack across my cheek, then stars, then black swirls at the edges of my sight. But I didn’t fall down. I think I was too stunned
to. I just held my cheek, the skin throbbing, the bone screaming, and stared wide-eyed at Javier.

  He had hit me. It was a slap across the face and I probably should have expected it, but he’d never hit me before. For all the painful, twisted things he’d done to me — that we’d done to each other — he’d never done this. It wasn’t his style to hit women, a slap or not.

  I didn’t know what his style was anymore. But now, now I feared it.

  I feared him.

  He stared at me in a rage, nostrils flaring, his chest heaving, and he jabbed his finger at me while I stood there, holding my cheek, trying to breathe through the shock of it all.

  “You do not disrespect my sister like that,” he growled, his voice rough and hard and frightening. “She is my family. She was my family. And that’s the one thing you obviously are not, because families do not disrespect each other.”

  I had nothing to say to that. No protests. And the apology I had, because really, I meant Alana no disrespect, was caught in my chest, unable to come out. I just stared at him, wondering what this meant now that I was no longer family.

  He watched me for a few moments, the two of us locked in our gazes, with so much anger that the air was electric between us. Then he winced as if pained, and turned away from me.

  “Get out,” he said quietly. “Please.” He paused before screaming, “Go!”

  I snapped to it and turned from him as quickly as I could, scuttling out of the room. I didn’t even look at Diego as I passed him and ran down the hall, hot tears burning behind my eyes.

  I couldn’t stay inside, couldn’t stand to feel the walls constricting around me. I rushed out of the house and into the dying light. Through the kitchen window I could see Esteban laughing, his hand on Juanito’s shoulder, who was smiling. At the time I barely registered it, but I would go back to that image later and wonder why Juanito wasn’t in trouble.

  I’d wonder about a lot of things.

  But as it was, I could only think about myself at that moment and how I was nothing more than a wounded animal. My cheek throbbed but the pain inside was far worse. It was debilitating, hindering my actual movement. I practically staggered all the way to the pond.