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Cristiano grabbed Diego by the shirt. “I hope those ten minutes alone with her were worth it. Now tell me which hand you’d prefer to lose.”
“Enough,” came a bark from the doorway. I turned as my father took a few measured paces, his expensive loafers silent on the wood floors.
Cristiano released Diego with a shove.
“Cristiano has attacked me.” Diego fixed his collar, looking to me for back up. I wouldn’t offer it—not to either man. “He has attacked your family,” he continued, “and proven what I’ve known all along—he isn’t the man we once knew.”
“None of us are,” Papá said, pausing at my side.
In that moment, they were two wards of the cartel, standing before their fed-up jefe.
Papá sighed as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. “When night falls, I’m alone in the dark with only my character. The choices I’ve made, if I’ve kept my word—and whether I’ve stayed true to myself and my instincts.”
I looked up at my father as lines crinkled around his eyes. He wouldn’t end this. The deal was done. He was the man in my life, but today, my trust in him had eroded just a little.
Cristiano gave a satisfied rumble from his chest. “What do your instincts tell you, don Costa?”
Papá looked between the both of them. “Leave my home. And don’t return.”
I didn’t have to see which brother his eyes had landed on, but my nerves flared nonetheless. A day ago, I would’ve fallen to my knees and begged my father to pardon and forgive the boy I loved, but Diego’s sins were too great—and his betrayal had cut this family too deep.
“I am not the enemy here, Costa,” Diego said, a tremor of panic in his voice. “You’re alone at night because you lost your wife. We may never have hard evidence Cristiano was behind it, but you know in your heart he was.”
“I know in my heart that he wasn’t,” my father said.
He’d said it before, and his mind was made up. I hoped, for my sake, he was right.
Diego narrowed his eyes. “You seem to forget Cristiano blew up one of our tunnels and killed a number of our men at the warehouse last week—an attack which almost took Natalia, too.”
“A nearly inexcusable offense,” my father agreed. “But one you’re guilty of as well, since you made the deal in the first place. Cristiano has promised to make it up to me.”
“I’m not the enemy,” Diego repeated with conviction.
“No?” Papá asked, fisting his hands. “You never planned to fuck me over? Never thought about it?” His body seemed to grow bigger beside me. “Never wondered what it might be like to back me into a corner—and use my daughter to do it,”—his voice boomed so loudly, the windows nearly shook—“and break her heart and fuck her when I explicitly told you to stay away?” He thrust his finger at the door. “Get out!”
Diego’s jaw looked painfully tight as he stared at us. My cheeks burned with the heat of a thousand suns, and I wished for a trapdoor in the ground to swallow me up just then.
“You nearly got us all killed,” Papá said evenly, but no less threatening. “You went behind my back and tried to take Natalia from me.”
“And I failed.” Diego seethed more quietly than my father. “But Cristiano succeeded. He’s the one who’s fucking her now—in more ways than one.”
Cristiano turned his head, looking cool and collected, but his neck corded. For a moment, I thought he might make good on his promise to remove one of Diego’s body parts.
“And that’s no longer your concern,” my father said. “My instincts—and those of my beloved wife, God rest her soul—tell me this is where you and I part ways, Diego.”
And that was it—Papá’s word was the final one. Barto waited by the door, and Diego was forced to walk through his past—by his brother, his benefactor, and his lost love—and toward as uncertain a future as mine.
“May God protect you when I can’t, my love,” Diego said softly to me as he passed. He glanced over his shoulder at Cristiano. “And may He protect you from the devil—as He has me.”
I was beginning to learn it wasn’t God’s job to protect me, and it certainly wasn’t Diego’s. Even Papá hadn’t been able to reverse this. The job was mine. I wanted to go back to the way things were—to fall into Diego’s embrace and believe that he’d fix this. To let my trust in my father overflow as it always had. But they had both failed me, and the sting was fresh. Neither had given me any reason today to believe he wouldn’t fail me again.
I was on my own.
9
Natalia
Taking the terrain at a higher speed than we had yet, I jostled in the cab of Max’s pickup truck on our way back from my father’s house. We sailed over rocks and potholes right up until we entered the gates of the Badlands and Max slowed down.
