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She flicks a perfectly manicured fingernail at the door, and the guards leave, closing the door behind them.
Esperanza looks me up and down like she’s sizing me up for a fight.
I’m sure I could take her if it came to that, but not chained up like this and with her guards outside.
A sardonic smile spreads across her red-painted lips, and the humor spreads into her dark unfathomable eyes.
“Look at you. Imagine this.” She laughs. “I can’t believe I spent all those long years looking for you, and here you are, chained to a wall without daddy dearest to protect you, or your Knight.”
“You are one nasty piece of work.” I know my comeback is lame, but I have to say something.
“I am. You have to be in my line of work, where people take advantage of you. You are weak if you don’t fight back.”
“Is that what you were thinking when you killed my father?”
“Partly. By then I felt he deserved to die. I had no love left for him and no remorse when I watched him take his last breath.”
My heart aches at hearing this. “I thought you loved him. We couldn’t have him because he was bound to you. How could you shoot him in the way you did?”
“That part was his brother. I was far cleverer. I’m a biochemist, so when I kill you, I’ll make you suffer in ways you only hear about in nightmares. I swapped his allergy medication for something that would screw with his brain and dissolve it from the inside out. Manolo shot him just to make it look more legit.”
This woman is pure evil. I can see it in her eyes and oozing from her just like the scent of that sickly sweet perfume.
“Why? Why then?” That is the question I’m desperate to get an answer for. “Why did you kill him then? Why not before?”
She releases a short sigh and gives me a haughty glare from under her thick lashes. “Two reasons. Two things happened. First, he’d extinguished the threat I held over him to stop him from leaving me. He managed to find his enemy and kill him. So, my threat to expose Santiago for killing his enemy’s brother, no matter how accidental it was, was worth nothing. He came to me with divorce papers again. It was at that moment that he found me in bed with his brother.”
“Wow, I guess you had to have them both?”
“It wasn’t that as such. Santiago didn’t love me, but his brother showed me some sort of love. Even if he didn’t love me either, he didn’t plan to leave me in the wind with nothing the way your father did.” She smirks and brings her hands together. “That brings me to the second thing.”
“Which is?” My voice is demanding and imbued with a confidence I don’t really feel.
“Santiago changing his will. Before he found out his brother was sleeping with me, he trusted him like none other. Not enough to tell him about the identity of his mistress or the secret child he had with her, but he trusted him with the business. Until then.” She shifts her weight from one foot to the next, and her heels scratch against the floor. “Manolo was always second-in-command to him. The agreement was if anything were to ever happen to Santiago, Manolo would take over. The revised will’s existence fucked everything up. Santiago intended to rule by himself, but we put a stop to that. We couldn’t change the will because it was tied legally to the pharmaceutical company, but what we had was better than nothing. It was unfortunate that Manolo died, but Diego planned to ensure I was never without. Then Malik Volkova happened, and he unearthed the one thing that could destroy us.”
“Me.” I stare back at her feeling the cold of her Arctic stare chilling my bones.
“You. Gwen.”
Now I have the answers, my body feels like it might turn inside out and never stop until there’s nothing left of me.
“Weeks ago, when we learned about you, I looked up your mother and her death. Things made more sense.” Esperanza inclines her head. “Thetimingmade sense of when Santiago set everything up the way he did, and so quickly. As well as his grief he never shared with anyone. The love of his life died, and he was going to take care of his little girl.”
“You took that away from me.”
“You talk to me as if I care. As if I should. As if I’m supposed to feel some compassion for you. Don’t you realize you shouldn’t even exist?”
Those words sting my soul because I’ve thought them before.
“You are a bastard child who should have been killed,” she spits. “You and your pathetic mother, who thought it was okay to spread her legs wide open for a married man. My entire life was created to marry that man, and I hated that I loved him.”
“I apologize for my mother and father’s infidelity, but it has nothing to do with me. I exist, and I’m a person.”
“Of course, spoken like a true princess.” Her mocking tone is full of venom. “I might have been able to accept your father’s betrayal because I couldn’t have children, but he just didn’t love me. The harder I worked to find out who you and your mother were and where you were, the harder it became to find you, the more I realized how much he loved you both. He invested his life trying to protect you. In our world, most men don’t want their families to be involved in the business, but he was protecting you from us. Fromme.”
The breath in my lungs stills, like it’s been switched off, and my heart aches even more for my father.
Malik was right, like with most things. He said the truth hurts worse than the lies. It does, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
