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It’s not just about me. If I tell him, he’ll kill Helena. As much as I hate Helena for the phone call and the fear, I don’t want her dead. I’m so tired of being the cause of someone’s death.
The money is there. I don’t need it. I never plan to use it. I’ll send her everything if it means she leaves me alone.
* * *
Manuel
The call comes in only minutes after I’m advised the plane is preparing to land. It’s Nicolette. She never calls me. “Nicolette, are you all right?”
She’s fighting tears. Fuck. “No. Please. I’m sorry. I need you. The cat I told you about who got into Elias’ nursery and had the kittens then scratched up Tessa and Elias the other day—the scratches got infected. Tessa is home sick. Elias’ infection got bad. I took him into the hospital, and they’re keeping him. He’s going to be okay but they’re keeping him overnight. I just… I’m sorry. I need you.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can, baby. I’m on my way.”
Less than twenty minutes after we land, we’re back in the air fueled to get back to Colombia. The pilot tells me it’s going to take five hours. I spend the time seething with frustration as I learn what Nicolette has been dealing with all alone, from Ana. Her mother left only a few days after me. My father has been back in Los Angeles since the day I got home from our honeymoon.
Is this why she’s been so distant for the last few days when I called? I shake my head. Elias got the scratches the day of the call where she was first different.
My father is pissed but tells me he’ll handle the business I was in Houston to deal with. I don’t care. I’ve been gone almost eight days. Retrieving our hijacked shipment in Albania took too fucking long.
I’m met at the hospital by a doctor who gives me a spiel of Elias’ treatment. How they are simply keeping him overnight for observation. It isn’t easy to keep the mask in place. I’m nodding, but I don’t care. All I want is to get to Nicolette.
She falls into my arms. I hold her tightly. “I’m sorry—”
I shake my head. “Don’t. Don’t apologize to me. I should be here for you. You shouldn’t be calling me and pleading for me to come home. I’m going to talk to my father. We have to figure this out so I’m not gone all the damn time.”
“Why is it always you who has to retrieve it? Why not make it the problem of the bad guys in the area? There’s no way it’s getting snatched and hidden without other dirty players knowing what happened and where it’s going.”
The question is one I had for my father when we spent days in Mexico to retrieve a hijacked shipment at fifteen. My little mafia princess knew too many things about dark and ugly shit.
“If we did, there would be far more death and destruction. The reason why we’ve stayed on top for so long is the death we deal is limited to only the baddest of bad. It’s precision surgery cutting out the worst. Once civilians get hit in the crossfire, someone has to pay for the death. There is never going to be a time when bad shit goes away completely. It becomes a who is the least of the bad.”
Her sigh is heavy. “It’s too bad you don’t have a tracker on your shipment the way Valdez tracks us.”
“We do, but the fuckers always manage to disable it. Our satellite access helped us find shipments in the past—until my nephew sunk his grandfather’s operation a few years ago. The dumb idiot thought if he sold the piece with the satellite access he could use the money to hold up the rest of it. Never mind we would have paid twice what he sold it for.” I shake my head. Years later, I’m still pissed by how my time in the air increased because of it.
“That sucks.” A little frown appears in her forehead. She opens her mouth, only to close it again while shaking her head.
“What, Nicky?” I urge her. “I don’t want you afraid to say whatever you’re thinking.”
A self-conscious shrug. “I remembered an article about NASA. How they hadn’t sent anyone into space since 2011. They’re basically spending their time sending stuff up. They undercut other companies to send satellites up for big corporations as another way of funding.”
Pay to send our own satellite up? The idea never crossed my mind.
She rushes to fill the silence. “I mean, I know it’s a lot of money. I’m not sure how much it would cost. The article didn’t say that. But… I was just thinking.”
Running my hand through her hair, I press a kiss to her cheek. “I love the thought. I’m going to look into it,” I promise her.
In only minutes, she falls asleep in my arms. All I want is to take her home and put her to bed.
The child shifts in the small crib they have him in. He seems fine to me. I grab his chart to see if I can talk the doctors into releasing him. It’s obvious I’m not getting her home without him.
A scan of the chart says everything the doctors already said. I stop reading when I see it, the child is mine. His blood type couldn’t be what it is if he were Felix’s.
I study him again. The information doesn’t change my lack of feeling for him. It was one of the things that upset Blanca the most, my inability to show care for the children.
Her repeated begging for me to hold Ofelia only caused me to resent the small screaming baby. It was as though Blanca believed I was withholding feeling to hurt her or the baby.
No matter how many times she said she understood, when she got stressed, she screamed I was a monster for not caring about a defenseless baby. If it were Blanca who called me, she would have demanded I hold the child and pay him attention the moment I came through the door. Yet, there is none of that with Nicolette. Despite her surprise by my lack of care for the children, she accepted it and understood she would be the one to provide it for them.
