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This must be Don Diego, I thought. The expression on his face didn’t give me much hope that any of us would live to see tomorrow.
“So,” he said, once we were all looking at him. “I finally have the sons of Esteban Cruz—the man who stole my house from me!”
“My father never stole anything—the DEA kicked you out of the country and he bought it at an auction,” Gabriel growled.
Don Diego made a curt gesture to one of the men holding a gun on Gabriel.
“Don’t shoot him but shut him up,” he said.
I gasped as the man turned his gun around and clubbed Gabriel in the face with the butt of the assault rifle.
Gabriel took the hit and swayed on his knees for a moment but didn’t fall over. Blood trickled from his temple as he glared at the laptop, but he didn’t say anything else.
“There. Now you know the way it is with Don Diego,” the man on the laptop said. “When he speaks, you listen.”
I had a bad feeling about the way he was referring to himself in the third person. Only narcissists and psychopaths talked like that, right?
“They’re listening, Don Diego,” the man holding the laptop said respectfully.
“Good. And are you filming? Not just with your phone—I want a good, high-quality picture,” he added.
“As you see, Don Diego, we got the equipment you asked for.”
The man holding the laptop turned it towards the corner across from us and I saw something I had missed before. There was a professional looking camera mounted on a tripod as well as a boom microphone and another tripod with one of those lights surrounded by shiny gold foil—a diffuser I think it’s called, though I don’t know for sure.
I wondered how I had missed the movie equipment before—possibly I had been slightly distracted by the men with AK47s pointed at our heads.
“Good, very good,” Don Diego said. “Be sure you record their deaths. I want that hijo de puta, Cruz to see the execution of his sons in detail.”
I felt cold inside. He spoke in such a calm tone, as though he was ordering a sandwich from a deli instead of a triple homicide. We were going to die here and now—this was the end of all of us!
“Wait!” Gabriel exclaimed and I was afraid Don Diego would order that he should be clubbed in the head again, but he only nodded in a sanguine way.
“You wish to say some last words to your cabron of a father, no doubt. Very well, Don Diego will allow it.”
“No, I’m talking to you, Don Diego,” Gabriel said. “Shoot me and Christopher if you want to, but please let our little sister go free.”
“Zoe’s done nothing to you— you can’t shoot an innocent girl!” Christopher chimed in.
“Your little sister, you say?” Don Diego leaned forward, giving us all a better view of his jowly, bulldog face. “She looks nothing like either of you.”
“She has a different mother,” Gabriel said quickly. “Please—just let her go.”
“Hmm…” For a moment the drug lord actually seemed to be considering it. I was torn between feeling a cautious kind of hope for myself and a terrible fear for my stepbrothers. I was also touched that Gabriel and Christopher would make a plea on my behalf—especially after the fight we’d had in the sedan.
But Don Diego’s next words made my stomach drop like a stone.
“She’s very pretty, this little sister of yours,” he remarked. He made a motion with one hand. “Stand her up,” he said.
Immediately the man behind me put a hand under my arm and hauled me to my feet. I stood there, feeling frozen with fear as Don Diego studied me.
I had on a prim white A-line dress with many tiny buttons down the front that my stepfather had ordered me to wear. I guess he must have thought it would make me look pure and virginal, though now it was dusty and dirty and crumpled.
I wondered what the drug lord saw when he looked at me—it was impossible to tell from his eyes, they never changed even as he studied me from head to foot.
“Take off her clothes,” he said at last.
“What? You fucking cabron!” Gabriel roared and started to charge to his feet. The man holding a gun on him clubbed him again, but still he tried to get up.
On my other side, Christopher was struggling too. He was trying to put himself between me and the man who was now pawing at my dress. I was afraid in a moment the situation would get out of control and the shooting would start but I couldn’t stop myself from twisting away from the man who was trying to undress me.
“Stop!” Don Diego roared, raising his voice to be heard. “Don’t touch her—just strip her. Shut the other two up, if you have to but don’t shoot them,” he added.
