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PROLOGUE
MARIANA
Of all the things in life, love is the most confusing. The most all-consuming. The reason we breathe, the light in our darkness.
At sixteen, love devastated me, his perfect button nose and sweet-baby smell overwhelming as my father took him from my arms and into the night. At nineteen, love saved me, a dangerous man with a heart that was determined to own mine. At twenty-nine love almost freed me . . . but in the end, love broke me.
I wish I could tell you that things ended differently — but I’d be lying. I don’t know if he regrets what he did, or if he’s happy, but it doesn’t matter, really.
It doesn’t change the fact that the man who loved me ended up being the same man who would destroy me.
CHAPTER ONE
EMILIO
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA, DECEMBER 1998
The fucker owed him money.
Emilio Ross paced across the verandah that flanked his brother’s house. Beneath him, the city of Bogota sprawled herself out in a dazzling array of lights, a city peppered with skyscrapers and lush green mountains that rose up in the distance like a protective shroud.
It was beautiful, and he couldn’t wait to fucking leave.
‘How much?’ Emilio asked, sucking on his cigar and letting the smoke leave his mouth with a humph.
Julian, his younger brother, uncrossed his legs and set his snifter of brandy down beside him. ‘Thirty.’
Emilio’s fists tightened around his own brandy balloon, a hairline crack appearing in the delicate glass. ‘Thirty?’
‘It was a large shipment, boss.’
Julian always called him boss when they spoke business.
Emilio stuck his cigar between his teeth and attempted to channel a sense of calm. He was the kingpin of the Il Sangue Cartel, the goddamn owner of the coke empire that ran from the depths of Colombia all the way across the gulf, its tendrils reaching into northern California and beyond.
He was Italian mafioso — la famiglia — and when he made up his mind, axes fell, and heads rolled. Whether the thugs and mobsters he hired lived or died meant nothing to a man like Emilio Ross.
But family — ah, yes, family was different. There was an unspoken rule between the cartels of South America.
Hands off the family. After all, Il Sangue was Italian for ‘the blood’, and blood was thicker than water in the cartel. It meant something. Il Sangue è sacra. Famiglia è sacra. Those were the words he lived by.
If you crossed the cartel, you got a bullet, simple as that. But your family, your wife and your kids, would go unharmed. At your funeral, a cartel lackey would deliver your wife a couple of hundred bucks to get by on, maybe more if you’d been a long-time employee, and you’d have taken your last breath knowing that at least your family would be okay after you were dead and buried.
But thirty grand worth of coke was a big fuck-up. A royally big fuck-up. Because the thirty grand it cost to produce, package and ship Colombia’s finest white powder would turn into half a million dollars of pure profit by the time it hit the streets of Los Angeles and was divvied up among the small-time dealers and suppliers.
Five hundred thousand dollars in potential profit, and Marco Rodriguez had driven the goddamn truck right into the open arms of the American Drug Enforcement Administration. Emilio’s coke was in lockdown in some government warehouse, the dealers of Los Angeles were screaming for more product to fill the void, and Emilio was down half a million big ones.
He cast Julian an irritated look. Julian stopped chewing on the ice cube in his mouth and let it sit on his tongue.
‘Can we get into the DEA warehouse?’ Emilio asked, already knowing the answer.
Julian shook his head, swallowing his ice. ‘Nope.’
Emilio nodded in resignation. ‘Then, you know what we need to do.’
‘Pay Marco a visit?’
Even the mention of the fucker’s name made Emilio want to smash his fists into the man until his eyeballs burst and his teeth shattered.
