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Dornan was an enigma, a combination of brutality and tenderness, wrapped up in one man. The only son of my ‘owner’, Il Sangue kingpin Emilio, Dornan had been the one who’d saved me from being sold into sexual slavery. Emilio had intended to reclaim the money my father owed by selling me as a whore in one of his slave auctions, but Dornan had convinced him that I was more valuable as a money launderer in the cartel business. I’d proved him right very quickly, and we’d fallen for each other even faster.
Everyone in my immediate family thought that I was dead – they thought that Emilio’s men had killed me on the night they shot up my family’s home – and somehow that made it simpler to disconnect from my old existence. Dornan thought it’d be easier that way – for them, because they’d be able to stop searching, and for me, because I’d be free from the soul-crushing guilt of knowing they were looking for me while I was hiding in plain sight with the Gypsy Brothers in Los Angeles. I never had a choice in the matter. The man I was falling in love with dragged me up a rocky mountain, kissed me and then made me watch as my brother and father dug up a headless corpse they’d been led to believe was me.
And I still fell in love with him. I’m smart, but maybe I’m also really, really stupid. Because I truly did love Dornan Ross, with every part of my dark soul. I needed him like I needed air to breathe. I came alive whenever he was around me. My light to his dark, a delicate balance of pleasure and pain.
We were like a match made in heaven.
Wait. That’s wrong.
We were a match made in hell.
CHAPTER TWO
MARIANA
1999
SIX MONTHS GONE
Every cartel needs someone who can make their dirty money clean, and I was the best damn money launderer on the West Coast.
Six months after I’d arrived in Los Angeles, John Portland – president of the Gypsy Brothers Motorcycle Club and Dornan’s best friend – paid me a visit. I’m not sure why he chose that particular day, or why he’d waited months to voice his suspicions about who and what I really was. Maybe he’d wanted to bide his time, watch me, make sure he wasn’t raising any suspicions by visiting me at home, away from the strip club and the Gypsy Brothers clubhouse where we frequently crossed paths.
We shared the same small office at the clubhouse but John was hardly ever there. I suppose presiding over a one-percenter biker gang like the Gypsy Brothers wasn’t really a job you could do from behind a desk. But he was always around, delivering big crumpled bundles of cash for me to clean and launder, picking up packages that were probably full of drugs or guns, monitoring the front business that allowed us to channel money obtained illegally through a legal avenue – peepshows and lap dances. The reality was the strip club (or ‘burlesque club’, as they somewhat euphemistically called it) ran at a loss, and the majority of the clientele were Gypsy Brothers, who came in for free blow jobs and beer in between their club business. The dollar bills floating around this club were usually reserved for snorting coke, not stuffing in strippers’ panties.
I’d learned much about John Portland in the six months since Emilio had parked me in the back office of the VaVa Voom strip club with a pile of blood-smeared hundred dollar bills and a boxy old computer that whirred whenever it overheated. Tidbits of information that I had filed away for the future, just in case.
John had a wife who liked to shoot drugs into her arm to make her forget she was a biker’s wife, a daughter who was the light in his world, and a club full of Gypsy Brothers he was responsible for leading. He was covered in tattoos, mostly over his muscled arms and up his neck, the only part not covered was his face. The club tattoo that stretched across his tanned back was the largest, and I’d seen it only once, when he’d been stabbed in the stomach by a rival gang member and he stitched his wound in front of me. Yeah, John Portland was a bad ass. His blue eyes, ringed with hazel flecks, were framed by dark blonde hair, and he alternated between clean-shaven and a full beard. With the tattoos and the bike, it didn’t really take away from the tough exterior when he shaved the beard off. He still looked like he could kill you with his bare hands.
I’d learned some other things about him. He was kind. He was thoughtful. He liked to surf. When he smiled, his whole being lit up. He almost never smiled, though, instead wearing a constant hard-set expression that was halfway between a grimace and a frown. Most of all, I’d learned that he was trapped here, just like me. He might not have realised it – hell, maybe he did – but he was as much a pawn in the Il Sangue Cartel as I was . . . maybe even more.
Six months in and John Portland knew nothing about me besides the fact that I carried a photograph of a small baby around with me. Christopher Murphy, a federal air marshal and Emilio’s long-term link to bribing the American government, had stolen it from me and used it to try and extort sex and compliance from me in exchange for his silence. Until John arrived. He had never spoken of the photo again after he wrestled it from Murphy and silently returned it to me months later, and for that I was eternally grateful.
But John knew, and I didn’t know what he would do with my secret. I’d vowed early on to give him nothing else – not one more shred of incriminating evidence that he could potentially use against me. Whenever he asked anything about me or my family I would find a way to change the subject, to deflect his questioning, to respond with something vague and non-committal. I was very, very careful with my past, with the way I interacted with people. One word answers. Blank stares. Outright ignorance. The strippers who frequented the hallways didn’t call me The Ice Queen for nothing. Sometimes, if they were particularly bitter, The Ice Cunt. But I’d only heard that once, from a girl called Mindy. After Dornan threatened to knock all her teeth out and set her up as the permanent blowjob station in the corner of the club, she didn’t say it again. After that, none of the girls had really spoken to me, let alone bothered me. The only person who ever spoke to me outside of the holy trinity – Dornan, Emilio and Murphy – was John.
But for all of my one-word answers, blank stares and outright ignorance, it felt like John Portland could lower my guard without me even noticing, until it was too late and I’d revealed parts of myself better left in the dark.
I don’t think he knew what I really was – a prisoner – or maybe he just didn’t want to admit it to himself – until he came to see me at the apartment one day. Dornan was in Mexico on Gypsy Brothers business, and I needed to be checked on, obviously. John knocked on the door. I waited for him to punch in the code and come in, but he didn’t.
‘Mariana!’ he yelled, kicking the bottom of the door. ‘I’ve got my hands full, can you let me in?’
I panicked.
I still wasn’t trusted with the code to my own apartment. Other select people could get in, but I couldn’t get out. Dornan said it was for my own protection.
And it had worked fine. Until John.
‘Uh, just key in the code and come in,’ I replied, rooted to my spot on the couch.
He yelled a few more times, but I couldn’t move. I was paralysed with fear. I knew he suspected something wasn’t right, from the first moment he’d laid his baby blue eyes on me and demanded to know who I was, and what the hell I was doing in his office. He wasn’t an idiot.
Eventually, he punched in the code himself. The front door to my apartment swung open and there he was, his helmet in his hand and a question on his face. I got up and hurried to the door, as if I’d been about to open it.
‘Can I get a hand here?’ he asked.
Barefoot, I stepped out onto the landing with him. There was nothing there.
‘I thought you said your hands were full,’ I said, looking around.
