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‘It’s for your own protection,’ he said. ‘I know you want to go outside.’
Because I had begged him to go outside. To shop for groceries, to feel the wet sand beneath my feet, to breathe in the fresh air on my balcony.
I got my wish.
I got to go outside, whenever I wanted, Guillermo Reyes always by my side or five steps behind.
It was easier, I decided soon afterwards, to be alone and locked up in a glass tower than to have someone watching my every move.
I realised much too late that things are almost never as bad as you think they are, and just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change again.
I wanted to go outside. I wanted to stop feeling so alone.
I got my wish.
I was never allowed to be alone again.
CHAPTER THREE
MARIANA
2007
NINE YEARS GONE
Sunday.
A sacred day. The one day a week when I was guaranteed time with Dornan.
I just had to jump through a few hoops first.
He’d been late to pick me up, which wasn’t a surprise. Still, I didn’t like it. I hovered inside the entry to the apartment – I still didn’t feel right calling it my apartment, even though I’d spent almost a decade trapped between its walls – and paced nervously. My black patent stilettos clicked on the tiles as I walked back and forth, wanting to wait outside in the fresh air and open space, but knowing Dornan wouldn’t be happy to find me out there. Because, according to him, I was something to be protected. Something to be hidden away.
I was about to fix another coffee when I heard boots thunking on the concrete stairwell, getting louder as he approached. It felt silly that even after all these years, he made my stomach buzz nervously just by showing up. I hadn’t seen him in weeks, since he’d been away and then he was tied up with his wife and kids, but today was ours. At least, this afternoon was ours. Once we’d served our purposes to other people, we could serve each other.
There was a snort from the man sitting at the kitchen counter. ‘Your master is here, bitch.’
I narrowed my eyes at Guillermo, my excitement fading.
He laughed, slapping his leg with a hand covered in gang tattoos. Guillermo was now a constant in my life. He was my unofficial bodyguard, babysitter and someone who watched over me when Dornan wasn’t around. He lived in my apartment, ate my food, drank my good coffee and annoyed the living shit out of me every minute of the day. Don’t get me wrong – he wasn’t a bad person, or at least no worse than any other small-time gangster-slash-biker.
However, he was in my apartment. It was technically Dornan’s, owned by some dummy corporation on paper, won in a poker game years before I’d arrived and now a convenient hideout for me. And, sadly, Guillermo. He was in my apartment, and I very much did not want him to be here, because Dornan had arrived.
‘Jealous?’ I asked, smiling sweetly as I slammed two coffee cups down in front of me.
Guillermo, Latino and thirty-something, was attractive in an unkempt, rugged sort of way, but he wasn’t my type. One of Dornan’s thugs, he was also a fully patched member of the Gypsy Brothers and a skilled drug trafficker. He knew everything about me. Almost everything. He knew as much as Dornan and Emilio. As far as I could tell, Murphy was still the only one who knew for sure the details about my son.
‘Nah,’ Guillermo answered. ‘Just thinking should I get my earplugs before you two start fucking like dogs in here.’
I scowled. ‘You could always leave,’ I suggested helpfully. ‘Don’t you have something to do? Somewhere to be?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied stonily. ‘At the clubhouse. Church is about to start, and if you make me late—’
‘I hardly think they’ll notice if you’re there or not,’ I interrupted. ‘You’re not the president or anything.’
He laugh-snorted, shaking his head. ‘Your man ain’t the prez, either, cholita.’
I looked around the apartment, as if he were talking to somebody else. ‘Since when do you call me cholita? That’s Emilio’s thing.’
