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‘I’m so wet right now,’ I said casually, just loud enough for John to hear. ‘If I sit down in your car, I’m going to mess your seat up.’
‘Fuck you. I’m going to get coffee,’ he muttered. ‘Make sure that little shit doesn’t touch my daughter.’ He walked away without looking back at me. I snickered, wondering how obvious my nipples were underneath my black tank top.
I didn’t mess John’s car seat up, but we did ditch the kids pretty soon after that. Dropped them back at my apartment and made sure they were securely inside before we drove to a deserted football field and fucked until we were raw and panting.
We were getting careless.
Looking back, it was a miracle nobody found out about us sooner. But I couldn’t focus on that then, naked and spread open along the backseat of John’s car as he pounded me into the leather. Both of us slick with sweat, my head slamming against the car door with every thrust, his hands pressing my knees so wide it felt like I’d break in two. We fucked like two people about to be murdered, two death row prisoners tied together, devouring each other, one last meal while we waited for the executioner to come and blow a bullet through each of us.
We fucked like we were starved, like dirty, raw copulation was the only thing that could feed us, the only act that could make us whole again.
We loved each other so much, it was a wonder we didn’t just burst into flames from the strength of our desperation right then and there.
We’d burn eventually.
I think we both understood that.
We just didn’t know when the Reaper was coming to collect our corrupted souls.
CHAPTER TWO
MARIANA
I was cutting into a red bell pepper a few days later when my phone buzzed. I still remember the moment like it was yesterday – the way the sun was perched high on the horizon, ready to swallow up the shadow of my apartment building that overlooked Santa Monica Beach; the Ferris wheel on the pier, a giant silhouette against the bright blue sky. I can taste the pepper in my mouth, sharp and cold from the refrigerator; I can hear the waves as they crash onto the shore beneath my apartment. I can still remember opening the window, a cool breeze hitting my face as I marvelled at how the sky and John’s eyes could be exactly the same colour.
Peace was always fleeting in my world.
My twenty-ninth birthday and I was still here. Still with Dornan. Still with John. Trapped between three men: one that I loved, one that I used to love, and one that I despised with every fibre of my being.
And number three, lucky last, was calling me. Emilio flashed up on my cellphone, and I was so startled I almost chopped my fingers clean off.
Emilio never called me. I wasn’t even sure he had my number until that moment. Why would he call me? Maybe Dornan was dead. The thought briefly occurred to me, and then it was gone, a wisp of smoke on a summer breeze. Maybe Dornan is dead.
I set my knife down and hit the green answer button, bring the phone to my ear.
‘Happy birthday, Mariana,’ Emilio drawled. I heard loud noise, traffic in the background. I remembered Dornan telling me his father had travelled to Bogota for a meeting with his brother, Julian. Perhaps that explained the noise.
They were still searching for Christopher Murphy, shady DEA agent and Emilio’s right-hand man. They’d never find him, though – this I knew for certain.
They didn’t know, though. They were still searching for answers to his disappearance. If only Emilio knew what I’d done, I thought to myself, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I remembered how Murphy’s blood had tasted, how my ears had buzzed for a week after I’d shot him in the face at point-blank range.
‘Did you kill my family?’ I whispered. Realisation spiked in his eyes, and his entire body tensed. A wave of nausea rolled through me.
He didn’t respond, but the answer was clear as day in his eyes; in the way he looked away for a split second before meeting my gaze again, in the stunned expression on his face, in the heavy exhale that came from his chest. His mouth around the gun was revolting, the metallic knock of tooth on polished steel enough to make me cringe.
I saw the questions in his eyes. How? How did I know? How had I found out what he’d done?
‘You really think I didn’t check on my family in nine years?’ I whispered. ‘How stupid are you? How stupid do you think I am?’
And then, before I lost my nerve, I pulled the heavy trigger back. I’d just killed a man as he hate-fucked me, and I was pretty sure I was going to be murdered brutally for it.
I was the murderess who had finally put Christopher Murphy in the ground – or, more accurately, in a crematorium – and Emilio could never know.
‘Thank you,’ I said, pressing my fingers against my eyelids. Emilio Ross wasn’t the kind of man to wish me a happy birthday. He was the kind of man who thought I took up too much air just by breathing in the same room as him.
‘I got you something,’ he added, and I stiffened. Swallowing thickly, I tried not to panic. It’s probably nothing.
But it was never nothing with Emilio.
