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‘If you do that enough times, the alarm gets triggered. Dornan gets a call. How the hell are we supposed to explain us being stuck in here?’
Guillermo sagged against the door. ‘Well, how the fuck are we supposed to get out? We don’t turn up to church, Boss is gonna notice that, too, send out a fucking search party to cut our nuts off.’
John was already dialling Mariana’s cell. She answered on the second ring, and he heard the noise of the highway in the background.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ John asked, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible. He didn’t need her hanging up on him.
‘I’m meeting with Emilio,’ she said, her voice sounding far away. He imagined the way she’d balance the cellphone on her knees while she drove, her hair blowing around her face as she cruised down the freeway. She always drove with the windows down, no matter what the weather was like outside. Said it made her feel alive.
Well, she wouldn’t be alive much longer if she was going to pull shit like this.
Guillermo leaned over towards John and yelled, ‘You’d better let us out of this fucking place, now!’
John narrowed his eyes at Guillermo, as if to say, what the fuck? He purposefully took three steps away from him, staring at the tiled floor as he pinched the bridge of his nose.
‘Just tell me what you’re doing,’ John said wearily. ‘Tell me why you’ve got a gun and six bullets and don’t want us to come with you to your meeting with Emilio.’
‘She took the box,’ Guillermo said. At first John was confused, until he looked to where Guillermo was pointing at the kitchen counter, where a box of human ashes had sat just minutes ago.
‘And a box of ashes,’ John added, a feeling of utter dread forming in the pit of his stomach and travelling like icy tentacles to every part of his body, until he was consumed by the feeling. His heart beat faster as he imagined the countless horrible fates that would befall the woman he loved, should she try anything so stupid as to murder Emilio Ross in his own building, surrounded by security and family and no doubt his own fucking son across the desk.
Mariana’s voice came through clearly. ‘Emilio needs to die. Then we can all be free.’
She ended the call. John looked at the screen in disbelief.
‘Call Dornan,’ John said to Guillermo, as he pocketed the phone and picked up a heavy brass vase that sat in the foyer.
‘And tell him that Mariana’s on her way to kill Emilio?’ Guillermo asked in disbelief.
John looked at the floor-to-ceiling window that butted up against the front door and prayed it wasn’t bulletproof. ‘No,’ he said, gripping the neck of the vase with two hands and rearing it back like a baseball bat. ‘Tell him you got clumsy again and broke the fucking window.’
Guillermo looked up from his phone. ‘Huh?’
John swung.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARIANA
I’d put on my best calm voice on the phone, but as soon as I’d ended John’s call, a mile from the Gypsy Brothers clubhouse, I had started to shake. I drove down Abbot Kinney and turned onto Venice Boulevard, passing tourists and moms pushing strollers with one hand, Starbucks firmly gripped in the other. People liked to think of Venice as a hip, grungy place, but if they knew what happened inside the nondescript warehouse I was pulling up to, they’d drop their pumpkin spiced lattes onto the pavement and run.
I parked in front of the clubhouse and gripped my steering wheel, trying to catch a breath. Dark desires stirred within me, ones that had lain dormant for years, the spark of the girl I had been when I was first thrust into this life. The girl I had been forced to be when I killed first Murphy, then his partner, Allie.
Breathe in.
I was probably going to die in the next thirty minutes.
Breathe out.
I was going to die because my shock had worn off, and in its place, a violent rage had taken hold of me. I was its willing hostage, its dutiful foot soldier, its vengeful lover.
Breathe in.
It spread through my veins like poison, an elaborate network of arteries and organs that ached for reprisal. My pale shocked cheeks were now flushed with anger as I placed a palm on the office door and pushed, not bothering to knock.
* * *
Emilio Ross sat behind the great wooden desk in an office he occupied for two hours every week. He didn’t need anything so elaborate, but he insisted for the other 166 hours a week, that this room was off-limits. Normally, I knocked and waited for his gruff invitation to enter.
