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Emilio watched his son wordlessly, dragging a packet of expensive-looking Italian cigarettes from his top pocket and sliding them through grimy ash towards his son. Dornan picked up the packet gingerly, shaking off ash before he opened it and withdrew a smoke. Placing it between his teeth, he took the lighter from inside the packet and lit up.
It tasted good. So good. Emilio raised his eyebrows as if to say What about me? and Dornan slid the packet back, making sure to avoid the mess Mariana had made on the table.
‘She didn’t call you,’ Emilio said, lighting up his own cigarette. ‘I’m surprised. If not you – who?’
Dornan had to think about that for a moment. Who had Mariana called when she’d received a dead child on her doorstep? The thought of her in that moment was horrifying to Dornan. He loved her more than almost anything. He loved her so fiercely, sometimes it scared him. And she hadn’t called him when something so monumental had happened.
Dornan knew what his father was doing. Trying to drive a wedge between them, to make him distrust Ana. And even though he knew this on an intellectual level, it was still impossible not to let that question burrow into his head like a fat worm and sit there, in the middle of his brain, burning him. Who had she called?
‘Guillermo was already there,’ Dornan said dismissively. ‘That’s what I pay him for. To be with her. Always.’
‘Where you’d like to be, no doubt,’ Emilio mused. ‘Ana’s a very beautiful woman, son. Beautiful women have needs. Do you really think it’s a wise idea to have a thug like Guillermo living with her? On her couch. In her kitchen. Maybe even in her bed, who knows? You think he’s licking that Colombian kitty of hers while you’re hard at work, earning the money for your family?’
It took every ounce of self-control that Dornan possessed to keep from flying across the desk and smashing his fists into his father’s face, but that self-control unfortunately didn’t extend to the visual image Emilio had just implanted into Dornan’s mind. Guillermo’s fat fucking bald head perched between Mariana’s thighs as she moaned and writhed on the bed. Whether it was true or not was completely irrelevant. Just the act of imagining the scene was enough to make Dornan want to go to Ana’s apartment and put a bullet between Guillermo’s eyes.
He needed to talk about something else before he killed somebody, right now.
They observed each other for a little while, Dornan smoking angrily, Emilio puffing away leisurely, as if the remains of a dead kid weren’t right in front of him.
It was Emilio who finally broke the silence.
‘You broke procedure when you took this kid to the hospital.’ He gestured at the ashes for effect, then tapped his own cigarette ash on the top of the kid’s remains, making Dornan’s stomach turn violently. It just kept getting worse.
‘We should never have been transporting somebody that pregnant in the first place,’ Dornan replied, unable to tear his gaze from the spot where Emilio’s light-grey cigarette ash had crumbled on top of the darker, sandier remains. He sucked desperately at his own cigarette, knowing that wasn’t what he needed, but utterly bereft at the thought of what he did need. He needed some fucking peace. He needed to not be doing this shit anymore. He needed his father to either stop what he was doing, or die, neither of which was likely to happen any time soon. The old bastard would outlive all of them. Of that, he had no doubt.
‘That’s not your concern,’ Emilio replied, waving his hand dismissively. ‘Your concern is to get the package from A to B. Your concern is to do what you’re told so I don’t have the fucking FBI breathing down my neck.’
Dornan baulked. ‘The FBI aren’t after you because I let some kid live after I shot his mother. The FBI are after you because your fucking business partner double-crossed you to go sun himself in the fucking Bahamas with his new piece of ass and a bunch of our money.’
Emilio’s smile had dropped completely. ‘Are you quite finished?’
‘The mother was dead,’ Dornan continued. ‘The kid was still worth something. I did what I thought best at the time. Dump the kid, let the hospital do their thing, and then go in and get the kid back once we knew it was viable.’ It was a lie, but one he’d had plenty of time to construct. ‘I didn’t know I was about to get fuckin’ shot, did I?’
‘The kid would have been fine,’ Emilio replied. ‘You should have called me.’
Dornan itched to get up and leave, get away from the oppressive stare his father was beaming down on his face like twin fucking laser beams that were burning holes in his skin.
‘The kid didn’t look right. He would have died. I made an executive decision. That kid was worth a lot of money.’
Emilio brushed some of the ash away from where he’d been resting his clasped hands. ‘Come on, son. We both know you didn’t take pity on that child because of money.’
Dornan didn’t respond. Of course he hadn’t. He’d taken the kid to a hospital because he wasn’t about to kill an innocent fucking baby that had just been born.
At least, not purposely. An image swam in his vision – Mariana’s pale face as she sat on a hospital stretcher, her accusing eyes, the blood that still stained her thighs. He’d accidentally killed his own unborn baby, so why not somebody else’s?
Emilio let his previous words hang in the air for an excruciating moment before he cleared his throat, pressing on again. ‘Here’s what I think happened,’ he said. ‘I think your pretty little whore batted her eyelashes at you – and, son, they’re powerful fucking eyelashes, I get it – and you handed her your dick, and you let her wrap her fingers right around the shaft and lead you astray.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Dornan snapped. ‘That bullet fucked things up.’
Emilio raised his eyebrows at the sudden rise in Dornan’s voice. ‘Speaking of that bullet. Any ideas on who fired it?’
‘No,’ Dornan said warily, ‘but I’m betting you have some.’
Emilio opened the drawer in his desk, pulled out a specimen jar, and slid it across the dark mahogany surface to his son.
‘Somebody wanted you dead, my boy.’
My boy. His father hadn’t said that since Dornan had been an actual little boy. When his brother had still been around. Before he was gunned down in front of their house and Dornan had been left all alone with an unhinged mother and a megalomaniac for a father.
