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Something about those two words hurt more than that damn bullet had.
Dornan picked up the small jar, marvelling at the piece of twisted metal within. It no longer resembled a bullet. It had punctured his chest cavity and exploded inside him, blooming fatal shards of metal that shredded his insides like ribbons. It was ironic that something that started out smooth and oval-shaped spread into something that looked eerily flower-like when it pierced flesh. This had been inside him. Dornan’s chest ached as he remembered the shot, out of nowhere. He’d been so confused, the pain not beginning right away. It had felt more like somebody had punched him square in the middle of his chest, like some kind of pressure had exploded inside him. He remembered the broken glass all around his face, in slow motion. The rain, as it battered them inside the car.
He remembered Mariana, her small hands pressing over his bloody chest as she tried to stop the bleeding. He remembered voices, even after he’d lost the ability to keep his eyes open and he’d tasted his own blood bubbling up in his mouth, drowning him from the inside. He’d been too far away to understand what the voices were saying.
He remembered a second gunshot. Mariana had shot somebody, or at least, she’d shot at somebody. The memory jerked him out of his daydream with a violence that was as unsettling as it was fierce. Fuck. Mariana had shot at somebody? He’d never remembered that before.
Did she know who had tried to kill him?
No, it couldn’t be possible. She’d told him, in the hospital, that she had driven him to the hospital as soon as she’d managed to move him out of the driver’s seat of his truck. That John and Viper and some of the other brothers had met them there, taken care of the surveillance footage.
He had almost died – half an inch to the right and the bullet would have hit his heart – but he hadn’t died, and did she know who had shot him?
‘I want you to take care of that little bitch for me.’ Emilio’s words roused Dornan from his macabre reliving of his near-death experience. He pushed those thoughts away, struggling to focus.
‘You want me to kill her?’ Dornan asked, confused. ‘The best money launderer we’ve ever had? Because she didn’t like that you delivered a dead baby to her doorstep?’
Emilio laughed, grinding his cigarette butt into the pile of ash on the desk in such a casual manner, it made Dornan cringe.
‘I don’t want you to kill her,’ Emilio replied. ‘She’s far too valuable to me. She may be fiery, but she’s a good girl with my money. Such a good girl.’ Emilio’s smile bared his teeth in a way that was entirely unsettling to Dornan. He’d always been afraid of his father, especially when Mariana was involved.
‘Well?’ Dornan pressed.
‘I want you to marry that little bitch,’ Emilio said, staring at Dornan until he wanted to squirm. ‘Fuck her. All day and all night, you fuck her. Get her pregnant again. I want that cunt barefoot and compliant, you hear me? The FBI is breathing down my fucking neck, and the last thing I need is for them to cherry-pick your little whore out of our organisation and turn her against us.’
Dornan got lost somewhere between the words ‘barefoot’ and ‘whore’, but he got the general gist of what his father intended. It was shocking. It was oddly exciting. Still, Dornan didn’t want to just act like he was excited at the prospect of trapping the woman he loved so that she could truly, irrevocably, never leave, by sealing their fate together with a child he could use as leverage. That would be wrong.
It sounded like a great fucking idea, though. Now that Celia was gone, he’d fuck Mariana until his dick was raw, come inside her until he was empty, and have so many babies with her she’d never even think to leave his side.
Dornan cleared his throat, shooting for an expression of amusement.
‘You think sticking a ring on her finger and knocking her up will make her less likely to turn on us? It’s been ten years. If she were a traitor, she would have gone by now.’
Emilio steepled his fingers in front of him. ‘Are you saying you don’t want to finally marry the woman you’ve been pining over like a pathetic fucking dog for the better part of the last decade?’
‘No–’
‘You’re saying you don’t want to kick that Mexican schmuck out of that apartment – your apartment, don’t forget – and move in there with her? Don’t you want to control her, son?’
‘I do control her,’ Dornan replied, perhaps a little too defensively. ‘I know where she goes. I know her every move. Marrying her wouldn’t change that.’
‘You know her every move, huh? You know where she got a cremation, last-minute this morning?’ Emilio picked up a handful of the ashes and let them spill through his open fingers, back onto the desk. ‘Because I’m pretty fucking sure she didn’t just burn this kid in a fireplace.’
Dornan’s heart sank at that thought. Why hadn’t she called him this morning? He would have helped her take care of the kid. But maybe that was the whole point. His father had done it, so indirectly it was Dornan’s fault, because he refused to forsake Emilio. And by cutting Dornan out of the equation completely, Mariana was making sure he knew that she would not tolerate Il Sangue’s bullshit forever. She had never been totally complicit, one of the many reasons Dornan loved her so much, but she had never been this defiant. Reckless, even.
‘She was in my car when I dropped off the mother’s body that night,’ Dornan said. He sounded a hell of a lot more self-assured than he felt. ‘Before this fucking bullet happened.’
Emilio seemed curious. ‘She ride along with you a lot?’
Dornan knew what he was really asking. Emilio was asking how much Mariana had witnessed. How much the FBI could potentially get out of her.
‘Never. This was different.’
‘How so?’
‘Nothing. It was . . . Nothing. I took her with me. It was a mistake. It won’t happen again.’
Emilio rattled off some more instructions, but all Dornan could think about was that fucking cellphone he’d found hidden in Mariana’s kitchen all those months ago, and whether she’d betrayed him already. He stared at the tiny, blossomed bullet that had once lived inside him for a brief spell, and a wave of pain touched his chest sharply, suspicion and regret all wound up in one imaginary stab to the heart.
