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‘Oh, yeah?’ My nerves started to rattle and fray, and my mind along with them. Papa and his stupid, selfish gambling.
I was pretty smart, good with numbers, and I’d been doing some creative accounting with my father’s finances for years, but there was no denying that he owed a lot of people a lot of money.
My father’s casual attitude towards the entire situation made my blood boil. It was fine to risk your life when you were single and unencumbered, but he had a wife and three children to think about. It didn’t seem to mean anything to him, though. He kept gambling and taking money from loan sharks until there was nothing left to lose. When he stopped being able to pay the bookmakers back, things had gotten really ugly.
They had started on his fingers. Three months ago, he lost an index finger, and two months ago, a middle finger. It was only a matter of time before they collected the rest. That’s when my brother, Pablo, had been shot in the thigh. Then my younger sister had been followed home by men we knew, men who had grown tired of issuing threats and decided to collect their outstanding debts in the form of my sister’s frightened pleadings. They didn’t rape her, but the threat was clear — they could, and they would, if my father didn’t front up the cash he owed. That was three weeks ago, and after my mother called me in hysterics I had left the relative safety of my stateside university to come home. To try to help my father claw back some control before we were all killed and hung off a freeway overpass as a reminder never to cross the cartel. Since I’d come home I’d been trying desperately to funnel some funds through accounts I had purposely hidden from my father for this eventuality, and pay off the most bloodthirsty of the people he owed.
Evidently, I was too late. Emilio Ross could tear us all apart if he wanted to.
I slumped in my seat, all the fight fleeing my body. I stared straight ahead at the back of the black leather seat in front of me, and set my jaw squarely.
‘You’re surprised?’ Emilio asked.
I shook my head from side to side; I was not surprised. I battled to keep the anger from my face, the disgust, but failed. Rage burned in my blood, but not for the man who sat beside me. No, the rage inside me was reserved exclusively for my father. The man who was meant to protect me, the man who had promised to keep me safe when I was a little girl. The man who drank more than he should and laid his fists into me, into all of us, when it got too much. They say every little girl wants to marry her father, but I wanted mine to vanish.
He was an idiot. A selfish fucking fool. And now I was going to pay for his sins.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ I asked calmly, as if we were talking about who had won the soccer game on the weekend.
He replied just as casually.
‘Yes, of course.’ He frowned. ‘It’s nothing personal against you, cholita.’ Tough girl, he had called me. I bit my lip and nodded, the sadness in my chest locked tightly away. I refused to show weakness in front of anyone, least of all the man who was probably about to end my existence.
Esteban. His face floated into my mind and I clamped down the thought. Flecks of his blood still clung to my bare knees. It didn’t matter now; none of it mattered.
‘How much does he owe you?’ I blurted out. ‘Are you sure he can’t work the debt off?’
Emilio’s eyebrows rose, and I heard the driver cough awkwardly up front. I wondered what kind of punishment I’d earned for daring to question the notorious drug lord.
‘Tell me,’ Emilio asked slowly. Taunting me. ‘What he can do for me that will be worth five hundred thousand dollars.’
Oh.
I returned my attention to the back of the headrest in front of me.
‘It’s a lot of pesos, cholita,’ Emilio said, reaching his hand over to squeeze mine. His sympathy was a ruse, nothing more than a macabre gesture to invoke desperation.
‘No shit,’ I muttered, the feel of his oily palm on my hand was nauseating. ‘It’s a lot of pesos.’
I looked down at my bound hands, startled as they shook violently. It wasn’t fear; a lifetime of being a drug trafficker’s daughter had numbed me to many terrors, real and imagined.
It was anger.
I was well-acquainted with anger. My mother called me feisty. My father preferred terms like ‘ungrateful’ and ‘whore’. I figured that he was just pissed that when he drank too much and laid his fists into me, I didn’t freeze like the rest of them. I fought back. I gave as good as I got, and I’d put my heavily drunk father on his ass more times than I wanted to remember. Yes, I was angry. I carried my anger with me beneath my skin, and I had for many years.
Emilio didn’t know that. He probably thought I was just scared.
Anger, though, would be much more useful if I were to try and overpower him, to somehow catch him off guard.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked softly, trying to appear more scared and defenceless than I actually was. I was petite, five foot two, and I had nothing to fight with except my teeth and a pair of bound hands.
‘Home,’ Emilio answered, apparently not annoyed by my direct questioning. It surprised me that he was so chatty, to the point of being flippant, when he was about to slaughter me and my entire family.
‘Maybe I could —’
Emilio held his palm up. ‘No. There is nothing you can do, cholita. I will kill your father slowly, but I promise you, the rest of your family will die quick and painless. I have no feud with you.’
I nodded, hardly believing my ears. What was I supposed to say? Thanks for killing me quickly? Thanks for not raping me in front of my father? Thanks for not disembowelling me while my mother cries on the sidelines?
