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I opened my mouth to talk again.
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Stop talking. I’m sick of listening to your voice.’
I closed my mouth and looked outside. We were pulling into my driveway.
Arriving at my death.
CHAPTER FIVE
MARIANA
A black stretch Mercedes pulled in behind us, reminding me of a funeral heass, and I watched nervously as the three men from the shooting climbed out and made their way over to the car we were in. One of the men who had shot Esteban approached my door, and I nervously twisted the black onyx ring that wrapped around my middle finger. This can’t end well. I thought of fighting for a brief moment, until he jammed the muzzle of a revolver under my chin and pulled me from the car.
‘Please,’ I implored Emilio. I hated begging. I’d begged for only one thing in my life, and it hadn’t made a damn lick of difference to the way things turned out. In my eyes, begging was for the weak. But my primitive survival instincts were kicking me in the ribs like painful steel-capped boots. I didn’t want to be executed on my knees and dumped into a hole in the dirt.
I didn’t want to die, and so I begged.
Emilio just smiled. His canine teeth showed when his lips drew back, making him look like he was going to devour me.
Maybe he was.
The man who had wrenched me from the car shoved me in front of him. ‘Walk,’ he said gruffly, in Spanish.
I fought to retain my balance, skittering up the steps to my front door. I didn’t want to fall in front of these men. I was already humiliated enough, and falling would only make me an easy target for their boots.
I stared up at the house I had grown up in. Maybe I was looking at it for the last time. Oh, Jesus. This is happening. They’re actually going to kill us.
The house was nothing special, a limestone-rendered villa that blended into the hill just like the rest of the houses that surrounded it. A sea of middle-class families, a little better off than those in the slums, but not by much. With the money my father had made over the years in trading powders and people, he could have purchased a house on millionaire’s row by now; had it not been for his crushing compulsion to gamble it all away every night.
If he had been smarter with his money — if he had done what I had told him years ago — he’d be able to pay off his stupid debt to this deplorable cartel kingpin, and my family wouldn’t have to die.
On the crumbling mosaic-tiled steps that my mother had always nagged my father to repair, I made a vow to myself. I vowed that before my father got his bullet between the eyes, I was going to make him understand just how stupid and reckless he had been with our lives.
Seconds later, I was being pushed into the house. The house was like a cool balm after the hot summer night outside. I glanced down at the orange tiles that lined the floor and remembered how, as children, we would all lay on them on the hottest days, our bare bellies sucking every iota of coolness from their porous depths.
And now our blood would flood those porous tiles, staining them forever.
‘Keep going,’ the man behind me muttered, shoving the barrel of his pistol deeper into my neck. I winced at the pain, walking a little faster lest his trigger finger get itchy.
I rounded the hallway and saw my mother sitting slumped at the dining table, sobbing as she clutched my sister to her side. Karina was only ten months younger than me, and so two months of each year we were the same age. We had always been a fiery duo, two sides of the same coin in a constant struggle to be the one in charge. We fought more than we ever got along, but I loved her deeply. And seeing the panic in her glazed eyes as she tried to comfort my mother broke my goddamn heart. A man I hadn’t seen before stood behind them, looking bored, clad in black military fatigues and aiming a Beretta sub-machine gun at my sister’s head.
‘Ana,’ my mother gasped when she glimpsed me. She pushed on her heels, obviously intending to stand and rush to me, but large hands dug into her shoulders and thrust her back down into her seat.
I choked on everything I wanted to say right then, but couldn’t.
Emilio appeared in front of me, blocking the view of my mother and sister.
‘Take her in there with the boys,’ he instructed, and terror gripped me as I wondered which boys I was being taken to. I stayed rooted to the spot despite the guy behind me pushing between my shoulder blades with the tip of his gun. I wasn’t about to make it any easier for them to take me to boys who would pin me down and hurt me.
Emilio smiled, a fake gold tooth catching the light from the old brass chandelier that hung above the dining table. ‘Cholita,’ he mocked, smiling at me. ‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to your father?’
Oh. Those boys. My father and brother.
I shivered despite the hot Villanueva night, refusing to acknowledge his question, but following him into the kitchen. My heart sank even lower as I saw my brother and father kneeling side by side in front of the refrigerator, a guy in front of them also holding a Beretta sub-machine gun. My brother’s face was cut up and covered in his own blood, and he had thick packing tape stuck over his mouth. I guessed by the way he swayed unsteadily that he’d put up a fight. And lost.
Another guy stood in the corner, slightly removed, wearing a pressed grey suit and studying his fingernails. My skin prickled as I turned my attention back to the thug who had his gun casually pointed at the male half of my family, as if it were just another day at the office. I was used to seeing AKs slung over the shoulders of mercenaries and guards, not these sub-machine guns.
Still, it made sense. Emilio was Italian, mafioso, and obviously proud of it.
