AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That made him chuckle. ‘I like this one,’ he said to my father, jerking his thumb towards me.
‘Your girl is a real cholita. Wonder how tough she’ll be when my boys take turns fucking her in her fleshy Colombian ass.’
My father lunged at him, but didn’t get very far, the guard smacking the bridge of his nose with the barrel of the gun.
‘Well, this has certainly been an interesting turn of events. Cholita, I admire your loyalty to your family. It is something your father clearly lacks.’ He glared at my father. ‘So, although your life will never recompense me for the street value of my cocaine, it will more than cover the production cost. I can recoup my initial loss and make an example of you at the same time, Marco.’
The wolf looked positively excited.
‘I told you!’ my father yelled. ‘I have thirty thousand American dollars for you! I’ll wipe my debt clean and kill those DEA fuckers who interrupted the transfer!’
My heart sank. Thirty thousand dollars. A little under four hundred thousand pesos. It was nothing. It was everything. It was what I was worth in this cruel world.
Emilio tutted, waving his long, bony finger in the air in front of my father’s face. ‘Thirty thousand was the production cost. Do you know how much money you’ve lost me? That was half a million big ones on the streets, bandito. Half. A. Million. Dollars.’
He raised his hand in a fist, smashing it down into my father’s nose. Another girl might cry out, struggle to get to her father, maybe mop the blood from his face and kiss his temple.
But I was not that girl. I was a girl with a rage inside me. Este. Oh, God. I clutched at the small crucifix that hung around my neck and said a silent prayer for Esteban’s soul.
I pushed down the urge to cry. My mother’s muffled sobs reached me from the next room as I drew a solemn, burning breath into my lungs and tried to stop the room from spinning.
‘You are giving yourself to me, yes?’ Emilio asked, clenching and unclenching the fist he’d just hurtled into my father’s face.
I nodded. Oh, fuck. What am I doing?
‘Words, cholita. A nod means nothing in my world.’
‘Yes,’ I said defiantly, head high, chin stuck out stubbornly.
‘For how long?’ He was testing me.
The breath hitched in my throat. ‘For as long as you spare my family.’
He nodded, and began to pace in the several feet of bare floor that separated my father and me.
‘And you submit to do anything I tell you?’
This time it was harder. ‘Yes . . . Wait,’ I added falteringly. Oh, God. ‘Do you promise not to kill me?’
It was a silly question to ask a man who didn’t deal in promises but in bloodshed and human lives, but I had to ask anyway. I couldn’t bear the thought of offering up my life, only for it to be taken away at his hand. I didn’t want to hope for nothing.
Emilio rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I can promise you that if you obey me at all times, you won’t die by my hand,’ he said. ‘But I can’t promise you that you won’t beg me to kill you anyway.’
His words cut to my very core, and that was precisely the effect he had been aiming for.
I bit my lip, then cursed myself for showing a reaction. Emilio waited patiently, his eyes only for me as my father bled before us.
‘What’ll it be, cholita?’ he asked me. ‘There’s no shame in changing your mind. A bullet would be much less painful.’
‘I am yours,’ I conceded finally, my voice quiet but firm. ‘Do with me what you will.’
Just then, a pathetically inadequate digital rendition of Mozart rose, buzzing, from somewhere on Emilio’s person, and I frowned in confusion. He reached a hand into his suit jacket and withdrew a cellphone. ‘Pronto,’ he answered in Italian, and before he had finished saying the word, a loud voice started screeching on the other end.
Emilio placed his hand over the receiver and gestured to the guy in the suit, the one who’d been admiring his own fingernails as we spoke of life and death, the one who I’d forgotten was even there.
He was actually going to answer a call while we were in the middle of talking about my life. Emilio didn’t even look at me, just strode into the next room, speaking a steady stream of Italian that I couldn’t decipher.
The man in the corner spoke up. The Suit, I decided to call him. I looked at him properly now. He was tall and wiry, with intense sapphire-coloured eyes, a mop of shaggy brown hair and an imposing stature. In another context he might have been attractive; but there was something in his eyes that troubled me. I watched them closely and noticed they never stayed still. Every tiny mood change and thought was expressed through those crazy ice-blue eyes, the subtle shifts in his neck muscles, and the way his long fingers fidgeted with his middle suit button.
