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I blinked the tear away, making sure none of it made its way onto my cheek. Dornan saw it anyway.
‘Happy birthday, baby,’ he said, his voice low and husky in the quiet, still night.
My eyes filled again at the tenderness in his tone. Someone else would miss it under the rough exterior, the ‘fuck you’ attitude, the way he held himself.
But I heard. I saw. I knew.
‘Aren’t you going to blow out the candle?’ he pressed, his rough hand caressing my cheek as he stood behind me. I nodded, swallowing thickly. I took a breath, pursed my lips and blew across the flame. It flickered at first. I hadn’t leaned in close enough. I took another breath, blew a steady stream of air at the flame, and extinguished it.
‘Did you make a wish?’ Dornan asked me, his hand squeezing my shoulder. I turned to meet his gaze. I thought of a boy with tiny, chubby hands and bright blue eyes. Wondered what he wished for when he blew out his candles. Did he wish for me, like I wished for him? He would have been twelve that year. Twelve.
Nine years spent together with this man, and he still didn’t know about the son I gave up before we met.
I nodded. I smiled. I pushed all other thoughts away.
Dornan smiled back at me, his dark brown eyes lighting up. He knelt beside me on the ground, and I turned in my seat, opening my legs so the insides of my thighs rested on either side of him. I cupped his face in my hands, pulled him closer and pressed my lips to his forehead. His skin was warm. He always ran hotter than me, like a furnace. As I gazed down into his eyes, I felt my heart jump, like it always did when I was with him.
I was twenty-eight years old.
We were in love.
And it was the saddest fucking thing in the world.
CHAPTER ONE
MARIANA
2007
NINE YEARS GONE
Five days a week, I dressed in smart business clothes. I ate breakfast and painted my face, like countless other women. I was an accountant – well, technically, I was a bookkeeper, because I had had to leave college before I could complete my degree. At the office – a tiny, cramped room in the back of a run-down strip club off La Cienega – I drank coffee and spoke to nobody and worked my ass off. Then I was driven home – the home he had chosen for me. Some nights, my lover escorted me to the door, opened it for me, and spent the evening worshipping my body in ways I’d never imagined possible before meeting him. He was rough, he was dominating, and he made me feel safe even with a hand wrapped around my throat, cutting off my air supply just long enough to make my head spin. I liked the way he drove me to the peak, how he dangled me over the edge and then pulled me back up just before I fell.
Dornan Ross might have been a brutal man, but to me he was shelter. Even when he hurt me, he made it feel like love. Because at least if he was hurting me, he was there. I’d become addicted to him and had stayed that way for nine years. I was either alone, or I was with very bad people like Emilio Ross, or I was with him. But mostly I was alone. So I took everything he gave me, and I took it with a smile.
If you and I passed each other on the street, you’d think I was just like all the other girls, getting through each day as best as I could.
But nothing about my life was normal. I was not just a girl who went to work and went home and cooked dinner and had sex. If you passed me on the street, you’d probably miss the biker who walked five steps behind me, the ‘roommate’ I’d been given who was actually my keeper for all those hours when Dornan wasn’t around. You’d miss the handprints around my neck, hidden by long hair and scarves, marks left by brutal love that I looked at in the mirror and delicately touched in the safety of my bathroom, to remember what it felt like to be alive, to be on the brink of coming and passing out at the same time.
If you knocked on my door and I was alone, you’d think I wasn’t there. You’d never imagine I was pressed against the other side of the door, listening to your every move, begging silently for you to go away but wanting you to stay at the same time.
You’d never guess what I really was, because that reality was too dark, too painful for any normal person to entertain.
I was a slave.
Nine years ago, I’d made a deal with the devil. Emilio Ross, Kingpin of the Il Sangue drug cartel, had been seconds away from slaughtering my entire family for a debt my father owed him. Perhaps foolishly, I’d offered myself up in return for my family’s safety. As long as I stayed with the cartel and worked off my father’s massive debt, they’d be safe in Colombia.
My money laundering had paid off the original debt a long time ago, at least by my count, but Emilio had since made it clear that the deal didn’t have an expiration date. He owned me.
I had been prized property of the Il Sangue Cartel for nine years, and there was one thing that I knew for certain.
I was never getting out alive. Truth be told, I’m not even sure I wanted to get out. The part of me that craved my son’s embrace, she wanted to get out. The mother inside my soul desperately craved the feeling of holding my child in my arms. Years before I’d become entangled with the cartel, I had given birth in secret. Teenage pregnancy was worse than murder in my family, and I’d been forced to give my son up hours after I pushed him into this cruel world. My father had forged my signature on adoption papers, and I never saw my son again.
Maybe when we met again, it wouldn’t be in this nightmare. Maybe he’d hold me just as tightly as I wanted – needed – to hold him. Maybe, more likely, I’d never see him again. Because of the sins of my father, I’d never see my precious boy again, and that thought was harder to fathom than knowing I was a prisoner of Il Sangue. I’d happily die if it meant I could spend just one day with Luis. But I couldn’t sacrifice my entire family for my selfish needs.
Besides, I didn’t even know if Luis’ adoptive parents would let me near him. I had no legal recompense to the child I’d carried in my womb for nine months, the child who was half me and half Esteban, my boyfriend who’d been murdered in front of me by Emilio’s men.
But by far the most compelling reason to stay away from Luis was that he was probably better off without me. I hadn’t believed my father when he had told me that, as he pried my fingers loose and took my only child from me, but over the years his words had played on my mind. He’s better off without you. It didn’t matter that I was screwing the vice-president of the Gypsy Brothers, or that we were in love. None of it mattered, because if I went to my boy, my lover would probably be the one who’d plant a bullet in my back before I even got to touch Luis.
