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CHAPTER TWO
MARIANA
I was cutting into a red bell pepper a few days later when my phone buzzed. I still remember the moment like it was yesterday – the way the sun was perched high on the horizon, ready to swallow up the shadow of my apartment building that overlooked Santa Monica Beach; the Ferris wheel on the pier, a giant silhouette against the bright blue sky. I can taste the pepper in my mouth, sharp and cold from the refrigerator; I can hear the waves as they crash onto the shore beneath my apartment. I can still remember opening the window, a cool breeze hitting my face as I marvelled at how the sky and John’s eyes could be exactly the same colour.
Peace was always fleeting in my world.
My twenty-ninth birthday and I was still here. Still with Dornan. Still with John. Trapped between three men: one that I loved, one that I used to love, and one that I despised with every fibre of my being.
And number three, lucky last, was calling me.Emilioflashed up on my cellphone, and I was so startled I almost chopped my fingers clean off.
Emilio never called me. I wasn’t even sure he had my number until that moment. Why would he call me? Maybe Dornan was dead. The thought briefly occurred to me, and then it was gone, a wisp of smoke on a summer breeze.Maybe Dornan is dead.
I set my knife down and hit the green answer button, bring the phone to my ear.
‘Happy birthday, Mariana,’ Emilio drawled. I heard loud noise, traffic in the background. I remembered Dornan telling me his father had travelled to Bogota for a meeting with his brother, Julian. Perhaps that explained the noise.
They were still searching for Christopher Murphy, shady DEA agent and Emilio’s right-hand man. They’d never find him, though – this I knew for certain.
They didn’t know, though. They were still searching for answers to his disappearance.If only Emilio knew what I’d done, I thought to myself, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I remembered how Murphy’s blood had tasted, how my ears had buzzed for a week after I’d shot him in the face at point-blank range.
‘Did you kill my family?’ I whispered. Realisation spiked in his eyes, and his entire body tensed. A wave of nausea rolled through me.
He didn’t respond, but the answer was clear as day in his eyes; in the way he looked away for a split second before meeting my gaze again, in the stunned expression on his face, in the heavy exhale that came from his chest. His mouth around the gun was revolting, the metallic knock of tooth on polished steel enough to make me cringe.
I saw the questions in his eyes. How? How did I know? How had I found out what he’d done?
‘You really think I didn’t check on my family in nine years?’ I whispered. ‘How stupid are you? How stupid do you think I am?’
And then, before I lost my nerve, I pulled the heavy trigger back. I’d just killed a man as he hate-fucked me, and I was pretty sure I was going to be murdered brutally for it.
I was the murderess who had finally put Christopher Murphy in the ground – or, more accurately, in a crematorium – and Emilio couldneverknow.
‘Thank you,’ I said, pressing my fingers against my eyelids. Emilio Ross wasn’t the kind of man to wish me a happy birthday. He was the kind of man who thought I took up too much air just by breathing in the same room as him.
‘I got you something,’ he added, and I stiffened. Swallowing thickly, I tried not to panic.It’s probably nothing.
But it was never nothing with Emilio.
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ I breathed, clutching the phone harder.
‘I did,’ he replied, his tone betraying nothing. ‘I got you something . . . appropriate.’
My stomach twisted violently.Appropriate?
‘Go to the front door,’ Emilio instructed.
I bristled, looking towards the entryway of my apartment.
‘Are you going to shoot me?’ I asked.Shit. I hadn’t meant to say that. The words had come out of their own volition.
Emilio snorted. ‘And cut short your valuable working life with me? I think not,’ he said, and he sounded amused. ‘Go. Now.’
With knees made of rubber, I shuffled towards the front door of my apartment. It was no longer a secret that I was free to the outside world; Emilio knew. He’d never said a word about it. And in my head, I’d figured it was because, after almost ten years, he’d finally started to trust me. Or because I had Guillermo, a Gypsy Brother and key cartel shitkicker, as my permanent roomie. My round-the-clock bodyguard.
Maybe I was wrong, though. Maybe Emilio didn’t trust me at all.
Maybe he’d found out my secrets. There wereso manysecrets. Killing Murphy. Killing Murphy’s girlfriend and DEA partner, and screwing John all over this goddamn apartment whenever Dornan and Guillermo were elsewhere.My son. Yeah, I had plenty of secrets for Emilio to unearth.
