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I looked back at the baby blanket. Emilio knew about my miscarriage – there had been no hiding it from him – and the thought that he was taunting me about it suddenly sprang to mind. I swallowed a lump in my throat as I remembered bleeding out on this very floor, at the hands of my lover.
Was that it? Was he reminding me of all I’d lost? Was he that cruel?
If only it had been that. A dig. A taunt. Anything would have been better than what was actually beneath the blanket.
‘What’s in there?’ Guillermo asked. I glanced at him, picking up the edge of the woollen blanket and peeling it back.
I screamed.
‘Fucking Christ!’ Guillermo yelled, dropping his pizza and backing away. I dry-heaved, sinking to my knees, the reality of mygiftso horrific, I could barely believe what my eyes were telling me.
I was still screaming.
‘Where the fuck –stop screaming.’
I kept screaming, only the noise coming from me had turned into more of a low wail. My eyes were blurred from too many tears, hot as they ran down my cheeks and dripped onto the floor. I felt like I was losing my grip on reality, but it was the opposite, really: I’d been thrust violently back into reality. My reality. The one where I was nothing more than a pawn in Emilio’s quest for total control over his son.
‘Shut the fuck up!’ Guillermo hissed, hushing me. He dropped to his knees in front of me, pulling me into his chest, his eyes darting around the room as he clamped a hand over my mouth. I fought for a second, wild with horror and disbelief, clawing at his arms, but he was patient. He was strong. The man bench-pressed more than my weight every day at the gym, and he had no trouble keeping a hold around me.
‘Shhhhhh,’ he said, low and long. Shhhhhh. Like waves retracting out from the shore.Shhhhhh.
I sagged, eventually, and Guillermo raised his eyebrows in question. He was asking me if he could take his hand away. I nodded, and he pulled his palm away from my mouth, ever so slowly.
‘Where did it come from?’ he asked quietly, his tone deadly serious. I choked, deciding whether to throw up. Nope. I kept my lunch down for the moment as I racked my brain for an answer.
‘Emilio,’ I croaked, finally. ‘It came from Emilio.’
‘Why?’
I thought back to the night Dornan had been shot. How he’d almost bled to death in the car beside me, only hours after we’d taken an orphan baby boy to the hospital and dropped him off at the counter, wrapped in a bloody coat.
Emilio’s cold hand squeezed the back of my neck as he directed my gaze towards the smallest baby in the line-up.
‘I’m taking this boy home,’ he promised, his words turning vicious. ‘I’ll raise him as my own. And if you ever try and leave your post . . .’
I sobbed from the pain of his fingers inside my wound. ‘I’ve given you almost ten years,’ I whispered. ‘You told me you’d let me go once I repaid the debt.’
He chuckled. ‘That was before. This is now. Do you have any idea how fucking marvellous you are at what you do? I was going to shoot you that night, and you insisted on coming with me. You’ve only got yourself to blame, dear.’
I couldn’t stop crying. The pain! I just wanted him to get his hands away from me.
‘You try and leave, and I’ll find you, Ana,’ he continued. ‘I’ll find you and I’ll make you watch while I kill that boy in front of you.’ He returned his black eyes to me and grinned.
It wasn’t over. It would never be over.
Solemnly, Guillermo and I stood over the suitcase; over the dead infant lying on his side in a swathe of blankets, dressed in a pale yellow jumpsuit, already cold, his skin waxy and pale in death, face frozen in an eternal sleep, on his side, as if someone tucked him up in his bed and left him to die.
Only, I know he hadn’t just been left to die. He’d been killed. Smothered, probably. And I knew who was responsible.
Somewhere in the background, a phone started to ring. It was mine. In slow motion, I reached for it.
I pressed answer and switched the phone to speaker mode, holding it in front of me so that Guillermo could hear. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak.
‘I take it by your screams that you opened your gift,’ Emilio said, the only things filling the room his voice, and death.
‘Why?’ I asked, my voice anguished beyond recognition.
‘Your gift, Mariana. A lesson.’
