But I still couldn’t reconcile the man I loved, the father of my child, with the man who had shot that woman in front of me while I held her baby in my arms, begging him to stop.
I still couldn’t fathom that the man I loved had been doing this – taking women and selling them as slaves and handing me the money afterwards – and I’d been blissfully unaware.
I knew they were bad people. I knew that. But I’d never known how complicit I was in it all.
And as much as I tried to convince Dornan to stand up to his father, he insisted that he couldn’t. That there was a bigger picture to think of. That it wasn’t just me he had to worry about.
‘You’re the kingpin of this operation,’ I protested. ‘You’re the one in charge of all of this.’
‘It’s not like that.’ Dornan replied, stonewalling me.
‘It’s exactly like that. You let me see something like this and then you pretend that you’re doing it for me? Well, don’t do it for me. I’d rather die than be the reason for all of this.’
‘Shut up,’ he growled. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, and if he ever hears you—’
‘Let him hear me, Dornan,’ I cut him off. ‘Let him hear everything I say. Because if he thinks he can make you do this for him and use me as a threat? I won’t have it. I’ll let him sell me as a fucking sex slave before I let you traffic one more soul in my name.’
‘Don’t you get it?’ he yelled. ‘This isn’t just about you. You’re one form of currency, Ana, but I have kids. I have friends. I have a club. How many people do you think had to die before I agreed to do this for my father? I’m no kingpin,’ he said bitterly. ‘Emilio’s the kingpin. I’m the pawn, and so are you.’
‘He’s your father,’ I protested.
‘Exactly.’
‘Who did he kill, Dornan? Who did he kill to make you go along with this?’
He was silent for a beat.
‘That woman I told you about, the first woman I really loved. Her name was Stephanie.’
He’d never told me her name before.
‘My father was putting the pressure on for me to join his trafficking operation. Said he needed someone he could trust to run it, and who can you trust more than your own flesh and blood? And I refused. I said no. I said fuck you, do your own dirty work.’
‘What happened?’
‘She disappeared. I said no, and she fucking vanished into thin air. I already had kids at that point. I didn’t love their mother, but I sure as hell didn’t hate her enough to risk her. To risk my boys. No. I showed up. I did what I was told to do. I kept my family safe.’
‘Your sons – they’re his family. That’s Emilio’s grandsons you’re talking about.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘When I say my father’s a snake, I’m not fucking kidding around, alright? He’d slit his own mother’s throat if it got him where he wanted to go. He’d sell my boys just as soon as he’d sell you.’
‘Dornan,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t know if I can live like this anymore.’
I cried. I always cried.
‘Really?’ he said, and his face twisted with rage. ‘And what can you live with? Huh? What’s the alternative? You want to leave?’
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ I muttered. ‘I want to leave this craziness. This is no place for a—’ I’d almost said baby, the word on the tip of my tongue.
‘For a what?’ he pressed.
‘For a life!’ I answered.
He just chuckled. ‘That’s funny,’ he said cruelly. ‘I thought you understood after all this time. There’s only one way out of here, baby, and it’s not pretty.’
There has to be a way, I thought to myself. There has to be something.
Dornan moved the food around on his plate.
‘You don’t have to eat it,’ Celia said quietly. She took the plate from in front of him and held a cool palm to his throbbing forehead. ‘You feeling okay?’
Dornan grunted in response and leaned back so his wife wasn’t touching him anymore. Her touch made his skin crawl, made him want to lash out and strike her. But tonight he couldn’t even be bothered making a shitty remark about her cooking, so he said nothing. For some reason, ever since he’d been shot, he couldn’t stomach eating. The thick steaks Celia had cooked were still bloody in the middle, and that was probably the issue. He’d seen too much blood lately.
Celia – cold, beautiful Celia – shook her head, and then left the kitchen. Dornan didn’t care. After this many years of marriage, he was completely disillusioned with the concept. He had thought about divorcing her, but he needed to be close to his kids. He’d been able to get sole custody of his three older sons when he divorced his first wife, Lucia, but her family was nobody special. Celia, on the other hand, had powerful mafia connections on the east coast, their grandfathers very distant relatives somewhere along the line, and she’d probably be able to wrangle shared custody.
Dornan wouldn’t have that, and he’d told her exactly that on more than one occasion when she demanded a divorce. The only way she’d be getting away from him was through death. Over the years, their marriage had turned into something of a business alliance. Celia was smart, she was feisty, and she was crucial to getting their east coast relatives to play fair. Their current arrangement worked well enough.
But it wasn’t a marriage, and he didn’t love her, and he knew every time she looked at him she was probably counting down in her head the minutes until he’d leave again.
He didn’t even care anymore. Having Celia – who, he knew for a fact, was fucking somebody else – gave him a measure of protection, a cover story, something to distract people from asking what he was really doing. Sometimes he fantasised about somebody kidnapping Celia, holding her for ransom, and then going to collect her and to pay the kidnappers off, and shooting her in the face instead. Because even though she was his wife, she was also a rather heavy piece of baggage he had to drag around. The thought of getting rid of her tantalised him. Because if she was gone, he’d be able to spend every goddamn night buried balls-deep inside Mariana, fucking her into oblivion and then laying tender kisses on her afterwards.
Dornan wasn’t a tender man — in fact, he was the opposite — but Mariana made him want to be a better person. At least she had, until he’d found the fucking cellphone buried in the back of her kitchen cupboard. The question had been on his lips in the truck, just before the deafening bullet had torn apart his chest and his sanity. Who’s the phone for, Ana? He’d convinced himself that there was a perfectly legitimate answer for the secret phone. It could be Guillermo’s. It could be he’d forgotten about it. Because if it was anything else – if she had betrayed his trust – he couldn’t bear to think what would come next. What he’d have to do to her. How he’d have to punish her.
His chest was aching, that phantom bullet still metaphorically jammed up against his heart, its shards spreading through his ribcage, tiny specks of poisoned lead. And it ached for her. He couldn’t bear that she might have already betrayed him. He couldn’t deal with that shit. It was easier to pretend like he’d never seen the phone, or at least keep the knowledge of its existence in his back pocket, ready to pull out when she was least expecting it. He imagined her eyes widening in fright, because he knew he frightened her. Would she try to lie about it? Or would she confess? Had she been calling somebody without him knowing? The thoughts were like a cancerous rage, swirling inside him. He had to fucking stop thinking about it before it consumed him.
His stomach twisted uneasily again. Maybe he’d caught something. He never got sick, though. Ever. It was something else.
Yeah, come to think of it, he wasn’t any better than his father and the rest of the Il Sangue Cartel. He thought of Mariana’s face when she’d realised what exactly it was keeping her alive, Dornan’s end of the grisly bargain he’d struck with Emilio all those years ago. One life in exchange for many. He tried to forget the horror in her eyes when she’d learned the truth, just bef
ore he’d been shot, but it was impossible.
He was snapped back to the present moment by the urge for a cigarette. He could light up, inhale and try to burn the memory of her sad eyes from his brain, one puff at a time. His cigarettes were in the bedroom. He pushed back from the table and made his way to the master bedroom, finding his pack of smokes and lighter in the pocket of his leather jacket.
The light was dim in the cool and quiet bedroom. The kids were always loud, and sometimes this was the only place he could find any peace in this fucking house. As he lit up, he continued to think of Mariana, always alone in her apartment, always lonely. Always begging him to stay.
He thought of the way she’d cried out as he fucked her perfect round ass, the way her light brown skin shimmered as he pulled those tight globes of her ass onto his cock again and again, and the thought made his dick grow hard almost instantly.
He shifted slightly to relieve some of the unbearable pressure of denim on his growing erection, and saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
‘Dear husband,’ Celia said, leaning against the doorway. ‘Care to spare a smoke for your lovely wife?’
Dornan raised an eyebrow and stuck his cigarette between his teeth. ‘Knock yourself out,’ he said around the stick of tobacco, gesturing to the packet on the bed beside him.
She ignored the packet, instead slinking towards him. Kneeling on the floor in front of his legs, she burrowed her lithe body into the V between his open knees. Her mouth curled up into a smile as she looked towards his lap.
‘Happy to see me?’ she asked, reaching for his zipper and boldly tugging it down. Dornan watched his wife like one would watch a snake, keeping his eye on her so she didn’t suddenly strike. He didn’t respond, just watched with detached indifference as she pulled his straining cock out of his jeans and wrapped her lips around the head. It felt good, but knowing it was her made his blood run cold. Didn’t make his dick any less stiff, though. He was a man, and what man didn’t enjoy a surprise blow job?
She must have wanted something. That was the only explanation for her sudden interest in his dick, after so many years.
He rested back on his hands, cigarette still between his teeth, as he watched his beautiful, cruel wife suck him. She was really getting into it, using both hands. Taking one of his hands off the comforter, he threaded it into her hair and pulled her head back. ‘What do you want?’ he muttered around the cigarette.
She pouted, her hands still around his erection. ‘Nothing. Can’t a woman give her husband a blow job anymore?’
He let go of her hair and gestured as if to say, Don’t stop on my account.
She resumed her sucking, making a small gagging noise as he hit the back of her throat. That amused him more than it should, and he found himself holding back a snicker. His cell vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out. It was Viper. Christ, what now? Last time Viper had called him, he’d ended the night with a bullet to the chest.
‘Yeah?’
It was quiet. Eerily quiet. The only noise on the other end of the phone was steady breathing.
‘What?’ Dornan asked.
‘Boss,’ Viper spoke, an urgency in his tone. ‘I found her.’
Dornan transferred the phone to his other hand; he could barely hear Viper, he was speaking so quietly. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Dee,’ Viper said.
‘What is it?’ Dornan asked, impatience growing in his gut.
‘Don’t freak the fuck out. I found Stephanie.’
Stephanie? Fuck. It had been what – sixteen, seventeen years? An anxiousness began to build inside his chest, an annoying, gnawing buzz that ate away at him.
His heart squeezed painfully.
Dead. That’s what Viper was going to say, he knew it. Knew it in his bones. The first woman he’d ever truly loved, one he could have imagined leaving this life for. Hell, once he’d even proposed the idea. He would kill everyone in the cartel, and they could leave, go someplace where nobody would ever find them.
She’d laughed.
He’d pretended he was kidding, and they had never mentioned it again. And not long after, she had vanished from the face of the earth, swallowed up no doubt by the same people who had killed Dornan’s brother back when they were still weedy teenagers on the verge of becoming men. Gunned down, left in their front yard as a message, and he just knew Stephy had ended up the same way. That knowledge had almost killed him. He’d been a zombie, then become cruel, sadistic, letting her disappearance ruin any good that had existed within him. So he embraced the dark, and he was very, very bad. He killed. He coerced. He traded in lives.
And then he met her.
Mariana.
And she blew his goddamn world to pieces.
She was different from Stephy in every way possible. Mariana was Colombian; Stephy was born-and-bred Texan. Mariana had dark hair and bronze skin; Stephy had strawberry blonde locks, the consistency of fairy floss, and pale skin thanks to her Irish-American ancestry.
Mariana was alive, and Stephy was not.
At least, that’s what Dornan had believed for the past sixteen-odd years.
He held the phone so tight, it was a wonder it didn’t shatter in his hand.
Viper seemed hesitant. Dornan could’ve reached through the phone and ripped him a new asshole for not hurrying the fuck-up and spilling what he’d discovered.
‘She dead?’ Dornan grunted, feigning indifference, but inside, he was ready to explode.
‘Dee,’ Viper said. ‘Where are you right now? I should be telling you this man to man, not on the fucking phone. Where the hell have you been, man?’
‘Keep talking,’ Dornan said. He struggled to keep his voice steady as he pushed Celia away, and she fell on her pert ass with a thud. ‘Tell me.’ He tucked his cock back into his pants and started working on the zipper – not easy with one hand.
Celia was on her feet now, staring right at him with dead eyes. She looked positively pissed and like she might want to cut his balls off and shove them down his throat.
Stephy had to be dead. After all this time, it was the only explanation. He knew someone had taken her, probably used her for their own sick pleasure and then murdered her. His chest grew uncomfortably tight as he remembered her hair, those bright eyes, that smile. The one woman he’d truly loved. The woman who’d accepted him with open arms and a laugh, even though he was married, even though he had kids, even though he was a Gypsy Brother with so much baggage it could spell death for them both. She’d started out working in the bar at the clubhouse, but she wasn’t a club whore. She was just a university student trying to supplement her income, and when Dornan had found out about Celia’s cheating, how she was pregnant and it might be with some other motherfucker’s kid, Stephy had been the one who had listened to him. He’d confided everything in her – things about Emilio, about the trafficking, about the government connections. He’d been so smitten with her, and then she’d just . . . vanished.
She’d gone and fucking disappeared on him, so abruptly it was almost as if she’d never existed. He’d gone to her apartment and everything seemed normal. Her purse was still there, all her ID, some cash, her cellphone. It was all normal – too normal. He’d called a crime-scene tech he knew and asked him to check out Stephy’s apartment with luminol, and that place had lit up like a fucking Christmas tree in Times Square. There was blood all over the apartment, invisible to the naked eye since someone had painstakingly mopped it all up, but it had been there, and nobody could lose that much blood and still be alive. He hadn’t loved another woman for many, many years. Not until Mariana.
They never found Stephanie’s body. Dornan had grown older and more bitter, refusing his wife’s half-hearted attempts at reconciling, burying himself in his work, waking up at night covered in sweat as he imagined Stephy being brutally murdered.
Imagining it was Emilio who’d been holding the knife. Because she had known too much. Dornan had been too naive, entrusting this girl w
ith cartel information, and so he was certain his father had had a hand in her death. He pictured a bag of bones in a shallow grave, some piece of clothing or a deathbed confession the only way to truly know they were Stephy’s remains. It had been so long ago that it would be impossible to identify her. Her flesh would have rotted into the earth a long, long time ago, eaten by greedy worms and insects.
Viper cleared his throat. And he said something that would change the very fabric of Dornan Ross’s soul, extinguish the love he felt for the girl he’d long given up for dead, and replace that feeling with a rage so brutal it demanded blood. Simple words was all it took.
‘Dee, listen to me. I found her. I found Stephanie. She’s alive.’
‘Come again?’ If the fucker was having a joke at his expense, it would be the last joke he ever made, because Dornan would drive over to his house and kill Viper with his bare hands.
‘That’s not all,’ Viper said.
There was something else? Dornan could hear the reluctance in Viper’s tone. There was something else.
‘Go on,’ Dornan ground out.
‘She’s got a kid, man. A son. He’s fifteen. I’m pretty sure he’s yours.’
Fifteen.
FIFTEEN.
The kid was fifteen.
He had a son out there, somewhere, and he hadn’t even known.
It all fit together now, all made total, devastating sense. She hadn’t been taken – hadn’t been killed.
She had run away. With his baby inside her.
She had stolen something that belonged to him.
Dornan’s grip on the phone became even tighter, the plastic starting to buckle under the pressure.
‘Boss?’ Viper said nervously.
Few things were capable of shocking Dornan Ross these days, jaded and weary as he was, but this was like someone had just dropped an atomic bomb in his lap and asked him to please sit still.
‘Where is she?’ Dornan asked, feeling almost two decades worth of sadness and guilt collect into a vortex of what could only be described as a black, festering rage. ‘Dee—’