EPIGRAPH
Loving me will not be easy.
It will be war. You will
hold the gun and I will hand
you the bullets. So breathe,
and embrace the beauty of
the massacre that lies ahead.
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Prologue
Mariana: 2007, Nine Years Gone
Mariana: 1999, Six Months Gone
Mariana: 2007, Nine Years Gone
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Dornan
John
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
John
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
John
Mariana
John
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana: Three weeks later
Dornan
Dornan
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Dornan
Dornan
John
Mariana
John
Mariana
Dornan
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
Mariana
John
Mariana: Six weeks later
Empire: the conclusion
About the Author
Copyright
PROLOGUE
2007
I watched from where I sat, grief beating inside my chest as Dornan placed a cupcake with a single candle on the table in front of me. A tear formed in my right eye, blurring my vision and the pink frosted cupcake warped momentarily. But I would not cry. I would not break down. Because it had been too long, and I struggled to remember my life in Colombia before this. I only knew that it had been happier, freer. Mostly, I remembered being less afraid.
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.
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 happil
y 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.
Dornan was an enigma, a combination of brutality and tenderness, wrapped up in one man. The only son of my ‘owner’, Il Sangue kingpin Emilio, Dornan had been the one who’d saved me from being sold into sexual slavery. Emilio had intended to reclaim the money my father owed by selling me as a whore in one of his slave auctions, but Dornan had convinced him that I was more valuable as a money launderer in the cartel business. I’d proved him right very quickly, and we’d fallen for each other even faster.
Everyone in my immediate family thought that I was dead – they thought that Emilio’s men had killed me on the night they shot up my family’s home – and somehow that made it simpler to disconnect from my old existence. Dornan thought it’d be easier that way – for them, because they’d be able to stop searching, and for me, because I’d be free from the soul-crushing guilt of knowing they were looking for me while I was hiding in plain sight with the Gypsy Brothers in Los Angeles. I never had a choice in the matter. The man I was falling in love with dragged me up a rocky mountain, kissed me and then made me watch as my brother and father dug up a headless corpse they’d been led to believe was me.
And I still fell in love with him. I’m smart, but maybe I’m also really, really stupid. Because I truly did love Dornan Ross, with every part of my dark soul. I needed him like I needed air to breathe. I came alive whenever he was around me. My light to his dark, a delicate balance of pleasure and pain.
We were like a match made in heaven.
Wait. That’s wrong.
We were a match made in hell.
1999
SIX MONTHS GONE
Every cartel needs someone who can make their dirty money clean, and I was the best damn money launderer on the West Coast.
Six months after I’d arrived in Los Angeles, John Portland – president of the Gypsy Brothers Motorcycle Club and Dornan’s best friend – paid me a visit. I’m not sure why he chose that particular day, or why he’d waited months to voice his suspicions about who and what I really was. Maybe he’d wanted to bide his time, watch me, make sure he wasn’t raising any suspicions by visiting me at home, away from the strip club and the Gypsy Brothers clubhouse where we frequently crossed paths.
We shared the same small office at the clubhouse but John was hardly ever there. I suppose presiding over a one-percenter biker gang like the Gypsy Brothers wasn’t really a job you could do from behind a desk. But he was always around, delivering big crumpled bundles of cash for me to clean and launder, picking up packages that were probably full of drugs or guns, monitoring the front business that allowed us to channel money obtained illegally through a legal avenue – peepshows and lap dances. The reality was the strip club (or ‘burlesque club’, as they somewhat euphemistically called it) ran at a loss, and the majority of the clientele were Gypsy Brothers, who came in for free blow jobs and beer in between their club business. The dollar bills floating around this club were usually reserved for snorting coke, not stuffing in strippers’ panties.
I’d learned much about John Portland in the six months since Emilio had parked me in the back office of the VaVa Voom strip club with a pile of blood-smeared hundred dollar bills and a boxy old computer that whirred whenever it overheated. Tidbits of information that I had filed away for the future, just in case.
John had a wife who liked to shoot drugs into her arm to make her forget she was a biker’s wife, a daughter who was the light in his world, and a club full of Gypsy Brothers he was responsible for leading. He was covered in tattoos, mostly over his muscled arms and up his neck, the only part not covered was his face. The club tattoo that stretched across his tanned back was the largest, and I’d seen it only once, when he’d been stabbed in the stomach by a rival gang member and he stitched his wound in front of me. Yeah, John Portland was a bad ass. His blue eyes, ringed with hazel flecks, were framed by dark blonde hair, and he alternated between clean-shaven and a full beard. With the tattoos and the bike, it didn’t really take away from the tough exterior when he shaved the beard off. He still looked like he could kill you with his bare hands.
I’d learned some other things about him. He was kind. He was thoughtful. He liked to surf. When he smiled, his whole being lit up. He almost never smiled, though, instead wearing a constant hard-set expression that was halfway between a grimace and a frown. Most of all, I’d learned that he was trapped here, just like me. He might not have realised it – hell, maybe he did – but he was as much a pawn in the Il Sangue Cartel as I was . . . maybe even more.
Six months in and John Portland knew nothing about me besides the fact that I carried a photograph of a small baby around with me. Christopher Murphy, a federal air marshal and Emilio’s long-term link to bribing the American government, had stolen it from me and used it to try and extort sex and compliance from me in exchange for his silence. Until John arrived. He had never spoken of the photo again after he wrestled it from Murphy and silently returned it to me months later, and for that I was eternally grateful.
But John knew, and I didn’t know what he would do with my secret. I’d vowed early on to give him nothing else – not one more shred of incriminating evidence that he could potentially use against me. Whenever he asked anything about me or my family I would find a way to change the subject, to deflect his questioning, to respond with something vague and non-committal. I was very, very careful with my past, with the way I interacted with people. One word answers. Blank stares. Outright ignorance. The strippers who frequented the hallways didn’t call me The Ice Queen for nothing. Sometimes, if they were particularly bitter, The Ice Cunt. But I’d only heard that once, from a girl called Mindy. After Dornan threatened to knock all her teeth out and set her up as the permanent blow-job station in the corner of the club, she didn’t say it again. After that, none of the girls had really spoken to me, let alone bothered me. The only person who ever spoke to me outside of the holy trinity – Dornan, Emilio and Murphy – was John.
But for all of my one-word answers, blank stares and outright ignorance, it felt like John Portland could lower my guard without me even noticing, until it was too late and I’d revealed parts of myself better left in the dark.
I don’t think he knew what I really was – a prisoner – or maybe he just didn’t want to admit it to himself – until he came to see me at the apartment one day. Dornan was in Mexico on Gypsy Brothers business, and I needed to be checked on, obviously. John knocked on the door. I waited for him to punch in the code and come in, but he didn’t.
‘Mariana!’ he yelled, kicking the bottom of the door. ‘I’ve got my hands full, can you let me in?’
I panicked.
I still wasn’t trusted with the code to my own apartment. Other select people could get in, but I couldn’t get out. Dornan said it was for my own protection.
And it had worked fine. Until John.
‘Uh, just key in the code and come in,’ I replied, rooted to my spot on the couch.
He yelled a few more times, but I couldn’t move. I was paralysed with fear. I knew he suspected something wasn’t right, from the first moment he’d laid his baby blue eyes
on me and demanded to know who I was, and what the hell I was doing in his office. He wasn’t an idiot.
Eventually, he punched in the code himself. The front door to my apartment swung open and there he was, his helmet in his hand and a question on his face. I got up and hurried to the door, as if I’d been about to open it.
‘Can I get a hand here?’ he asked.
Barefoot, I stepped out onto the landing with him. There was nothing there.
‘I thought you said your hands were full,’ I said, looking around.
Before I could stop him, John grabbed the door handle and pulled it shut.
‘Oops,’ he said. ‘Can you open it back up for me?’
I gave him a blank look, but inside my stomach was twisting into knots. Oh God, he knows, he knows about me. He knows I’m not normal. He knows I’m trapped in here.
‘Sure,’ I replied. I stared at the keypad, tried to think of a number Dornan would use. His birthday? I punched that in and tried the door. Nothing.
I looked at John, who had one eyebrow raised. He was dressed in black from head to foot, his leather cut and jeans hugging his body as he towered over me, black steel-capped boots encasing his feet. His dark blonde hair hung in front of his eyes, adding a smudge of boyish charm juxtaposed against his ferocity.
I shrugged. ‘This thing’s temperamental,’ I said. ‘I swear it hates me.’
I tried another couple of combinations. Of course, they didn’t work.
‘Forget your own birthday?’ He rolled his eyes, shouldering me out of the way and stabbing at the keypad with his index finger until the door gave a small metallic click.
He’d tricked me. And how the hell did he know when my birthday was?
Furious, I shoved the door open and tried to slam it behind me. John wedged his boot in the door before it could close. I tried to push his boot out of the way using the door, but he was much stronger than me.
‘I can stay here all day,’ he said. Finally, I moved back, letting him into the apartment.
He closed the door behind him and strode past me, down the hallway and into the dining room, which faced the ocean and had its own small balcony.