Where Loyalties Lie: A Standalone Romantic Suspense

by Jill Ramsower

  In fact, I stayed away for days after his birth. I finally returned to my father’s house only when I had no other option, sneaking in at night to avoid seeing my new insta-family. When I entered the dark house, there was no avoiding that a baby had joined our ranks. His cries ravaged the night air, falling on deaf ears.

  I peeked into the nursery to find it empty, except for the tiny screaming bundle. How long had they let him cry? There was no telling, knowing Courtney and my father. Neither of them was exactly the nurturing type.

  Isaac’s little hands scratched and pulled at his puffy cheeks as he cried. Seeing him made my heart ache. I didn’t have much experience with babies, but that didn’t seem to bother me. Wanting to hold him felt natural, so I scooped him up, cuddled him against my chest, and sang him a lullaby I remembered my tita singing to me.

  He fit perfectly in my arms. Within a few minutes, his cries tapered off, and he fell back asleep, comforted by my touch. As I gazed down at the beautiful features of my baby brother, the pieces of my broken heart rearranged themselves until they formed a new, patchwork version of what they’d been. Not exactly like new, but far better than it had been just minutes before.

  This was my new purpose in life.

  This little innocent bundle was going to need me, and I needed him more than I ever could have guessed. I’d been upset with Dad and Courtney about the baby, but little Isaac was just as much a victim to circumstance as I was.

  The next day, I learned how to make his bottle and change a diaper. Courtney was thrilled to see me show an interest in taking care of him, shocker. We worked out an unspoken truce—I loved my brother like he was my own, and she gave me a wide berth. My father was grateful to me for helping keep Courtney happy, which improved our relationship.

  When it came time to graduate, I wasn’t ready to leave. Isaac had quickly become the center of my world. My dad was more than happy for me to stay and help out. In fact, he started teaching me about the management of the family restaurant. Tita and my grandpa, who passed away when I was little, started the little Mexican restaurant when they were young. Dad took over when my grandpa got sick but had since hired managers and only checked in on occasion. I’d worked there as a waitress, but now, he taught me about the books, insurance, staff schedules, and the myriad of other intricacies running a restaurant entailed. When I took over as the general manager, I had a solid grasp of its inner workings.

  I loved it, especially because the place was a part of our history. A part of my tita.

  However, it didn’t take me long to realize the financial records had some oddities that didn’t measure up. Large sums of money would be received on days we hadn’t been particularly busy, and there was an employee on the books that I’d never heard of.

  My father had been in Los Zares all my life. All of his friends and most of my family were involved in the club in one way or another. Sometimes, it was hard to tell who was a real cousin and who was family through the club. When my father did spend time with me growing up, it was often to bring me to club barbecues. My tita was never happy about it, but she could only do so much to stop my dad.

  When I was little, I never understood the problem. The club gatherings were great fun. I ran around with the other kids and got to spend some much-needed time with my dad. As I got older, I began to understand that Los Zares weren’t exactly law-abiding. The family and friends who were associated with the club were in and out of jail. The circumstances were always downplayed to me, and the police made out to be the villains. Rarely did I hear about any major crimes, but the club members definitely weren’t the Brady Bunch.

  After Tita died, I had the chance to spend more time with those people. I learned about their struggles and saw them for the dynamic individuals they were, rather than the label my tita had branded them with. They were no more good or evil than anyone else. They were just trying to make a life for themselves in a world that beat you down if you weren’t careful.

  In fact, some of them were the most loyal and selfless people I’d ever met. Their good intentions were sometimes misguided, but they were always there for one another. It was the club that had been providing money to help support Tita and me all those years. She might not have liked it, but my dad’s other job was what kept our lights on.

  I began to see the club and its activities as a way to better our lives. As just part of the world around me. I intentionally avoided any knowledge of the uglier side of my father’s business, like whether it was drugs or guns or both that he bought and sold. I knew enough not to ask questions and told myself that my limited role in the club wasn’t hurting anyone.

  In a short amount of time, my skill with numbers allowed me to show my dad more ways he could filter money through the restaurant even more securely than before. His eyes lit up when I explained my ideas, and I yearned for that approval.

  On my nineteenth birthday, after I’d been working with him for almost a year, my dad took me out to celebrate. We had dinner on the Riverwalk, just the two of us, and after, he took me to a tattoo parlor.

  “What’s this about? Tell me we’re not getting father-daughter tattoos,” I teased.

  “Nah, this is way more important than that. You can’t be a sworn-in member as a woman, but you’re a part of Los Zares as much as any of us. It’s time we let people know. By giving you our mark, no one will ever fuck with you. You’ll officially be under our protection.” My father wanted me to be a part of his club. A part of his life. It was so much more than any of the token outings or birthday gifts I’d received before. It felt like the first time he was truly proud of me. Proud to call me his daughter.

  My heart swelled and blossomed as tears pricked at the back of my eyes. “Thanks, Dad. This means a lot to me.”

  He grinned, pulling me into a hug and patting me on the back. “Hey, Cinco,” he called out to the tattoo artist working on a customer behind a curtain. “I have my baby girl in here, and she’s ready for her mark.”

  “Fuck yeah,” the man hollered back. “I’ll be done in ten, and we’ll get her inked.”

  It was one of the best and worst nights of my life, although I wouldn’t know just how bad it was until I experienced the absolute worst night. That didn’t come until five years later.

  ***

  If I’d told Miguel once, I’d told him a dozen times to make sure the napkin stock was full and a backup package was ordered before the supply got too low. But no, he continued to forget, and this was the second damn time in the past six months we were stuck without napkins. It was Friday night with a restaurant full of customers. I was going to wring his fucking neck.

  “Miguel, where the hell are the napkins?” I hissed, not wanting customers to hear me chewing out my day manager in the back.

  “Whoa, easy, Em. I don’t know where they are. I ordered napkins two weeks ago—I swear.”

  “If you ordered them, where are they?”

  “I don’t know, but I swear I’m telling the truth. You need me to run to Costco and grab some?”

  I let out an exasperated breath. “Let me pull up our order history first and see what’s going on.” I spun around and power walked to the tiny office.

  Originally, my father purchased supplies through a restaurant supply company, but I’d figured out a couple of years ago that it was cheaper and easier to simply go through Amazon Prime. I pulled up our account on my laptop and searched the past orders. When I clicked on the napkin order made two weeks prior, I realized what had happened. The napkins had been sent to our warehouse address downtown instead of the restaurant. We had a handful of addresses registered on our account since we used it for business and personal purchases. Miguel hadn’t noticed the wrong address had been selected.

  Rather than buy more napkins we didn’t need, I decided to make the ten-minute drive to the warehouse. I asked Miguel to hang around the restaurant while I ran my errand, then hurried out to my car. My dad had bought the warehouse years ago to house the Mustang he was fixing up
and for other club business that I had no desire to know about. The few times I’d been there, I noticed crates and boxes stashed on one end of the building, but they were none of my business.

  He’d given me a key for emergencies, and in my eyes, this qualified. I wasn’t going over to butt into his business. I just wanted to get our freaking napkins and get back to the restaurant.

  The building was in the worst part of town, but the locals knew it was Los Zares property, so no one touched it. Normally, I would feel safe walking from my car to the front door, but this time, unease pricked at my skin. I had no clue what my problem was. There were no other cars out front, and no one in sight. The door was only fifty feet away, with a set of floodlights illuminating the entry. I scolded myself for being ridiculous and forced myself from the car.

  I quickly flipped the deadbolt to the metal door, flinging it open and taking a confident step inside before I froze. The warehouse was one large open space with Dad’s car back by the bay garage doors. Normally, the center of the room was empty, but today, a white van was parked next to the Mustang. The back doors were open wide, and a dozen women huddled inside as far as they could get from the doors. One woman was bent over the van bumper, hands tied behind her back, with a man raping her from behind. Three other men stood around watching, one of which was my father.

  I took in the scene in a terrified heartbeat. The only sound was a heart-wrenching whimper from the woman being violated and the thrum of my pounding heart, pulsing in my ears.

  I’d made a horrible mistake, and there was no undoing it.

  Before I could say a word, one of the men had a gun pointed at my head. These weren’t club members—none of them were familiar. I would have remembered. They were the seediest, most terrifying men I’d ever seen in my life. I couldn’t even fathom what those women had felt being captured by such soulless creatures.

  “That’s my daughter,” my father growled at the man. “Put the fucking gun down.”

  His words broke the tense standoff, sending the room catapulting into action.

  The poor woman began to openly weep as her assailant resumed his rutting, laughing at her humiliation. The other women huddled even tighter into the front of the van and began to cry at various volumes. One of the men lit a cigarette and watched the scene like it was primetime TV. My father hurried over to where I still stood in shock and slammed the door shut behind me, grabbing my arm and exposing my wrist to the man.

  “See, she’s one of us.”

  The man lowered his gun and strolled over to us, his black eyes narrowed with the need for violence. His face was a graveyard of old acne scars. That didn’t necessarily say anything about him as a person, but it still made him look that much more terrifying.

  “You say that, but I don’t like the look on her face.” His voice was guttural—the sound of cigarettes and alcohol and pure evil.

  “She was just caught off guard is all. Let me get her out of here, and we can finish our business.”

  The whole time they spoke, the man stared at me, his black eyes slicing into me and poisoning my insides. “I think maybe she needs a reminder about minding her own business.” In two seconds flat, he clamped his hand around my neck, slamming my back against the wall and pointing his gun at my father.

  His eyes never once left mine.

  “You see that pretty girl on the van going for a ride?”

  His stale breath infiltrated my nostrils, making my already rancid stomach revolt further. I had to swallow it down, past his hand and my crippling fear.

  He waited until I nodded before he continued.

  “You don’t keep your mouth shut about everything you see here, I’ll do that to you myself, then fuck you with my knife and turn you inside out. You understand?” His hand squeezed my throat so hard that black dots floated in my vision.

  I nodded again, gripping his hand as I fought for air.

  He flung me to the ground by my neck, kicking me in the stomach for good measure. “Get the fuck out of here, puta, before I change my mind.”

  I scrambled back to my feet, my eyes immediately seeking out my father. He glared at me with disdain. If he was worried about me, he hid it well. I went straight for the door, slamming it behind me and running to my car. My hands shook so badly that it took three attempts to hit the unlock button. I peeled out, driving blindly for ten minutes before I parked in the Costco parking lot and burst into tears.

  The man’s soulless eyes and his rank breath dominated my senses, but it was the sight of those women that haunted my soul. All I could think was, that could have been me.

  It would be me if I couldn’t find a way to forget what I’d seen.

  I cried until my eyes began to burn, then pulled myself together and bought a week’s worth of napkins. By the time I made it back to the restaurant, I had packaged up everything that had happened and locked it away in a box in the back of my mind. I finished the dinner shift, keeping a wide smile on my face all evening.

  The one thing I wanted, more than anything, was to crawl into bed that night with Isaac and Averi, but I couldn’t chance running into my dad. I couldn’t face him. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see his face again. I’d known he was a criminal, but I never dreamed he participated in trafficking women. He was so much more of a monster than I ever could have imagined.

  Shame wrapped its greasy fingers around me and saturated every inch of me with its oily residue.

  I’d participated in my father’s enterprise. I’d helped launder money that was tainted by the sale of women’s bodies. Who knew how many women I’d facilitated in being trafficked, their bodies sold and abused. Their souls desecrated and lives snuffed out.

  There was no word for how wretched I felt.

  For weeks, I grappled with how to live with the knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes. Drowned in shame and disappointment in myself for ignoring how my tita had raised me and contributing to my father’s criminal activities. I’d known perfectly well that the club earned its money illegally—what exactly had I thought that entailed? I hadn’t thought. That was the problem. I’d actively stuck my head in the sand and pretended everything was fine. But now that I knew how ugly things were, how was I supposed to continue covering up what Los Zares was doing? How could I pretend it wasn’t happening?

  I couldn’t.

  But I also needed to stay alive. The self-loathing waged a war inside me, battling daily with self-preservation. I did everything I could to act normal. To continue with my life as if nothing had changed, but it had. Everything had changed.

  My father never said a word about what had happened. He never defended himself nor soothed my fears, and I was glad. As long as he didn’t bring it up, I didn’t have to spit in his face and tell him how much I hated him.

  One day, about six weeks after the incident, I was at a party with my cousins. I didn’t want to go, but it would be noticeable to others if I suddenly stopped showing up at gatherings. One of my dad’s friends walked in and made a joke to everyone about the narcs out front watching the house.

  It was the opportunity I’d needed, and I’d had just enough alcohol to give me the courage it would require.

  I had debated about going to the cops ever since the incident, but I couldn’t see how I could walk into a station without word getting around. I would end up dead without a doubt. I wasn’t going to just call 911, so where did that leave me? Los Zares probably had cops on their payroll. How did I know who was good and who was corrupt? There was no way to know, but someone staking out a Zares’ party was a good place to start. I would have to leave the rest up to God and what little luck I might have still had.

  Before leaving the house, I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper and slipped it into my pocket. I said my goodbyes and scanned the cars lining the street for the black sedan concealing the officers. As if it was meant to be, they were parked right in front of my car.

  As nonchalantly as I could, I walked toward the car and deposit
ed the note into their open window, not pausing to talk. I kept my head forward, so if anyone was watching from the house, I never appeared to register their presence. However, I held the driver’s eyes the whole time I walked toward him, infusing my pleading gaze with sincerity, hoping they wouldn’t take the gesture as meaningless taunting.

  Three days later, I met federal agents in a run-down motel room and began to discuss the end of my life as I knew it.

  Chapter 21

  Tamir

  “I told you it was my boyfriend that was in the club because I couldn’t stand to admit that it was me. That I was a part of something so awful.” Emily’s teeth chattered as she talked. I’d managed to coerce her inside as she told me her story, but a chill still saturated her body.

  I felt my own bone-deep chill, but it had nothing to do with the weather.

  Emily had been lying to me the entire time we’d been together. Considering how well she had fooled me, she was quite the gifted storyteller.

  There was no ex-boyfriend.

  She was no innocent victim.

  Emily had been a part of Los Zares for over five years, laundering their money and doing who knew what else. Then she turned over, not just on the club, but on her family. She’d sent family members to prison. Had it been purely from good intentions, or was she lying again? Perhaps the only reason she’d testified was to escape her own prosecution. How was I supposed to trust anything she said when she changed her story as often as she changed clothes?

  A part of me argued that it was understandable to want to hide her association with the Zares. They were a ruthless group of people, and one of the largest, most savage drug trafficking organizations in America. It was hard to picture Emily with her pet cactus, or whatever it was, living among the vicious bikers. That didn’t mean it didn’t happen. She’d been one of them, and not just briefly, but for five fucking years.

  It wasn’t the first time in my career that I’d come across a wayward criminal. There was almost always a hit put out on those who turned on a criminal organization and chose to testify rather than face the consequences of their actions in a court of law. As if testifying absolved their guilt for years of criminal activity. Just because a man threw his associates under the bus didn’t mean his hands were clean. Sure, there was something to be said for repenting, but was it enough?