by LP Lovell
I must have fallen asleep, and I jump when I wake up and find a figure standing in the room. My heart slows when I realize it’s Una. She glances into the cot, a soft smile touching her lips as she looks at her son. A kind of peace I never see any other time takes over her face. Una is turbulent and violent, driven by aggression and a killer instinct, but right now, she’s just a mother who loves her son.
“Thanks for looking after him,” she says.
I take in her appearance properly, noting the fine mist of blood across her throat and chest. Her white blonde hair is tinged in places with red. She’s been on a job with Sasha for the last two days.
“I don’t mind. He distracts me.”
She takes a deep breath and walks out of the room, glancing over her shoulder for me to follow her. I stand and walk into the hallway, quietly pulling the door closed. Silently, she pads down the stairs into the huge living room where she takes a seat on the white corner sofa.
“It’s time to let go of him,” she says quietly.
We both know exactly who she’s talking about without her needing to say his name. I feel myself bristle, my defenses shooting up instantly. I take a seat a couple of feet away from her. “I don’t want to talk about Rafael again.” She’s been saying the same thing for weeks, and every time I shut her down and change the subject because I don’t want to talk about it.
Sighing, she drags a hand through her hair. “You’ve been through so much, Anna, but in many ways, you’re so naive.”
“Because I’m not willing to kill people?”
She turns that icy gaze on me. “Because you think you love him, and so you are stuck, unable to go back, unwilling to go forward.”
“I do love him,” I whisper, although I wish I didn’t.
She offers me a sad smile, and I want to smack it off her face. “He’s not the savior you think he is.”
“I know exactly what he is.”
She takes her phone from her pocket and taps the screen before showing it to me. There are a series of images, which she flicks through. Women hung from a bridge, children dead in the streets. Blood and torture, carnage and destruction.
“This is what he is. He’s a killer, just as I am a killer, and you, sweet sister…you are not. You’re good. So let this go and move on with your life.” I almost feel like she’s goading me, mocking me with my inadequacies.
“You don’t know me, Una. I’m not good, and that…” I point to the phone and shrug. “Is just the cartel. I’ve seen far worse. I know what he is, and I love him.” I swallow heavily, dropping my chin to my chest. He gave me freedom from slavery, strength from weakness. Love when I’d never known what it was to be cared for by anyone. How do you walk away from that and not mourn it? How do you live a life you have no idea how to live? She tells me to let go and avoid my misery, but I’ve only ever known misery, and in much worse forms than this. In a way, I think I like this pain because it reminds me that there are things in this life that are beautiful and pure. It’s okay to grieve the loss of those things.
“Mexico may never be safe, Anna. So I suggest you find some kind of purpose outside of this." She makes it sound so easy, but the truth is, I’m so lost that I feel as though I’m walking numbly in the dark: deaf, blind and unfeeling. I don’t know who or what I am. “Find your purpose, and once you have that, you’ll find yourself.”
“A purpose…”
“What do you want?” It’s a loaded question, and one I struggle to answer. “If Rafael didn’t exist, what would you, Anna Vasiliev want?” I try to push all thoughts of Rafael aside and think hard about her question. The truth is I don’t know. When I try and search myself, all I feel is rage.
Rafael once said to me that I’m one of the angriest people he’s ever met, and it’s never been so true. I’m consumed by anger until it’s all I feel, all I see. I’m angry with him for abandoning me when he promised he never would. I’m mad at myself for needing him so much because I have nothing else. I’m angry at fate for stripping me of my life before it had ever really begun. I hate the world and my place in it.
Closing my eyes, I push everything from my mind, and dig deep, searching out the source of all my rage. Layers peel away until I’m left with an answer so simple, and yet so obvious. Rafael is not the cause of my misery. He was just the band-aid that has now been ripped off, exposing a festering mess beneath. My pain is complex, various threads wound together so tightly, they’ll never truly be picked apart. The wound itself was inflicted a long time ago by many different men. In the last few weeks, I’ve often found my mind drifting, contemplating how I got here. Well, now I want to right the wrongs.
“I want revenge on the men who enslaved me,” I say, and the corner of her lip pulls into a slow smile. She looks like some kind of dark angel. The face of perfection with death on her lips, whispering sweet promises of retribution.
“Good. I had a feeling you’d get here eventually.”
“How?”
“Because though we may be different, we’re very much the same. I would want them dead, the same way I wanted Nicholai dead.”
I nod, and for the first time in a long time, the storm within me calms a little.
6
Rafael
“Rafe, we are about to lose our distributors!” Samuel shouts.
“Good.”
“What?” He shakes his head. “You’ve lost it.”
“No.” I push to my feet. “I haven’t.”
“Well, do you want to let me in on your game plan here, because I’m struggling to see how we aren’t going to fuck ourselves?”
Opening the office door, I step out into the warehouse. There are girls packing coke into blocks, the production chain still in full swing, but it isn’t going anywhere. I have aircraft hangars and warehouses full of coke, a month’s worth to be exact.
I cross the warehouse and open the door that leads outside where the airstrip is. One of my heavy freight planes sits on the tarmac, it’s engines just winding down. When it comes to a halt, the back ramp lowers, and men scramble to unload the contents, one barrel at a time.
“What is that?” Samuel asks.
“Ether.” I turn to him. “We’re doing things the old-fashioned way.”
Samuel drags a hand down his face. “That’ll take three times as long to produce.”
“And it’ll be twice as pure.”
“The distributors won’t wait that long.”
I shrug. “Then we’ll get new distributors. Who isn’t going to want ninety-eight percent pure cocaine?”
He narrows his eyes at me. “No one.”
I smile slowly. “Exactly. It’ll be a war, Sam. Everyone will be scrambling to buy it. And Dominges distributors…they’ll be out on their ass.”
“It’ll cost more to make. Less markup.”
“No, because it’ll cost more to buy. Tell the distro’s that they’ll have their first batch in a week. On the house.”
He looks at me, and I can see the argument on the tip of his tongue, but he says nothing. It’s a win-win. The dealers are happy because they’ve got free shit, and this miraculous new coke will be up junkies’ noses and firing around their bloodstreams. They’ll want more, and more until nothing else will do. An epidemic. And Dominges can’t fight that because he doesn’t produce his own cocaine, and no one else bothers with ether washing anymore. There’s less markup in it.
I’m not here for money though. I’m here to win. And I have ten tonnes of backed up coke to do it with.
7
Anna
Three months later
Darkness surrounds me, and I inhale a deep breath of the fresh night air. Ahead of me, the perfectly-manicured lawns are illuminated by the light spilling from the enormous windows of the mansion. Inside, smatterings of light glitter over the walls, reflected by the crystal chandeliers.
It looks so grand and perfect. Shiny. But I know the truth because inside that house are horrors that play a starring role in my nightm
ares every night, even after all these years.
A guard walks the perimeter literally meters away but hidden by the darkness, it’s as though we don’t exist. I have to glance to my left to check Una is still there, she’s so utterly silent. She can melt into the darkness like a shadow—so still, you’d never know she was there until it was too late.
Una breaks cover, and I follow her, sprinting across the length of the lawn. We drop to a crouch in the shadow of the enormous house. The number of times Una has made me recite this plan, I feel as though I could walk through it in my sleep. It’s second nature to her, an everyday occurrence, but truthfully, I’m nervous. My pulse pounds erratically against my ears as adrenaline surges through my veins. I spent years trying to escape this place, and now I’m breaking back in. If we fail…if we get caught… I don’t even want to think about what will happen to me, or my sister.
As if sensing my thoughts, Una reaches behind her, wrapping her fingers around my wrist and tugging me tight to her back. She glances down at her watch, counting down the seconds for a gap in the security. Standing up, I wait for her to break the window open. There’s the click of the lock turning over as she picks it, and then the old-fashioned window gently creaks open. Una pushes herself up and slips silently through. I take a deep breath, digging deep within myself for courage. This is it. I follow her, and there’s no going back. The weight of the moment presses in on me because I know this is a crossroads between the girl I am and the woman I could be if I do this.
I linger a beat longer, and then I grab the window ledge and yank myself up, sliding through. The sound of my feet hitting the ground is muted by the thick carpet. Una pulls the window closed and moves away down the corridor without looking back. I mimic her footsteps exactly. The security isn’t that tight. It wasn’t designed to keep people out. It’s to keep people in.
I follow her through the house, ducking into doorways and hiding from the occasional guard in the corridors. Finally, we reach the top floor, and as I get to the top of the stairs, my breath seizes in my chest. At the end of the hallway is a set of double doors, and the sight of them grips me with fear. Behind those doors is my own personal hell.
Una strides forward like death personified, not a trace of hesitation or fear to be found. When she reaches the door, she turns around and glances at me, cocking a brow as she waits. Seconds pass, and she doesn’t move. She’s waiting for me to make the decision because this is for me. Not her. Una is the assassin but this is my kill, and we both know it. And I need to do this. I know it down to the fragmented depths of my soul.
I walk towards her, and with every step, my heart beats harder, thrumming against my ribcage. Vile memories blink through my mind like a faulty film reel, depicting all the times before that I was lead to this exact door. Una cocks her head to the side, waiting for some kind of confirmation. I nod, and she slips a gun from a thigh holster, screwing a silencer to the end. I expect her to walk straight in there, but instead, she places the gun in my hand, her eyes locking with mine. My fingers wrap tightly around the cool metal, and I press my finger over the trigger. She drops to one knee in front of the door, picking the lock. And then she takes a knife from her other thigh and silently pushes the door handle down.
The distinctive scent of wood polish and cologne hits me as soon as the door opens. The room is illuminated by the dim light of the bedside lamps, bathing everything in a soft glow. At first glance, the room looks lavish, but all I see is a torture chamber. It hasn’t changed one bit from when I was last here, six years ago. I still remember that last time because it was the worst, the parting gift that man gave me before he sold me to the Sinaloa like unwanted cattle.
The sound of the shower running can be heard through the en-suite door, and the anticipation is eating away at me, waiting for him to step out here.
Stepping inside, I round the bottom of the monstrous four-poster bed and still. There, lying on her side on the floor is a girl, naked and bleeding. I rush to her, all thoughts of the mission, or the kill temporarily forgotten. She glances up at me, her haunted sapphire blue eyes meeting mine through the curtain of golden blonde hair hanging in her face. That singular look drags me right back to that place, this place. I feel her pain, her sorrow, and her absolute desolation. We share it because what’s hers is mine and what’s mine is hers. We are both two lost souls that the world forgot about and abandoned. My eyes drop to the gold collar fastened around her throat, blood tainting the metal as it cuts into her neck. I know well what it means. It marks her as his favorite. Just like I was. To be his favorite is to live a fate worse than death. She’s chained to the bed frame by the collar around her neck, the chain only a few inches long. I swallow the bile that’s creeping up my throat and fight back the angry tears prickling the back of my eyes. When I brush her hair away from her face, she flinches, and it’s then that I really see just how young she is. Thirteen maybe. Her body is covered in scars, some I recognize all too well, and some that must be a new form of torture he’s devised.
“She’s just a child,” Una whispers from somewhere behind me.
I glance at my sister. “Yes.”
Her jaw ticks and I see a rare hint of emotion from Una before she slowly stands. “We have to take care of him. You need to focus,” she says, her eyes tracing over the girls trembling form. I know she’s right. One thing at a time. She walks across the room, flipping her blade between her fingers ominously. Standing, I tear my gaze from the girl. I want to help her, but I can’t do that while he still breathes.
I move to stand near Una, next to the bathroom door. “You can do this, Anna,” she says quietly.
“What if I can’t?” I whisper. This is like facing the monster under the bed, confronting all your worst and most debilitating fears, but as I glance at the abused girl, I know this isn’t just about me.
Una lifts her face, the curtain of white blonde hair falling away to reveal those violet eyes. “You can and you will.”
The shower cuts off and Una shifts, placing herself beside the doorway to the bathroom. She takes what looks like a piece of string and clutches it in her fist. Her eyes lock with mine and time seems to stand still as the doorknob twists, steam billowing through the gap and temporarily blurring the figure in the doorway. And then the steam clears, revealing the monster himself. Alexandru Dalca. Even thinking his real name has me nervously cringing. The Master. He will always be The Master, no matter how much I know that this man deserves no such respect or subservience from me.
He stills, and I lift the gun in my hand. It trembles as I point it at him and he narrows those cold blue eyes on me. He looks older and yet just as I remember.
“Amado,” he breathes, and my stomach churns violently, forcing bile to the back of my throat. I freeze, my mind blanks, my tongue feels thick in my mouth, and my lungs seize until I feel as though I’m voluntarily drowning. He takes a step towards me, and then Una moves, shifting behind him and pulling what I thought was string across the front of his throat, but as it bites into his skin, I realize its wire. A thin red line wells instantly, pooling down his neck.
“I suggest you take a seat, Mr. Dalca,” she says against his ear. His back bows awkwardly as he tries to relieve the pressure of the wire. Una forces him to the floor at the head of the bed before wrapping the wire around the bedpost, imprisoning him by the neck. Just like he did to that girl. If he tries to move, he’ll slice his own throat. The blood continues to run, a fresh wave coming with each tiny movement. The sight of it brings a small sense of satisfaction.
Una steps in front of him, her body uncharacteristically tense. His eyes trace over her before shifting to me. “I thought you would be dead by now,” he says, his body language and voice betraying none of the discomfort I know he must feel. He knows what he did to me. He has to know he’s going to die.
“Well, unfortunately for you, I’m not,” I say quietly.
A smile quirks the corner of his lips. “So, what is it you want?”
&
nbsp; I open my mouth to speak, but Una moves, lightning fast, gripping a handful of his hair and wrenching his head back. A fresh flow of crimson runs from the wound at his throat. She bends over, bringing her face only inches from his. “There is no want here. This is simple justice.” She flicks her eyes over him, a sneer pulling at her lips. “I’ve dealt with some monsters in my time, but you, Mr. Dalca… fucking and hurting little girls…there’s a special place in hell for men like you.” Gripping his chin, she places her lips to his forehead and the image is so strange that I can’t quite process it until he starts screaming that is. I drop my gaze to her free hand, which is planted between his legs, beneath his towel. A red stain blossoms across the pristine white material, growing bigger by the second. When my sister pulls her hand away, I see the bloodied knife clutched in her fingers. Did she just…castrate him? She pats his cheek and stands. “He’s all yours, Anna.” She turns to face me and our eyes meet. This isn’t like her. She doesn’t do uncontrolled or messy. Her eyes lock with mine, and I see the turmoil swirling in those violet irises. She’s fighting demons every bit as much as I am right now. “You only get to take revenge once. Make it good,” she says. She isn’t going to do this for me. She made that clear when we agreed to come here. This is my past, my vendetta, and my demon to slay.
“I want you dead,” I say to him. He sucks in pained breaths, the color draining from his face as he bleeds out.
My emotions are all over the place because although I should be in a position of power right now, I feel weak, fragile, and broken. And angry. I’m so angry because he renders me powerless. Years of the most manipulative abuse have ingrained this fear of him into me. Tell me you love me, Amado. The memory of those words has bile rising in my throat.
“Well, then, you should get on with it before my men kill you,” he says through clenched teeth. He’s mocking me, daring me. He doesn’t think I’ll kill him.
