Empire

by Lili St. Germain

  But somebody else did. Out of nowhere, Dornan was behind me, his hand around my wrist, twisting painfully so that my grip on the photo frame faltered. With an angry cry, my fingers loosened and the photo fell to the floor, bouncing harmlessly.

  Dornan pulled my arm, hard enough that I was forced to face him. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Look at me. What do you think you’re doing?’ His fingers were squeezing my upper arms so hard, it ached. I struggled in his grip, my eyes only for Emilio.

  ‘Look at me!’ he roared. It was like time stood still for that moment, our tragic tableau representative of our entire lives – Emilio, smirking as he crossed his leather shoes on the edge of the desk where a dead child’s ashes lay scattered; Dornan, hurting me, always hurting me. And me. Useless. Pathetic. Emilio had killed a baby. He was a human trafficker. He dealt in women and children like it was nothing. I’d known the depths of his depravity for almost a year now, ever since that night when Dornan had been shot, when he’d revealed to me the cost of keeping me alive was to do his father’s bidding – transporting human beings across state lines, across countries, stealing people and selling them. Selling them! And I’d sat on my hands and blamed my need to protect Luis and done nothing.

  In some ways, I was just as bad as them. Worse. Because I couldn’t help feeling – knowing – that if I’d done things differently, the nameless baby Emilio had killed would be alive right now. Maybe even his mother, if we’d taken her to a hospital instead of Dornan shooting her in the back of his truck to relieve her suffering as she slowly bled out after giving birth. I could have done something, anything, and I’d been sitting on my hands for a year, hell, for ten fucking years, and I had nobody to blame but myself.

  ‘Look at me, goddamn it,’ Dornan muttered. I did. I raised my eyes. I could only imagine what they looked like. Wild. Empty. I was empty inside. Dornan’s dark eyes widened a little when he saw my gaze. I think I must have repulsed him, then. With my face twisted into a mask of rage and grief, my eyes blank and hollow, it was a wonder he recognised me at all.

  ‘It was easy, really,’ Emilio said. I didn’t look away from Dornan as Emilio continued to speak. ‘I used a pillow. Didn’t take more than a few minutes. He struggled, a bit, but then he stopped. He looked so peaceful, Mariana. It made me wonder what your child would have looked like if it hadn’t died inside of you.’

  I saw the light die in Dornan’s eyes as his father spoke so casually about murdering an infant. The subtle way his broad shoulders curved inward, the way his whole body seemed to deflate. He took his hands off me, let them hang at his sides.

  ‘Go home,’ Dornan bit out, his eyes pained. He put his hands on his hips, shaking his head as he finally broke our gaze.

  ‘We still have our meeting,’ I replied, feeling like my insides had been hollowed out with a melon scoop. Like someone had taken out every bit of energy and life inside me, and left a vacuous nothingness in its wake.

  ‘The meeting is cancelled,’ Dornan said, the first trace of decisiveness I think I’d ever seen him display around his father. Dead kids brought out the rebel in him.

  ‘Good,’ I replied. ‘It’s my birthday. I’m taking the day off.’

  Without looking back at Emilio, I slung my bag over my shoulder and brushed past Dornan without giving him eye contact.

  My hand was on the door handle when Emilio chuckled. It was a noise that made me want to go on a murderous rampage. I felt the weight of the gun in my handbag and briefly contemplated if I could get off a couple of bullets before Dornan could stop me. He was, after all, blocking my aim.

  I swallowed down the need for immediate violence and turned on my heel, my eyes landing directly on the man I most hated. ‘Do I amuse you?’ I asked softly.

  Emilio grinned, wiping some of the ashes off the desk and onto the floor as he held my gaze. ‘I’ve finally driven you mad,’ he whispered, the delight – the wonder – clear in his raspy voice.

  I stilled. Was he right? ‘I was mad when I met you,’ I said bitterly, opening the door. ‘No sane person would have agreed to this.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DORNAN

  Mariana slammed the door so hard, it was a wonder the fucking thing didn’t fall off the hinges. He listened to the click of her high heels as they disappeared down the hallway, away from them.

  And then he turned and faced his father, and whatever the fuck it was that was on the desk in front of him.

  ‘I should follow her,’ Dornan said, his eyes lingering on the closed door.

  Emilio slapped the desk, making little pieces of bone bounce in the shockwave of his gesture.

  ‘Sit. Your goon will watch her. If he can move his fat ass fast enough to catch her.’

  Dornan sat in the chair across from his father, his fingers itching for a cigarette. Fuck it. Why had he quit smoking again? It was something he’d done just recently, after Mariana had lost the baby. If he wanted to get her pregnant again, he couldn’t be going around smoking all the damn time and snorting flake off strippers’ tits. He needed to take care of himself so they didn’t lose another pregnancy. Somehow, in his mind, this self-enforced penance made it easier to believe that she’d forgive him one day, that they’d have a family of their own. In the wake of his divorce from Celia, marrying Mariana was something he was determined to do.

  Fuck it. ‘You got any cigarettes?’

  Emilio watched his son wordlessly, dragging a packet of expensive-looking Italian cigarettes from his top pocket and sliding them through grimy ash towards his son. Dornan picked up the packet gingerly, shaking off ash before he opened it and withdrew a smoke. Placing it between his teeth, he took the lighter from inside the packet and lit up.

  It tasted good. So good. Emilio raised his eyebrows as if to say What about me? and Dornan slid the packet back, making sure to avoid the mess Mariana had made on the table.

  ‘She didn’t call you,’ Emilio said, lighting up his own cigarette. ‘I’m surprised. If not you – who?’

  Dornan had to think about that for a moment. Who had Mariana called when she’d received a dead child on her doorstep? The thought of her in that moment was horrifying to Dornan. He loved her more than almost anything. He loved her so fiercely, sometimes it scared him. And she hadn’t called him when something so monumental had happened.

  Dornan knew what his father was doing. Trying to drive a wedge between them, to make him distrust Ana. And even though he knew this on an intellectual level, it was still impossible not to let that question burrow into his head like a fat worm and sit there, in the middle of his brain, burning him. Who had she called?

  ‘Guillermo was already there,’ Dornan said dismissively. ‘That’s what I pay him for. To be with her. Always.’

  ‘Where you’d like to be, no doubt,’ Emilio mused. ‘Ana’s a very beautiful woman, son. Beautiful women have needs. Do you really think it’s a wise idea to have a thug like Guillermo living with her? On her couch. In her kitchen. Maybe even in her bed, who knows? You think he’s licking that Colombian kitty of hers while you’re hard at work, earning the money for your family?’

  It took every ounce of self-control that Dornan possessed to keep from flying across the desk and smashing his fists into his father’s face, but that self-control unfortunately didn’t extend to the visual image Emilio had just implanted into Dornan’s mind. Guillermo’s fat fucking bald head perched between Mariana’s thighs as she moaned and writhed on the bed. Whether it was true or not was completely irrelevant. Just the act of imagining the scene was enough to make Dornan want to go to Ana’s apartment and put a bullet between Guillermo’s eyes.

  He needed to talk about something else before he killed somebody, right now.

  They observed each other for a little while, Dornan smoking angrily, Emilio puffing away leisurely, as if the remains of a dead kid weren’t right in front of him.

  It was Emilio who finally broke the silence.

  ‘You broke procedure when you took this kid to the hospit
al.’ He gestured at the ashes for effect, then tapped his own cigarette ash on the top of the kid’s remains, making Dornan’s stomach turn violently. It just kept getting worse.

  ‘We should never have been transporting somebody that pregnant in the first place,’ Dornan replied, unable to tear his gaze from the spot where Emilio’s light-grey cigarette ash had crumbled on top of the darker, sandier remains. He sucked desperately at his own cigarette, knowing that wasn’t what he needed, but utterly bereft at the thought of what he did need. He needed some fucking peace. He needed to not be doing this shit anymore. He needed his father to either stop what he was doing, or die, neither of which was likely to happen any time soon. The old bastard would outlive all of them. Of that, he had no doubt.

  ‘That’s not your concern,’ Emilio replied, waving his hand dismissively. ‘Your concern is to get the package from A to B. Your concern is to do what you’re told so I don’t have the fucking FBI breathing down my neck.’

  Dornan baulked. ‘The FBI aren’t after you because I let some kid live after I shot his mother. The FBI are after you because your fucking business partner double-crossed you to go sun himself in the fucking Bahamas with his new piece of ass and a bunch of our money.’

  Emilio’s smile had dropped completely. ‘Are you quite finished?’

  ‘The mother was dead,’ Dornan continued. ‘The kid was still worth something. I did what I thought best at the time. Dump the kid, let the hospital do their thing, and then go in and get the kid back once we knew it was viable.’ It was a lie, but one he’d had plenty of time to construct. ‘I didn’t know I was about to get fuckin’ shot, did I?’

  ‘The kid would have been fine,’ Emilio replied. ‘You should have called me.’

  Dornan itched to get up and leave, get away from the oppressive stare his father was beaming down on his face like twin fucking laser beams that were burning holes in his skin.

  ‘The kid didn’t look right. He would have died. I made an executive decision. That kid was worth a lot of money.’

  Emilio brushed some of the ash away from where he’d been resting his clasped hands. ‘Come on, son. We both know you didn’t take pity on that child because of money.’

  Dornan didn’t respond. Of course he hadn’t. He’d taken the kid to a hospital because he wasn’t about to kill an innocent fucking baby that had just been born.

  At least, not purposely. An image swam in his vision – Mariana’s pale face as she sat on a hospital stretcher, her accusing eyes, the blood that still stained her thighs. He’d accidentally killed his own unborn baby, so why not somebody else’s?

  Emilio let his previous words hang in the air for an excruciating moment before he cleared his throat, pressing on again. ‘Here’s what I think happened,’ he said. ‘I think your pretty little whore batted her eyelashes at you – and, son, they’re powerful fucking eyelashes, I get it – and you handed her your dick, and you let her wrap her fingers right around the shaft and lead you astray.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Dornan snapped. ‘That bullet fucked things up.’

  Emilio raised his eyebrows at the sudden rise in Dornan’s voice. ‘Speaking of that bullet. Any ideas on who fired it?’

  ‘No,’ Dornan said warily, ‘but I’m betting you have some.’

  Emilio opened the drawer in his desk, pulled out a specimen jar, and slid it across the dark mahogany surface to his son.

  ‘Somebody wanted you dead, my boy.’

  My boy. His father hadn’t said that since Dornan had been an actual little boy. When his brother had still been around. Before he was gunned down in front of their house and Dornan had been left all alone with an unhinged mother and a megalomaniac for a father.

  Something about those two words hurt more than that damn bullet had.

  Dornan picked up the small jar, marvelling at the piece of twisted metal within. It no longer resembled a bullet. It had punctured his chest cavity and exploded inside him, blooming fatal shards of metal that shredded his insides like ribbons. It was ironic that something that started out smooth and oval-shaped spread into something that looked eerily flower-like when it pierced flesh. This had been inside him. Dornan’s chest ached as he remembered the shot, out of nowhere. He’d been so confused, the pain not beginning right away. It had felt more like somebody had punched him square in the middle of his chest, like some kind of pressure had exploded inside him. He remembered the broken glass all around his face, in slow motion. The rain, as it battered them inside the car.

  He remembered Mariana, her small hands pressing over his bloody chest as she tried to stop the bleeding. He remembered voices, even after he’d lost the ability to keep his eyes open and he’d tasted his own blood bubbling up in his mouth, drowning him from the inside. He’d been too far away to understand what the voices were saying.

  He remembered a second gunshot. Mariana had shot somebody, or at least, she’d shot at somebody. The memory jerked him out of his daydream with a violence that was as unsettling as it was fierce. Fuck. Mariana had shot at somebody? He’d never remembered that before.

  Did she know who had tried to kill him?

  No, it couldn’t be possible. She’d told him, in the hospital, that she had driven him to the hospital as soon as she’d managed to move him out of the driver’s seat of his truck. That John and Viper and some of the other brothers had met them there, taken care of the surveillance footage.

  He had almost died – half an inch to the right and the bullet would have hit his heart – but he hadn’t died, and did she know who had shot him?

  ‘I want you to take care of that little bitch for me.’ Emilio’s words roused Dornan from his macabre reliving of his near-death experience. He pushed those thoughts away, struggling to focus.

  ‘You want me to kill her?’ Dornan asked, confused. ‘The best money launderer we’ve ever had? Because she didn’t like that you delivered a dead baby to her doorstep?’

  Emilio laughed, grinding his cigarette butt into the pile of ash on the desk in such a casual manner, it made Dornan cringe.

  ‘I don’t want you to kill her,’ Emilio replied. ‘She’s far too valuable to me. She may be fiery, but she’s a good girl with my money. Such a good girl.’ Emilio’s smile bared his teeth in a way that was entirely unsettling to Dornan. He’d always been afraid of his father, especially when Mariana was involved.

  ‘Well?’ Dornan pressed.

  ‘I want you to marry that little bitch,’ Emilio said, staring at Dornan until he wanted to squirm. ‘Fuck her. All day and all night, you fuck her. Get her pregnant again. I want that cunt barefoot and compliant, you hear me? The FBI is breathing down my fucking neck, and the last thing I need is for them to cherry-pick your little whore out of our organisation and turn her against us.’

  Dornan got lost somewhere between the words ‘barefoot’ and ‘whore’, but he got the general gist of what his father intended. It was shocking. It was oddly exciting. Still, Dornan didn’t want to just act like he was excited at the prospect of trapping the woman he loved so that she could truly, irrevocably, never leave, by sealing their fate together with a child he could use as leverage. That would be wrong.

  It sounded like a great fucking idea, though. Now that Celia was gone, he’d fuck Mariana until his dick was raw, come inside her until he was empty, and have so many babies with her she’d never even think to leave his side.

  Dornan cleared his throat, shooting for an expression of amusement.

  ‘You think sticking a ring on her finger and knocking her up will make her less likely to turn on us? It’s been ten years. If she were a traitor, she would have gone by now.’

  Emilio steepled his fingers in front of him. ‘Are you saying you don’t want to finally marry the woman you’ve been pining over like a pathetic fucking dog for the better part of the last decade?’

  ‘No–’

  ‘You’re saying you don’t want to kick that Mexican schmuck out of that apartment – your apartment, don’t forget
– and move in there with her? Don’t you want to control her, son?’

  ‘I do control her,’ Dornan replied, perhaps a little too defensively. ‘I know where she goes. I know her every move. Marrying her wouldn’t change that.’

  ‘You know her every move, huh? You know where she got a cremation, last-minute this morning?’ Emilio picked up a handful of the ashes and let them spill through his open fingers, back onto the desk. ‘Because I’m pretty fucking sure she didn’t just burn this kid in a fireplace.’

  Dornan’s heart sank at that thought. Why hadn’t she called him this morning? He would have helped her take care of the kid. But maybe that was the whole point. His father had done it, so indirectly it was Dornan’s fault, because he refused to forsake Emilio. And by cutting Dornan out of the equation completely, Mariana was making sure he knew that she would not tolerate Il Sangue’s bullshit forever. She had never been totally complicit, one of the many reasons Dornan loved her so much, but she had never been this defiant. Reckless, even.

  ‘She was in my car when I dropped off the mother’s body that night,’ Dornan said. He sounded a hell of a lot more self-assured than he felt. ‘Before this fucking bullet happened.’

  Emilio seemed curious. ‘She ride along with you a lot?’

  Dornan knew what he was really asking. Emilio was asking how much Mariana had witnessed. How much the FBI could potentially get out of her.

  ‘Never. This was different.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Nothing. It was . . . Nothing. I took her with me. It was a mistake. It won’t happen again.’

  Emilio rattled off some more instructions, but all Dornan could think about was that fucking cellphone he’d found hidden in Mariana’s kitchen all those months ago, and whether she’d betrayed him already. He stared at the tiny, blossomed bullet that had once lived inside him for a brief spell, and a wave of pain touched his chest sharply, suspicion and regret all wound up in one imaginary stab to the heart.

  ‘Son,’ Emilio said sharply. Dornan raised his eyes from the bullet to meet his father’s gaze – cold, almost reptilian. He’d always been terrified of the man. Dornan Ross loved his mother, but love was not an emotion he’d ever associated with the man who gave him life.