Empire

by Lili St. Germain

  Il Sangue. Of course. The very people who’d no doubt been depositing money into Allie’s bank account.

  A quiet sense of excitement began to build in Lindsay’s chest; the thrill of the chase in these cases was addictive. It was what he lived on. It was the thing that kept him going through the long nights and the harsh realities and the midnight autopsies.

  Having someone to chase.

  ‘What does the gun look like?’ he asked, almost breathless.

  The tech clicked around a few more pages and pulled up a picture that made Lindsay’s dick want to go hard.

  The bullet striations. A rare handgun with a wooden inlaid grip. The Il Sangue Cartel.

  Lindsay Price knew exactly where he’d seen a gun like that before. In a gym locker in Santa Monica.

  Seemed a visit to Mariana Rodriguez was long overdue.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MARIANA

  ‘You ever think about leaving?’ I asked Guillermo, as we sped down the freeway some twenty minutes later, headed back to the apartment minus a box of ashes, a funeral procession without a body.

  Guillermo reached a hand out without warning, grabbing my upper arm. Not rough, but insistent. Stop. I felt his fingers dig into my skin as I squinted against the harsh sunlight, trying to make out his expression.

  ‘These are dangerous times, Ana,’ Guillermo said, his expression grave as he watched the road in front of him. ‘Dangerous times. He’s testing you, don’t forget. He wants you to fail. He wants you to run, so he can aim at your back and pull the trigger.’

  I nodded, crossing my arms against my chest as I remembered the box of bones and ash. It was sad, how little remained after you burned an infant child to cinders. It was barely enough to fill a box the size of a coffee mug.

  ‘Where’s John?’ I asked.

  ‘Being the fucking prez, now that he knows you’re okay. I had to stop him from coming in and getting himself killed by your beloved.’

  I snorted. ‘Who, Dornan? He’s hardly my beloved anymore. Not after everything he’s done.’

  He must have heard the violent reality behind my words. ‘It was bad, huh? In Colorado?’

  I opened my mouth to answer him and a sob came out. Just one. An overflow of emotion, and then I caught it and shoved it back down where it needed to stay. ‘He’s not the man he used to be,’ I said, staring out of the window as Los Angeles passed by in a blur of asphalt, overpasses, and randomly spaced palm trees. ‘There’s killing someone and there’s murdering someone. You know?’

  Guillermo nodded, and I suddenly remembered what he had gone to prison for. Killing his wife for betraying him. ‘I didn’t mean–’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, cutting me off. ‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t.’

  ‘Did you know Stephanie?’ I asked him. I thought of her, the woman I had never known except in myth, as the woman Dornan had first loved, and then in death, as I greeted her bloody corpse in a bathtub in Colorado.

  I’d never seen Dornan so indifferent in the face of death. When he’d killed the woman in the backseat of his truck, he had cried. Wept as he pulled the trigger and delivered the bullet that ended her life. I’d seen the anguish in his eyes, seen the devastation that engulfed him. Now he seemed almost bored with the fact that he’d just killed someone. And not just anyone. He’d loved her, once. That was the part I found the hardest to accept. He’d loved her, and she’d left, and this was what happened when you left a man like Dornan Ross and never came back.

  Eventually, he found you, and then he slaughtered you.

  Guillermo nodded. ‘I did know her.’

  ‘Do you think she deserved to die?’

  He frowned. ‘I didn’t even know she was alive.’

  I thought back to my ill-fated pregnancy. How I’d given myself two choices – get an abortion, or run. I’d wanted that baby. A daughter. I wasn’t going to erase her. I was going to run. And then, before I could, he killed her while she was still in my womb.

  ‘He killed Stephanie because she took his son. He killed her because she wanted a better life for her child. He beat her until her face was . . .’ I couldn’t even think of an adequate way to describe it. Pulp, maybe. ‘Until it was gone. It was just a mess. You couldn’t even tell who she’d been.’

  ‘She was a pretty girl when I knew her.’

  I’m sure she was,’ I replied. I remembered Dornan’s hands on me after he’d murdered her, the way he held me down and forced himself inside me. It hurt. But him – he liked it. He was turned on by my begging. The way I fought him off excited him. That was not the man I’d fallen in love with.

  ‘So you’re not going to run, are you?’

  Guillermo’s eyebrows were raised, the prison tattoos on his neck slick with sweat despite the AC blasting in our faces. His sudden question snapped me out of my macabre rerun of that night in the motel room, when Dornan began his systematic destruction of anything good I’d ever seen in him. The night he’d turned into my nightmare. The night I started to be more afraid of him than I was of his father.

  The night my lover became my nightmare.

  ‘No,’ I said softly, tucking my long hair behind my ears. As Guillermo drove, I rested my head against the window, my throat thick, my eyes burning behind my dark sunglasses, my black clothes like magnets attracting heat. I felt like I was burning up, but inside I was so cold.

  I opened my mouth, my breath hitching in my throat. Closed it again. I didn’t want to breathe in the tiny particles of bone dust that had somehow attached themselves to my shirt, to the seat I was sitting on. There was already enough death inside me without swallowing more.

  ‘Don’t ever pull a fucking stunt like that again, you hear me?’ Guillermo said. ‘Don’t ever change that code on me.’

  ‘Don’t ever change it on me,’ I shot back. ‘You know how long I was stuck in that goddamn apartment before you came along. I refuse to be trapped in there for one more minute of my life.’

  Something in my words appeared to get through to him. He sagged a little in his seat. ‘Sorry.’

  I don’t think he’d ever apologised to me in all these years. Suddenly I felt shame at the way I’d effectively trapped him and John inside the apartment.

  ‘Me too,’ I muttered.

  We drove in silence for a bit. The sun was filtered by the traffic haze that always seemed to hang in Los Angeles. On the freeway at this time of day it was brutal. We sat in a crawling procession of cars, everyone poisoning the air together as we fought each other to get where we needed to be. I’d grown to hate this place. The place that had represented freedom to me as a child growing up in Colombia had inadvertently become my prison cell. I couldn’t wait to put my bare feet in the dark soil of the jungle in some lush locale in South America, or maybe it’d be white sand in some tropical paradise. Whatever, it didn’t matter, because it would be somewhere other than here.

  I dared to consider John’s words from earlier. At the time I’d still been too focused on Emilio and the baby to think about what he’d been saying, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  ‘Can we stop at the beach on the way back?’ I asked quietly, my throat aching at the sudden exertion. Guillermo looked at me oddly, but he didn’t argue. ‘Sure,’ he grunted. ‘Why the fuck not.’

  ***

  It was hot and crowded at the beach, but I found a small stretch of sand that wasn’t taken over by towels and kids. I didn’t even undress. I kicked off my shoes and walked into the water fully clothed, painfully aware that the remains of an infant child were now on Emilio’s desk.

  I waded into the water quickly, deeper into the waves, letting my arms float away from my body, fingers outstretched. The waves helped me, dragging me deeper as they pulled back from shore. I cried. I cried for that baby. I cried for my son. I cried for Dornan. Why couldn’t he be good for me? Why couldn’t he take me away from this? Why, in saving me from Emilio’s plans to sell me all those years ago, had he brought me here, to this? />
  I felt like I was losing my mind. I wondered, briefly, how hard it would be to drown myself without Guillermo saving me.

  I let myself sink into the water. It felt delicious, like a balm against my skin that burned in the Californian sunshine. My Colombian skin wasn’t used to the sun anymore, and though it was still milky brown, it didn’t like being outside. A decade of closed rooms and no windows will do that to a person.

  The water rushed around me, my long dark hair floating wildly in the waves. I lifted my feet from the sandy ocean floor and let myself float.

  Let myself sink.

  It was quiet down here. Peaceful. As peaceful as you could get when you’d just waited while a child’s body burned to cinders.

  I opened my mouth and screamed silently against the safety of the waves. As loud as I could, knowing nobody would ever hear how much sorrow tore at my throat as saltwater rushed into my mouth. It made my eyes sting, but I didn’t care. In the silence and the cold, I felt so . . . free. I imagined opening my lungs and taking in a mouthful of saltwater. Just breathing it in like it was air, until it filled me up. It would hurt, no doubt. My body would try to fight it. My survival instinct would kick in.

  Luis. I could never kill myself, knowing my son was alive and waiting for me to come to him in Colombia. Never.

  I kicked towards the surface with great reluctance.

  I felt Guillermo beside me, and then his strong arm was hooked around my chest and under my own arm, pulling me close. I glanced over, seeing that he’d walked into the water, jeans and all. At least he’d taken his shoes off.

  ‘They say drowning is a peaceful way to go,’ he said, a knowing smile on his face as he dragged me closer to shore, his kick strong. I felt like I was a wet blanket. I wasn’t even strong enough to pull away and slip beneath the water’s surface. I was too much of a coward to even figure out how to drown.

  ‘Sorry, baby,’ he said, treading water in front of me, holding my head above the surface by cupping his hand below my chin. ‘Today’s not your day.’

  I nodded dully, looking at a couple of surfers who were paddling past us, giving me strange glances. I suppose I did look a sight, fully dressed and crying my eyes out while I halfheartedly tried to drown myself in Santa Monica Bay.

  Guillermo’s grip eased, and he stood next to me, the water up to his shoulders. He was pretty much the same height as me, and I let my feet drop to the sandy ocean floor.

  ‘You love him?’

  I refocused my gaze on Guillermo as his words pierced my fog. ‘Who?’

  ‘Prez. John. You never answered me before. Too busy with your pretty little gun. So tell me. You love him?’

  I nodded, shivering. I don’t think I’d let myself believe it until that moment. But I did. Oh, how I loved that man. I didn’t want to be here, metaphorically and almost literally drowning. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to be tucked underneath his chin as he told me everything was going to be okay. I wanted to be in a car with him, flying down the freeway, breaking the speed limit as we left every single Gypsy Brother and the Il Sangue Cartel for dust, never to be seen again.

  ‘You got shitty luck with men, honey,’ Guillermo said, trying to make me smile. ‘Shitty, shitty luck. Remind me never to get involved with you, yeah?’

  I smiled a watery smile that matched our surroundings.

  ‘I’m tired, Guillermo.’

  ‘I know. Me too.’

  I saw the Ferris wheel in the distance, and behind it, my apartment. ‘I miss my family.’ I miss my boy.

  We stood in the water, as it gently rocked us from side to side.

  ‘Come on,’ Guillermo said, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘We got things to do.’

  I nodded, wading to shore with him.

  ‘You gonna call John?’ Guillermo asked, as we walked along the sand, headed for the car.

  I stopped in my tracks. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

  ‘He’ll pull the trigger, Mariana. Think. He’ll do something drastic. Kids are sacred to him. Kids are the one thing you don’t mess with.’

  I swallowed thickly.

  ‘Just make sure you got your shit in a row before you start plotting with him, girl, because he’s going to snap, and you’ll be the one in the firing line when Emilio comes looking for penance.’

  ‘Hard to keep track of all the lies, isn’t it?’ He gave me a knowing smile.

  I nodded.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JOHN

  John Portland hated lap dances. Despised strip clubs.

  It was an odd fact for a man like him. A biker. A president. A criminal. A murderer. And, ironically, a man who ran a strip club. It was funny, he could stare into the eyes of his victim and pull the trigger, cold as ice, but when a woman lowered her ass into his lap, he suddenly burned up like he had a fever. He didn’t want hands touching him, clammy hands that had touched everybody else. He didn’t even like his wife’s hands when they reached out to him.

  He liked Mariana’s hands, though, and that was a problem. A big fucking problem.

  She’d almost gotten herself killed today, and only escaped by some survival instinct she possessed, the thing that had carried her through a decade with the cartel. She should have died a hundred times by now, but she wasn’t dead. She was alive. She was beautiful. She was somebody else’s.

  Dornan Ross was not like John. Dornan very much enjoyed the attention of women, and their clammy hands. He had a decidedly different way of looking at the world, a more fluid appreciation of relationships and monogamy. He could touch a stripper or a whore, stick his dick inside them, snort flake off their tits, and it didn’t mean anything aside from a good time. If anyone looked at his women sideways, though, he would kill them.

  He never used to be like that. John used to like him, trust him. Christ, Dornan was the only one John had trusted with his own baby daughter, fifteen years ago, when he was in prison and Caroline ran away from the screaming newborn who was already a tiny little addict.

  Time had worn them both down, two brothers in arms, complete strangers. Now John despised Dornan.

  Sometimes, when he was screwing Mariana, he’d fantasise about a world where Dornan Ross did not exist.

  His lines had been clearly drawn. But the years and the bodies and the lies wore everyone down in different ways. They were no longer the brothers in arms they’d been as teenagers, setting off on the open road, criss-crossing the country with abandon. They were prisoners of fate now, soldiers of a fortune that they could never have foretold.

  Or, perhaps they could have foretold it.

  Perhaps they should have.

  John had never wanted to be a biker. Fuck! He’d never wanted to kill a man with his bare hands. Had never wanted to be involved in the shit that came with being indebted to a cartel like Il Sangue, carved and sculpted from the ruins of Dornan’s father’s enemies. John was a simple man and he’d wanted simple things. But once you were in with a man like Emilio Ross – just one time, one job, one task, one loan, one favour – before you’d even finished striking the deal with him, he’d already sucked your soul out of your body and put it in his cabinet with the rest of his trophies. Sometimes he did it literally – displaying a photograph of you with your family, with anyone you loved, under the guise of affection and concern; and sometimes he just told you that he owned your ass from now until the day you died. By his hand, if you fucked up.

  And now John did want to die. There was a stripper grinding on him, trying to push one of her fat nipples between his lips. He kept turning his head, trying not to offend her, but in the end he had to stand up and grab her by her shoulders. ‘How much do I have to pay you to go away?’ he asked, fishing a twenty out of his wallet. The blonde didn’t smile, but she plucked the money out of his hand and tottered away on her six-inch stilettos.

  John turned his attention to Dornan, who was sitting on a low armchair to his left, seemingly fascinated as another stripper shook a line of white powder onto his cock a
nd then snorted it right off. Dornan caught him looking and it seemed to amuse him. He fisted a hand in the woman’s hair and squeezed her cheeks with his other hand. ‘You gonna pay for that?’ he asked, guiding her mouth to his erection. Dornan stared at John as the woman made a gagging noise.

  John wanted a fucking drink. Beer wouldn’t cut it, he needed something stronger – like maybe bleach, so he could pour it into his eyes and pretend he’d never seen what he’d just accidentally glimpsed.

  ‘I can see the cogs turning in your head, Johnny boy,’ Dornan chuckled. His teeth gleamed in the oscillating light, his grin too big and bold to be anything but artificial. He looked like he wanted to lean over and start eating the girl who was gagging painfully on him, and not in a good way. He looked like a wolf. He looked like his father.

  ‘You celebrating your divorce?’ John asked, his fingers itching for a drink. Whiskey, vodka . . . anything, Christ. He was the president of the Gypsy Brothers and why wasn’t somebody bringing him a fucking drink already?

  ‘Hey!’ John barked over his shoulder, towards the bar. ‘Two whiskeys. On the rocks.’

  He held up two fingers briefly before turning his attention back to Dornan. He focused on his face, not on what was going on in his lap. Because Jesus Christ, could he not get a room?

  ‘You must be happy,’ John said, choosing his words carefully. ‘To be away from Celia.’

  Dornan shrugged, accepting the whiskey that a waitress was holding out to him. John did the same, closing his eyes briefly and tipping the amber liquid down his throat, enjoying the delicious burn that took the edge off his frustration, his terror. ‘Sure. Yeah. I don’t want to talk about Celia right now.’

  ‘What do you want to talk about, brother?’

  That word. Brother. It sparked something in Dornan’s eyes. Something wounded. He stared down at the stripper on his cock and then pushed her away with force. She landed on her ass, hard, but she was too high to be offended. ‘Go,’ Dornan barked, zipping his jeans as he turned his full attention to John.