Empire

by Lili St. Germain

  Dornan watched him do this for a few moments, unable to look down at John. And then he forced himself to look.

  John was dead. Gone.

  A moment of horrified shame lurked at the back of Dornan’s pitch-black mind. He pushed it down, though, with the rest of the terrible things that he’d done. He didn’t have time to ruminate now. His best friend was dead at his feet, and his son was now smashing the barrel of his gun into his face.

  ‘Chad!’ Dornan snapped. ‘Get him out of here.’

  Chad obliged, hooking his bloodied wet hands under Jason’s arms and dragging him from the room. As they passed, Dornan snatched his gun from Jase and jammed it into the back of his jeans again.

  Emilio entered the small office, coming to a standstill beside Dornan. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder, and it sat there, like a dead roach that Dornan desperately wanted to throw off.

  ‘We always hurt the ones we love,’ Emilio said, squeezing his shoulder. ‘Remember when you begged me to keep her? I told you, son, this day would come.’

  He let his hand drop.

  Dornan continued to stare down at the body in front of him as Emilio cleared his throat.

  ‘We have to go,’ Emilio said, his tone becoming urgent. His tone was never urgent, which meant the situation was dire. ‘We have to get out. The Feds are going to find one of their own dead here, and we need to be gone before then. Clean up crew will sort this, but only if we move. Kill her and let’s get the fuck out of here. Unless you want me to do it?’

  Dornan started to pace. He tugged at his hair.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Emilio snapped, drawing his gun.

  ‘Don’t fucking touch her!’ Dornan yelled at his father. ‘I’m about to shoot my fucking wife,’ he choked out. ‘Give me a goddamn minute, will you?’

  Emilio fixed his son with a hard glare. ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Then you’re on your own.’

  CHAPTER FORTY

  DORNAN

  Emilio was gone. John was dead. The boys had all cleared out, taking an unconscious Juliette and a crazed Jason with them. It was just Dornan and Mariana, locked in a room together. They were ending exactly as they’d begun, only this time there was a dead man lying on the floor between them, a man they’d both loved dearly at one time in their lives. A man who Mariana had just spent the past few moments trying to save.

  But there were some things that were beyond repair. A bullet in the brain, for example. John was dead. He’d been dead since the moment Jason planted a bullet in his skull. Now Mariana was standing again, only this time she was covered in John’s blood.

  ‘Hurry up,’ Mariana said, her eyes full of tears, her entire body shaking violently. ‘Just do it. Just kill me!’

  Dornan was crying now, too. The shock was starting to dissipate, and the rage along with it. Now he just felt a hollow ache inside, that familiar emptiness that defined his existence. He’d killed John. Juliette was almost dead. And his wife stood in front of him, begging him to kill her, and he couldn’t bear to end her life like this.

  He still loved her. Despite the treachery, the betrayal, the lies, he loved her. He would always love her.

  ‘I don’t want to kill you,’ he rasped. ‘I want to save you. I want you to run.’

  ‘No,’ she protested. ‘No, Dornan.’

  ‘You have five minutes,’ he said to her, his hand coming to rest on her cheek. His fingers burned where their skin met.

  She was sobbing. Hysterical. ‘What if I don’t run?’

  He shrugged, his own eyes burning with regret. ‘Then I take you back to Emilio, and he can do whatever he wants to you.’

  Her sobs stilled. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, hands thick with John’s blood. The sight made him bitterly jealous, for no good reason. John was dead; he was gone. But blood had been their thing, the thing that bound Dornan and Mariana together, from the very first time he’d bandaged her wounds all those years ago.

  ‘Did you ever really love me?’

  She slapped him across the face, hard. Enough so that he tasted blood. How did somebody as small as his Mariana slap him so he bled? The taste of his own blood set off something primal, and he growled, grabbing her wrist and twisting it until she cried out.

  She ripped her hand away and stepped back. ‘Of course I fucking loved you. I loved you so much I thought I would die. Don’t you know the things I did for you? For us?’

  All he saw was her with John. It consumed him until he thought he might go totally insane.

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘Enlighten me.’

  She shook her head, laughing mirthlessly. ‘You stupid bastard,’ she said. ‘I loved you until the end. I loved you even after I saw what you did to Stephanie. What you did to your own son. I still loved you.’

  He nodded, his throat tight. ‘So what was it, then? The thing that destroyed us?’

  She straightened, took a step back. ‘You know.’

  And it was true, he did know. He’d killed their child. Hurt her so much, it had died and bled away.

  This was his fault.

  ‘It was always going to end like this,’ she whispered, tears dripping onto her dirty cheeks. Her words stunned him, physically, to the point that he had to step back to keep his balance.

  ‘Like what?’ he asked.

  ‘With blood. We started with blood, and that’s how we ended.’

  ‘Is this what this is?’ he asked sadly. ‘The end?’ He’d been so fucking happy when he married her. It was the first day he’d truly been able to say that she was his and not his father’s. But now, looking at the weeping mess in front of him, the traitor, the seductress who’d been lying to him all this time, Dornan Ross had to wonder – had she ever been his at all?

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking down at John. His eyes were still frozen open, unseeing. It wasn’t fair.

  Mariana knelt beside John, reaching her hand out. With love. She reached for him with so much tenderness, so much despair, that it took everything inside Dornan to stop himself from putting the gun in his own mouth and pulling the trigger. Had she ever looked at him like that?

  ‘Don’t fucking touch him,’ Dornan said, jealousy surging through him as he aimed the gun at the woman he’d loved.

  She swallowed thickly, guiding the gun up to her forehead. ‘Do it,’ she urged, tears streaming down her face. ‘DO IT!’

  He grabbed her, pulled her back to her feet. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to save her. He wanted to take it all back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said hoarsely. ‘For everything.’

  She was sobbing, staring at John.

  ‘Ana. He’s not waking up.’ Dornan just needed to ask her one question. ‘Ana?’

  She waited for his next words, searching his face.

  ‘The way you . . . looked at him. Did you ever feel like that about me? Or was it love because you needed me? Because the alternative was too much to bear?’

  Her eyes flashed with emotion as she stepped back to him, taking his face in her bloody hands. He heard her chest rattle when she breathed and sobbed all at once.

  ‘I looked at you like that,’ she implored, her gaze the truest thing he’d ever seen. ‘I looked at you all the time.’

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ he said, his resolve faltering, his gun dropping to his side.

  She shook him, and he let her. ‘You were too busy looking at everyone else!’ she cried. ‘All I ever wanted was you, don’t you understand, Dornan? All I ever wanted was the man who saved me. He was my everything.’

  He wanted to hold her to his chest and never let her go. He wanted to give her fat babies and a house she could feel safe in, and most of all, her freedom. Her own name. He’d always wanted those things for her, but right now, more than ever before, he saw the life they could have had, he saw the baby he’d killed as if it had survived and been born happy, he saw every single thing that would have happened if he’d played a different hand.

  He wanted to make
it right.

  It would never be right.

  He staggered back, pushing her away. ‘Go,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Dornan,’ she protested, reaching out.

  ‘Go!’ He gritted his teeth. ‘If you touch me again, Ana, I will grab onto you, and I will never, ever let you leave me. We’ll end in blood when I decide, and we’ll end together. It won’t be pretty. I’ll take everything from you, whether you give it to me or not.’

  She shrank away like he was fire and she’d burn if she touched him. ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I loved Juliette!’ he roared, and for the first time he let the weight of what he’d done to John’s daughter sink into his bones. Fifteen years ago, he’d watched her be born. He’d taken care of her. Today, he’d tortured and raped her and left her for dead. The girl who’d been like a daughter to him. The girl who’d been punished for her father’s sins.

  Why can’t we ever turn back the fucking clock?

  Still, Mariana didn’t move.

  ‘GO!’ he repeated.

  And then, just as he’d decided to reach out for her, she turned on bare feet and fled.

  Don’t chase her. Don’t fucking chase her.

  Dornan turned slowly away. Every bone in his body screamed to go after her, until he saw John. Fuck. He crumpled to his knees beside his friend, the floor slick with blood, and shook his friend.

  ‘John,’ he whispered. ‘Johnny Boy.’

  Dornan let out a guttural sound, the sound an animal makes when its child has been killed. With much difficulty, he shifted John’s dead weight onto his lap, his tears falling down onto his friend’s still face, a face now marred with a perfect round bullet hole, smack in the middle of his forehead.

  ‘John,’ he whispered. ‘Brother. I’m sorry.’

  He thought of Juliette, then. Of Mariana.

  He looked at the gun and thought about blowing his brains out.

  It was tempting.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  MARIANA

  My chest screamed in agony as I tried to draw another ragged breath. Stones and old bits of glass bit into my bare feet as I ran blindly in the night, without any idea of where I was going, if anyone was following me, or what I would do if I ran into Emilio. In the distance, the busy streetlights beckoned through a fog of haze that blanketed my vision.

  John. Juliette. He’d killed them. I sobbed as I ran away, every step a jolt that said turn around.

  Every step reminding me that I was a terrible human being.

  Jason was still alive. I’d told him that I would protect him. That I would take him away from all of this, to the safety of a life that would now only ever be an idle thought, a daydream, an ill-placed fantasy.

  I was a terrible person, because he’d trusted me, and because I was never, ever going back. I was getting the fuck out of here. My brain had been reduced to the most basic of operations, and it said: RUN.

  So I did. Achingly aware that I was out in the open, that if the wrong person cast a glance my way I’d be shot in the back and left to bleed out on the ground, I kept running.

  Headlights loomed in the distance.

  Fuck! They’d found me. Dornan had changed his mind. Emilio had put his men on the scent. Something. All I knew was, I’d been found, and my brief taste of freedom was coming to a close.

  ‘Mariana,’ a self-assured voice called out.

  I froze.

  ‘I know you can hear me.’

  ‘Go away,’ I said, wincing as the soles of my feet bled.

  ‘Come on,’ Lindsay said, holding out his hand as he drove alongside me.

  I shook my head, sticking to the pavement. No. I wouldn’t go with him. I couldn’t trust anyone. All people ever did was lie and cheat and spill blood like it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. How much more blood would be taken from me before I’d be empty? How many more wrong moves?

  ‘I’m not going with you,’ I said, his eyes and the headlights appearing in double as the world started to spin around me. I stumbled and fell to my knees, and suddenly there were warm hands on my shoulders.

  ‘Come on,’ Lindsay said, draping his suit jacket around me as he led me to his car. ‘I’ll keep you safe. I promise.’

  ‘Where?’ I argued, too weak to fight him. ‘In prison?’

  He opened the back door of his Escalade and bundled me in, laying me across the backseat. ‘I’m not taking you in, Mariana,’ he said softly. He closed the door, and a moment later he was jumping into the driver’s seat.

  It took me a moment to register the words. ‘Then where are you taking me?’

  He pulled away from the kerb, and I lay on my back across the leather seats, the car accelerating so fast it was like we were flying.

  ‘To a safehouse,’ Lindsay murmured as he navigated traffic. ‘There’s someone waiting for you there, and I promise you, you’re going to want to meet him.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  LUIS

  I met my mother for the first time when I was born. Briefly, and then I waited another fourteen years to meet her a second time, inside the walls of an FBI safehouse.

  She was younger than I’d imagined, but when she raised her eyes to mine, I saw all those lost years in her stricken expression. Her bare feet were cut and bleeding. Her dress was torn and she was covered in blood.

  They say you can never remember the first moments of your life. That it’s impossible for the brain to be able to store that kind of information. But there are some things that transcend the realm of possibility, some algorithms too complex for us to explain away with just science. The nights I had spent looking at my mother’s faded photograph paled in comparison to this moment, this flesh and blood, and blood-covered woman who sat before me, as if she’d just fought a battle and barely made it out alive. Maybe she hadn’t made it out entirely. Her eyes were sad. They said she’d lost something very dear to her. That she’d left something behind.

  ‘Mariana,’ the FBI agent said, grasping one of her hands and placing his other palm on my shoulder. ‘This is Luis. He’s been waiting a long time to meet you.’

  My mother started to cry, and it hurt inside my chest that she was so upset. What had happened to her? Had she been trapped somewhere? Had she just escaped?

  ‘Don’t cry, Mama,’ I said, my throat tight. I was fourteen years old, and I didn’t cry. I wouldn’t cry. But in front of my mother? I wanted to crawl into her lap and cling to her and never let her go.

  Her eyebrows rose in disbelief when I said Mama.

  ‘Luis?’

  There are some things that cannot be explained. A child can’t remember his mother’s voice from the day he was born. And yet . . . ‘Your voice,’ I said. ‘I remember your voice.’

  That made her cry harder. I chewed on the inside of my cheek. I didn’t want her to cry. I wanted her to speak so that I could hear her voice again.

  We sat in stunned silence, observing each other.

  ‘You look exactly like your father,’ my mother said to me.

  I nodded. It was true, I did. I’d seen the photographs. I was his spitting image.

  ‘But I have your eyes,’ I said to her.

  She blinked fat tears, tears that wound a line through the dried blood and the dirt on her cheeks. It was incredible. Like the warrior I’d always envisaged her to be, here she was, risen from ashes, this mythical person who, until this moment, had only existed in hope and a faded photograph I carried around with me like it was my saving grace.

  Agent Price nudged me, pointing at the empty seat next to this woman he called Mariana. I stepped over and sat down so that I was next to her.

  My mother dropped the agent’s hand and turned to face me, stretching her fingers towards me ever so slowly, almost as if I might disappear if she moved too fast, like smoke on the wind.

  ‘Can I?’ she asked hesitantly, her eyes darting to my hands.

  I nodded, offering them to her. She took them in her hands, drawing a deep, almost cho
king breath when our skin met. I hated to be touched, hated to be hugged by my aunt or my cousins, hated to have any affection. My whole life, I’d always felt like a weird kid, the outcast, because I’d just wanted people to leave me alone.

  But when my mother studied the ridges on my palms, when she turned them over to look at each finger, at my wrists, when she let my hands gently go and pressed her fingertips against my cheeks, it was like someone had poured a balm onto my skin. I didn’t want to shrink away.

  ‘You’re real,’ she whispered, cupping my chin in her hand.

  I nodded, squeezing her wrist with my hand.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘that I ever let you out of my sight.’

  She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed, and we stayed that way for a very long time. It was nothing like I imagined it would be. It was so much better.

  After a long time, the agent cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s time for me to take you both, now.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ my mother whispered.

  I saw him glance at me before his gaze settled on my mother.

  ‘Home. You’re going home.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  DORNAN

  There was a hollow feeling in Dornan Ross’s chest that he just couldn’t seem to shake. He’d tried to fill it with so many things over the years, with fucking and money, and little lines of flake that made his brain spark and bubble but left him with a hideous comedown afterward. He tried to fill it with children, and wives, and control.

  He tried to fill it with everything he fucking could, but it was like a black hole, and it demanded to be fed, and it never, ever fucking closed up. It was never full. It was never sated. It just got bigger, and greedier, until one day, it swallowed him whole.

  All these things occurred to him as he watched six Gypsy Brothers lower John Portland’s coffin into the earth. The day was brilliant, the normally hazy Los Angeles sky clear and blue. Sweat gathered around Dornan’s collar as he tugged at his tie. It seemed like far too nice a day to bury the best friend you’d murdered. He glanced across to the second slightly smaller coffin that contained John’s daughter’s remains. Yes, the sky was much too blue to be burying the girl he’d once thought of as his own.