Sweet Collateral

by LP Lovell

  It’s when I pull the car door open and glance back at the house that I see Rafael lingering at one of the first-floor windows. Our eyes lock, his swimming with untold pain, and the hole in my chest rips wide open. A barrage of emotions presses in on my bubble, like thousands of bees stinging over and over again.

  He asked me to trust him, and I fought so hard to give him every grain of myself. Only for him to destroy me. I close my eyes and tears break free, tracking down my cheeks. Turning away, I get in the car.

  Una gets in behind me, sparing me a brief glance. “Let’s go home.”

  Home. Rafael was my home.

  55

  Rafael

  The sunlight soaks through the material of my suit jacket until I’m burning up under its heat. I tug at my collar as sweat sticks to my neck and trickles down my back.

  The birds sing in nearby trees, and cicadas chirp happily in the long grass that surrounds the cemetery. I hate it. I hate it all. It’s as though the world is just continuing to exist, to go on in spite of the fact that it’s now missing something vital, something that made it so much better.

  Silence wraps around me like a suffocating blanket as I watch the coffin descend into the earth. The lilies on the lid are a stark white, contrasting with the shiny black lacquered surface. I can’t help but think of them, crushed under the weight of all that soil. Wasted. Ruined. Just like Maria. A tragic waste of something so bright.

  The sound of a woman’s nearby sobs filter through my muted state, but I pay them no attention. I’m caught in my own private agony, tormented by my own failings and tortured with the knowledge that even in death I’ve let Maria down. All that sits in that coffin is the severed head that was sent to my door. We couldn’t retrieve the body, and knowing Dominges, it’s probably buried in an unmarked grave in the desert. My fists clench so hard that my fingers ache with the effort. I’m caught in a vicious cycle of unbearable pain and rage. Part of me wishes that Anna were here. Her simple touch, a few whispered words, and I know this storm would become that much easier to weather, but I can’t risk her. What I feel now is only a fraction of what it would be to lose her. Without her though, this all feels that much more destructive.

  As soon as the coffin hits the bottom of that deep, dark hole, I turn around and walk away.

  The sunlight highlights fine spider webs that blanket the grass in a dusting of silk—pure and uninterrupted. Shrugging out of my jacket, I tear off my tie and release the top two buttons on my shirt.

  “Rafe.”

  Carlos jogs up beside me, and I glance at him briefly without stopping. “What?”

  “Where are you going? The funeral isn’t over.”

  “It’s over, Carlos. She’s dead. No changing that.”

  “This wasn’t your fault,” he says for what feels like the hundredth time.

  “Don’t waste your breath.”

  He grabs my arm, and I snatch it away, glaring at him.

  “You just…you need to say goodbye,” he says quietly.

  “I will, but not until I’ve sought retribution.” I can’t sit here and say goodbye, speak words of what a good person she was, all while her killer runs loose, laughing at me. No. I start walking again, heading for the car.

  “What are you going to do?”

  I reach the car and yank the door open. “Something Dominges doesn’t expect. And he expects me to be at a funeral today.”

  His lips tip up in a small smile, the only trace of anything other than misery I’ve seen from him in days. He rounds the car and opens the passenger door. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I’m going to set fire to his entire world.”

  56

  Anna

  Shifting my weight from one foot to another, I adjust Dante on my hip. He happily wraps my hair in his chubby little fist before trying to put it in his mouth. I gently rock him as I stare out at the sprawling city of New York far below the penthouse, the lights like fireflies wandering aimlessly through the darkness. There are thousands of people down there, living lives that they take for granted. Making dinner, feeding their cat, watching television…and here I stand, so far removed, so envious of their basic normality.

  These moments with my nephew are the only times when I feel like I can actually breathe properly. He’s so absolutely unaware of anything but what’s in front of him. When I’m with him I’m able to focus only on the exact moment I’m in. The rest of the time, I simply long for what I can no longer have: Rafael, and it’s slowly killing me.

  Whatever small trace of happiness I had previously found in this life has been ripped from me because I live in a world of dangerous men and unfortunate girls. Rafael is as dangerous as any of them, but he was my safe harbor, and now I’m just lost; a vessel cast adrift without an anchor. All that lies before me is an endless sea of nothing, with no land or salvation in sight.

  My chest aches painfully, as though something vital has been removed, and all that’s left in its wake is this gaping void. I find myself seeking out that dark little place inside myself where I know this will all just stop, but in a sick way, I crave the pain. It reminds me that it was real; that our love was real. But I know that if love was enough, nothing could separate us. In a way, that’s the worst part of it all. My agonized, flayed heart hates him for this, even if my head can rationalize the reasoning. We promised each other we were ride or die and he broke that promise.

  The bedroom door clicks open before hushed footsteps fall over the thick carpet. “Rafael called,” Una says quietly. My heart trips over itself, limping along in a faltering beat. I focus on Dante, trying to ignore the stabbing sensation behind my ribs. Just keep breathing, in and out, in and out. “I gave him your new number.”

  I whirl around to face her. “Why would you do that?”

  She narrows her eyes at me and steps forward, taking Dante. “Because I’m not going to field calls for you. If you don’t want to speak to him, don’t answer.” I don’t know that I’m strong enough to reject a call from him, but I know I can’t hear his voice. I can’t listen to him making false promises when he’s already broken the only one that mattered.

  I rub at the aching spot in the center of my chest.

  “This needs to stop,” Una shifts Dante to her hip. She looks so out of place, all tight muscles and danger, with a baby on her hip.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been in New York for a week, and all you’ve done is cry and pine after him.”

  Years spent wondering if my long lost sister is alive and this is what I get. Turning away from her, I train my gaze back out the window, hoping she’ll disappear.

  She forces herself into my line of vision. “You survived nine years as a sex slave, Anna.” She eyes me up and down, a trace of disgust in her eyes. “You can certainly survive a little heartbreak.”

  “It’s not the same.” I’d sooner take physical pain over this.

  “Rafael has made you weak.”

  I always said that after everything, he would be the one to break me. Bones will mend, psychological scars can be masked, but the heart…the heart is so easily destroyed.

  “I don’t expect you to understand this, Una.” My sister is cold and hard, almost impenetrable. There is no room for emotion in her world unless it’s for her son.

  “I understand better than you know, but it is what it is. Rafael has made a choice to protect you.”

  “I don’t want protecting!” I shout, all my frustration and hurt bubbling to the surface.

  For a brief second, a hint of sympathy crosses her features. “You have the love of a powerful man, Anna. What you want becomes of little consequence.”

  I look at her, really look. “You have the love of a powerful man, but he doesn’t cast you aside.”

  “I’m the Kiss of Death,” she says simply. She’s a weapon in her own right, a woman any man would fear. Rafael’s men would whisper my sister’s name in fear as though she were more myth than reality. Una is not Nero’s weakn
ess, she’s his strength, and I envy her for it. “Do you really love him?” she asks.

  “Of course I do.” What kind of question was that?

  “Think about it, Anna. Do you really love him? Or was he just the first man to treat you kindly? The first man to love you?” I frown. “You’ve only ever been a slave. Love and gratitude are not the same things.”

  “I love him,” I say, even as her words worm their way into my mind. She makes me feel like a foolish, naive child. “I need him.”

  “No. You just think you do.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Her violet colored eyes lock with mine. “The world does not begin and end with Rafael D’Cruze. You now have to learn to live without him. Live your life.”

  I say nothing for a moment, allowing her words to sink in. “I don’t know how,” I admit.

  “You’ve been Anna the slave, and Rafael’s Anna. Now you need to figure out what independent Anna looks like.” I was happy being Rafael’s Anna, maybe I don’t want to be independent.

  “What if this is as good as it gets?”

  “It’s not. You’re stronger than you know.”

  “I don’t feel strong.”

  “Then I’ll make you strong, little sister. I’ll make you unbreakable.” I meet her gaze, finding the promise in her cold eyes. I find myself craving her icy self-discipline because my sister is nothing if not powerful.

  “Okay.”

  A small smile pulls at her lips, and I find myself wondering what the hell I’ve just agreed to. Either way, it’s a step forward, and I have to start walking at some point.

  57

  Rafael

  I lean back in my office chair, watching the screens depicting the warehouse, humming with activity. Everything is going to plan. Almost everything. As always when I’m alone, my mind drifts to Anna. I’ve tried to call her. Every Friday like clockwork, because it’s as much as I allow myself. I need to focus, and without a degree of self-discipline, I’d be calling her every day. Not that it matters. She never answers, and each time, it fractures something in me, allowing this darkness in a little more. I want her to be happy, to be safe, but I also just want her, need her. Being without my little warrior is an ache I can’t soothe. The physical distance is something I put there, but this emotional distance is of her doing, and it’s a cut that wont stop bleeding.

  The office door bursts open and Samuel storms inside looking far more disheveled than normal.

  “Rafe, we are losing distributors left and right.”

  “Good.”

  “What?” He shakes his head. “You’ve lost it.”

  “No. 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? Dominges is shitting all over our territory, killing our guys, taking our distributors. You know he’s taken two more?”

  “I’m simply biding my time, Samuel.” For the first few weeks after Maria’s death and Anna’s absence, I painted the streets on my city red with Sinaloa blood. For every one of theirs we killed, they responded in kind. Until my blood lust cleared and I remembered that I am stronger because I’m smarter. Senseless blood and carnage is Dominges style, not mine.

  I push to my feet and open the office door, stepping 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 all over Juarez 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?” Sam asks.

  “Ether. We’re doing things the old-fashioned way.”

  He 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 says nothing and I smile. “It’ll be a war, Sam. Everyone will be scrambling to buy it. And Dominges will be out on his ass. We’ll take all his clients.”

  “It’ll cost more to make. Less markup.”

  “I don’t care. 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. I have to win, because I won’t bring Anna back to an unsafe city, but the more time I spend without her, the more I realize I don’t think I can just let her go. I’m fighting a war for her.

  58

  Anna

  Pain explodes across my jaw before my back slams against the floor.

  “Concentrate!” Una’s face moves into my field of vision. “You have to focus.” She offers me her hand and pulls me to my feet. My entire body aches from weeks of my sister’s ‘help’. The bruises on my skin detract from my battered heart though, and so I embrace it. Some days are better than others, but today is not one of them.

  “I need a minute.”

  Una folds her arms over her chest, lean muscles flexing with the movement. My sister is lethal, unyielding and hard in every way. Reaching for me, she grabs my chin, and I wince against her grip. “Fine. Put some ice on your face.”

  She follows me to the kitchen, and I can feel her eyes burning into my back as I take an icepack from the freezer.

  “You’re distracted today.”

  I’m both distracted and trying to use the violence as a distraction because Rafael tried to call again last night. It’s been four weeks since I left, four Fridays in a row that he’s tried to contact me. Four calls I haven’t answered, because I can’t handle speaking to him. I’m still too hurt. Part of me wants him to stop calling altogether, while the other wonders why the hell he hasn’t tried more than once a week. My only fix is calling Lucas a couple of times a week. He feels like family to me, my best friend, and I crave the familiarity that my heart can’t take from speaking to Rafael.

  “The gym is my distraction,” I say, taking a seat at the breakfast bar.

  “Maybe you should stop looking for distraction. At some point you have to let him go, Anna.”

  I feel myself bristle, my defenses shooting up instantly. “I don’t want to talk about Rafael again.” She’s been saying the same thing ever since I got here, and every time I shut her down and change the subject because I don’t want to talk about it.

  “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.” Although at times I wish I didn’t. It would make this easier.

  She takes a seat beside me. “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’re good. You need to let go.” 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 and staring at Dante. Rafael 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 told me that I’m one of the angriest people he’d 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.