When Lies Unfold

Chapter 70

With my bodysnug against Santy’s side, he keeps one arm tightly banded around me as if he fears I’ll be taken from him next. The fingers of his other hand gently comb through my damp hair in slow, soothing strokes.

After we showered, he pulled me toward the bed. He hadn’t voiced his request, but I just knew he wanted to hold me. To remind himself that we still have each other.

For now.

I absently trace the patterns of ink along the curves of his pectorals when he clears his throat like he’s about to speak. When he doesn’t, his audible hesitance is so out of character that it spawns a wariness washing over me.

“Gotta question for you, but don’t know if you’ll wanna answer.”

“O-kay,” I say slowly.

“How’d you get messed up with him in the first place?”

“My parents.” My voice is devoid of emotion, matching what I feel for the people who placed me in that hellish existence.

His stroking of my hair stutters before resuming, silently waiting for me to continue.

“My father started working for Hidalgo when I was nineteen. It became a struggle for him to keep up with my mother’s expensive tastes. So, when Hidalgo offered to buy me and make me his wife that following year, my parents couldn’t accept fast enough.”

His arm that’s banded around me flexes, and when he utters the single word, it’s little more than a growl. “Motherfucker.”

A smile graces my lips, but it’s short-lived.

“Did it…start right away?”

“No.” I expel a sigh, my tone bleak. “Which is why I na?vely thought it wouldn’t be so bad…”

Colombia

PAST

I’m holding on to a modicum of hope that Hidalgo isn’t the monster he’s rumored to be.

After all, he’s the sole reason I was accepted into the advanced program at the university and why I don’t have to pay a cent for any tuition or books. He paid for everything, claiming he recognizes a promising young surgeon when he sees one.

It’s easier to pretend this is some strange version of a fairy tale instead of one where my parents sold me to an older criminal.

I con myself into believing that as long as I’m able to use my hands to heal others, I can endure a loveless marriage. That I can come to terms with being the wife of the most well-known narco in Colombia.

At the very start of our marriage, he offers a gesture of kindness by creating a designated room for me and filling it with all the best medical equipment.

But I soon discover his ulterior motives. Each of his henchmen who are stabbed or shot become my patients.

“He dies, you suffer.” This is Hidalgo’s threat each time. It doesn’t matter how badly wounded the men are. It doesn’t matter if they’re brought to me without anyone administering a tourniquet or any prior aid whatsoever.

Countless times, men who’ve almost bled to death before being brought to me die on the cold, stainless-steel table. This is even after I do everything I can with the little I have to work with. It’s only me and the medical equipment.

No blood bank for transfusions.

No one to assist me.

No one else to shoulder the blame when one of those bastards dies.

No one else to endure the beatings when they inevitably come.

Initially, he simply backhands me. His fancy ring leaves behind tiny craters in my skin, gifting me with a permanent reminder of the monster I was forced to marry.

Once I grow hardened to that, he becomes more creative with his punishment methods.

Year after year, my nightmare progresses. My parents are of no help. After all, they used me to get rich off this nightmarish joke of a marriage. My grandmother lives a humble life, so she certainly isn’t in a position to help me escape.

The only silver lining is that my abuelita makes Hidalgo uneasy. She’s proud of her indigenous background and often mentions how she practices certain “ceremonies.”

Where my grandmother is committed to her belief about fate and believes that she has a gift for being intuitive, she doesn’t have anything to do with the dark arts like Hidalgo assumes. However, she’s dropped enough hints and made implications that make him uneasy enough to allow me supervised time with her on certain occasions.

“Your life isn’t over, nieta.” She whispers this reminder at each of our visits. “Your fate is on the horizon. I sense it.”

I dismiss her words, because I can’t bear to recall the last time I felt like I stepped onto the path fate intended for me. It was far too magical of a moment, which makes it that much more painful to leave behind.

So, I suffer through each day, promising myself that I’ll find a way to escape Hidalgo and the prison he keeps me in—whether I escape and flee to another country or I escape him by suicide.

The death of my abuelita brings a more potent doom, though, because she’s been the only one I had on the “outside.” With her gone, Hidalgo’s wrath only intensifies.

PRESENT

Santy presses his lips to my hairline, his tender kiss at odds with the tension radiating through his body. “You don’t have to say more.”

“It’s okay. I’ve never told anyone else.” I turn my head slightly to plant a light kiss to his chest. “There’s some relief in finally voicing it.” And it’s true—it’s cathartic, in a way.

His voice is low, gravelly. “It’s good to get shit off your chest, sometimes.”

“It is.”

My attention settles on my hand that lies on Santy’s chest, those beautiful, inked butterflies disguising the horrors my body endured.

Then I curl myself tighter along his side, drawing from his innate strength, before I continue.

Colombia

PAST

When Hidalgo accuses me of flirting with some of the injured assholes I’m forced to treat is when I suffer beneath my own scalpel in his hands.

On and on it goes, until his tipping point.

Until one fateful night in November…when he tries to fuck me and fails.

He comes to my bedroom in the middle of the night, startling me awake by shoving my nightgown up to my armpits and tearing off my panties. With a knife to my throat, he forces himself between my thighs and attempts to shove his dick inside me.

Except he can’t stay hard enough to do much of anything.

I lie in stunned silence, staring up at the darkened bedroom ceiling, waiting for it to be over. Mentally, I go to that same place where everything grows hazy and the sounds around me turn to static. Where I cease to feel pain. Where I’m numb to it all.

Once he finally gives up, relief swamps me. Of course, he tears himself away and backhands me across the face. But I welcome this over him raping me.

When he leaves my bedroom, slamming the door behind him, I wonder what’s gotten into him. Perhaps now that he tried that, he won’t do it again, seeing as how terrible it turned out. Maybe he’ll even give me a reprieve of some sort.

I’m irrevocably wrong, because the next day, he punishes me in a way I could’ve never imagined.

Zip-tied and hung by my cinched wrists, I’m beaten with a crowbar. This is when my uterus ruptures.

This is the night he steals my ability to ever have children.

Even this, though, I find a way to accept. Because there’s no way I want to bring a child into this kind of world.

It isn’t until the day he steals my gift—my dream—from me that I feel as if he shatters my entire existence.

He straps me to the metal table as if I’m a patient on the verge of a mental breakdown. My head, body, arms, legs—everything is restrained.

His face looms over mine, and with that maniacal smirk I’ve come to dread, he informs me that he knows I want to leave him. That he heard me whimpering about it in my sleep.

His mouth widens in a grin that makes my blood turn to ice. “You’ll never leave, because what would you do without me?” He raises his hands and the objects he holds come into view. A wide mallet and a thin piece of rebar.

Thin by normal standards. Thick if you’re driving it into someone’s flesh.

I thought I knew pain from all the previous torture I endured.

Until now.

Until he hammers the first few centimeters of the metal through the center of my dominant hand—my left. He knows this, because he watched me perform surgical procedures countless times on his men.

He knows that my left hand is the steadiest and most precise. My skilled precision is what’s received accolades from my professors.

He knows what destroying my hand will do.

But Hidalgo is evil enough not to stop there. I know this with every fiber of my being. I know he’ll continue to diminish my will to live. He’ll find other ways to punish me for whatever fucked-up reason he conjures.

I promise myself, in this moment, that I’ll do anything to escape him.

Anything.

PRESENT

“I stand by what I said before.” Santy’s voice is a low rumble, blanketed with affection.

With two fingers beneath my chin, he urges me to peer up at him. Once I do, all breath evaporates from my lungs at the blatant affection etched on his features. He smooths back my hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear. “No doubt about it, my woman’s a warrior.”

I greedily soak up his words and tender touch, but I know the truth.

Rosa Carrera wasn’t a warrior. She waited for someone else to give her a way out. Otherwise, she would’ve continued to turn the other cheek. She would’ve continued to live her life filled with regrets.

But these past few years, I’ve made it a point to hone myself into the kind of woman I’m proud of. The kind of woman who will be a reckoning force for the most evil men on this earth.

I may not have been born Lola Arias, but I’m more her than Rosa. I’ve become a woman who doesn’t yield to anyone.

I’m a woman who finds her own way out. Who paves her own way.

It’s more important now than ever before to remind myself that I can take on challenges and risks I would’ve previously balked at.

Sudden clarity and peace settle over me, and I lift up and press my lips to Santy’s. Because I know what needs to be done.

This is it.

I’m prepared to finalize Rosa Carrera’s last chapter.

I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to ensure that Lola Arias’s final chapter is powerfully written. That it’s one I’m proud of, filled with bravery, love, and friendship.

If this is the end for me—for Lola Arias—it won’t be filled with regrets.

It’ll be filled with memories of the two Hernándezes I love the most.