Chapter 12 Victoria Blanca
VICTORIA BLANCA
Istepped into the meeting room, and every man seated at that table had already been waiting on me for fifteen minutes.
That wasn’t an accident either, that was strategy because men like the ones sitting in that room only understood power when it looked deliberate, and after the way the last few weeks had gone, I had learned how to make them feel it before I even opened my mouth.
The compound sat high enough in the hills outside Medellín that the city lights looked far away and soft at night, but inside that house everything felt different.
The walls were light stone color, and the floors were polished a dark wood.
The table was long enough to seat twelve people, and ten of those seats were already filled with men who still hadn’t fully decided if they respected me or if they were simply too afraid not to.
I liked that for them, and I was learning that respect took time, and I was tired of giving men time to decide what I was worth.
I had on a fitted black dress that stopped right below my knees, but it was nothing too flashy, yet expensive enough that nobody would mistake me for anything less than exactly what I was.
My hair was down and blown bone straight, tucked behind one ear on one side, and every time I moved, the light would shine on my gold chain.
I wore my uncle’s ring on my right hand now, and every time I saw it I still felt that strange little twist of knots in my chest as a part grief and part anger, but I had to push it to the side.
No one should have to grow into power that way, but I did.
So, there I was. I walked to the head of the table and sat down in the chair that used to belong to him, smoothing my dress once over my thighs before lifting my eyes to the men across from me.
Nobody spoke right away. They all looked at me with some version of the same expression, waiting to see if I was tired, emotional, distracted, weak, unprepared, or just woman enough to underestimate.
I let the silence linger a little longer. Then I smiled and it wasn’t warm, but it was just enough. “Why does this room always feel like a funeral?” I asked in a smooth tone. “If one of you is planning to disappoint me, at least do it with energy.”
That got a couple of uncomfortable smiles, and one nervous laugh from farther down the table, and one of the older men cleared his throat as if he had to physically prepare himself to speak. “We were waiting for you La Reina.”
“I know,” I replied. “And now that I’m here, somebody tell me why the shipping report on my desk made me want to throw a bottle through a window.”
That kind of talk got them moving as folders opened and phones begin to turn over.
One of the men nearest to me slid a packet across the table, and I opened it while he started explaining something about route delays, increased checkpoints, a driver who suddenly had family problems, and many excuses men loved using when they thought too much talking made them sound important, but it didn’t.
I let him finish and then I looked up at him.
“So, what you’re telling me is you let one driver, one checkpoint, and one weak excuse delay product moving through a route that has been secure for months?” I questioned slightly raising one brow.
His mouth opened, then closed and he said nothing. The man across from him jumped in too fast, trying to save him. “The military presence has increased in the area.”
“And?” I asked.
The room got quiet because that was the thing they were finally starting to understand about me.
I did not care about panic, and I did not care about what couldn’t be done.
I also did not care about all the reasons something failed if the only thing sitting in front of me was failure itself. I learned that from El Blanca.
“If there’s military, buy them,” I ordered.
“If they can’t be bought, reroute. If the driver can’t handle pressure, replace him.
If there’s a leak, close it. Why are any of you coming in here telling me about problems you were paid to solve?
” I couldn’t understand this and I realized that the job wasn’t even hard, you just had to use common sense.
I’d heard my uncle enough although he never taught me this side of the business, he knew that I was listening.
One of the men shifted in his seat and another one looked down at the papers in front of him.
Good, I thought to myself, because I needed them to feel uncomfortable, I needed them to remember that I was not sitting in my uncle’s chair for decoration.
By the time the meeting ended, I had changed two routes, replaced one handler, cut one man’s percentage down to almost nothing, and told the port manager if he embarrassed me again I’d have him replaced by somebody younger and hungrier before breakfast and the best part, they believed me too.
I could tell in the way their faces got uncomfortable when I spoke and in the way their eyes kept dropping before they lifted back to mine.
By the time they finally left the room, my back hurt, my head was pounding, and my coffee had gotten cold long ago.
I stood there by the table for a second, with both palms flat on the counter and let myself breathe.
The house around me was quiet except for the distant noise of staff moving through the kitchen and the hum of the air conditioning.
It was one of the larger compounds, not the main estate, but one of the safer ones.
It had tall walls, it was gated, tucked away enough that people had to really mean it to get there.
There were guards outside, drivers in the front, and cameras on every corner.
Everybody moved when I told them to and everybody answered when I called but somehow, it still felt lonely.
I stepped away from the table and walked out into the hall. My heels clicked against the marble, and one of the house girls straightened up the second she saw me.
“Senora, would you like something to eat?”
“No.” I told her.
“You haven’t eaten. La Reina.”
I stopped walking and looked at her, but I didn’t have anything to say.
She immediately looked down. “Lo siento.”
I exhaled softly. “Just tea.”
“Sí.”
She hurried off to retrieve it . That was another thing power gave you.
People started noticing your moods before you said them out loud.
They watched what you ate or how much you slept, or how often you looked at your phone and if you were a woman, they noticed even more.
They wanted to know if your sadness made you weak or if your loneliness made you reckless or even if your beauty made you foolish.
I gave them as little as possible. At least in public.
In private? That was where the problem started.
My phone had become the center of my day, and I hated that about myself.
I hated it enough that I kept it a secret from everyone in the house, because if Luciana or any of the older women around me ever figured out why I had started dressing with more care again, why I had begun wearing perfume even to breakfast, why I checked my phone more often than my security reports, they would know exactly what kind of fool I was being.
Or rather, what kind of fool I wanted to be.
Dom had been calling me and not every day like a lovesick man with too much time and too little self-control.
That wasn’t his style, but it was enough that I started expecting it to the point I started feeling the absence of it when two days passed without his voice.
It was enough that when I heard his name now, everything in me reacted before I could stop it.
At first I told myself it was nothing. Then I started replaying the things he said after we hung up.
Always concerned about if I’m eating or sleeping or if I’m handling things well or if I needed any advice.
He was never warm and never sweet, and he surely was never the type of man to say something that could be read as soft if he could help it.
But he was checking on me, and the part of me that had always wanted more from him kept turning that into something bigger and I knew how it sounded, but still, I couldn’t help it because what if he was coming around?
What if time had done what force never could?
What if Carmen only held his attention now because she was carrying his baby and because duty made him stay where comfort had already started to fade?
That thought was ugly, I knew it, but it still ran across my mind, like a warm and poisonous venom every time he called.
By the time I made it to my room, the tea had been placed on the little table by the window, and my second phone was exactly where I left it.
Not the main one people called me on for business but the private one.
The one no one in the house knew mattered more to me than it should.
I picked it up before I even sat down and there were no new messages.
My stomach dropped anyway, and I hated myself for that too.
I slowly crossed the room, stopping in front of the mirror long enough to take my earrings off and place them onto the vanity.
My room overlooked the back gardens and one of the smaller pools, and the sunset was just beginning to turn the sky colors.
The whole room glowed in that color, through the silk curtains.
From the furniture, and the black marble fireplace, everything looked expensive and lonely.
I set my uncle’s ring on the vanity, then immediately picked it back up and slid it on again.
I hated how naked I felt without it. A knock came at the door, and before I could answer, Luciana stepped in with a stack of reports in one hand and a look on her face that told me she had already clocked my mood from down the hall.