Chapter 31
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
LUKE
BOOM.
For the second time in a short period, I had yet another bomb dropped on my fucking head.
Nothing compared to the way this had instantly killed me inside.
It carved.
It cut.
It sliced me up into tiny little pieces, making me bleed from the inside out.
I never expected she’d have it in her to completely fucking destroy me. Burying me alive to suffocate in the lies and deceit she had spun for over three months.
I was blinded by anger.
By her presence.
By my love for her that I couldn’t shake.
I needed to keep going.
I had to remain strong.
I dug my fingernails as hard as I could into my palm to keep from giving in to my true nature. Her only saving grace was I truly cared for this woman.
This was the only thing that was keeping her alive.
The only thing that was keeping me alive, too.
I should have put a stop to this, to her. Knowing that all it would take was a pull of my trigger finger, but the thought alone had the power to bring me to my knees.
She had the power to bring me to my knees.
I missed her so fucking much, and she was standing right in front of me. I couldn’t concentrate on that. I had to stay focused on my hatred for her, on her web of lies that bonded me to her betrayal.
Even then, it still felt like it wouldn’t be enough, it wouldn’t matter because my love for her would prevail.
Possibly ending us both.
“His daughter?” I scoffed out, disgusted with what that meant. “But he… he…”
“He doesn’t touch me, Luke, but that doesn’t mean he stops other men from fucking whatever hole they want on my body. You can decide which one’s worse.”
I couldn’t believe the words I was hearing.
More lies? Or the truth?
She didn’t stop there, admitting, “He’s been selling me off to the highest bidder since he forced me to become a woman at twelve.”
Her eyes didn’t just water that time, they burst, and two symmetrical tears streamed down her gorgeous face.
I fought the urge to comfort her.
To hold her.
To tell her everything was going to be okay. That I would make it okay. I did none of those things. I just stood there and waited for her to continue. I didn’t even think I was breathing, so it wouldn’t keep her from opening up to me.
She was there, but she wasn’t.
Her eyes faded into a familiar place I was currently standing in.
Hell on earth.
You’d think after everything I discovered, I’d have the will to keep her at arm’s length.
I didn’t.
If anything, my desire to hold her was stronger, more vivid and alive. Beating into me with each breath she took. I wanted to fucking kill him, so I grabbed my whiskey glass instead and threw it as hard as I could against the bulletproof window, spraying the contents everywhere. Shards of glass shattered in every direction.
It still didn’t stop her from declaring, “I didn’t want to do it then, and I don’t want to do it now. I’ve never wanted to do it. I hate him! I’ve hated him since I was a little girl. He’s an evil bastard. Always slapping my mother around and treating her like shit. He’s a nasty drunk and snorts blow like it’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” She frowned for a moment, inhaling a deep breath. “My mom always protected us. She always tried to hide us from him. We’d spend summers in Europe, and it was the only time I remember being happy as a kid. He never followed us there for whatever reason, but I knew it would be short-lived. The end of summer would come around, and we’d have to return to Cuba for school. She tried to push boarding school to get us out of the house, but he refused, so we went to a religious school instead, which was the biggest irony of it all.”
“Sloan—”
“I prayed all the time. I thought if I was a good girl, God would save us… but God never came.”
I couldn’t imagine being raised in that environment.
To have a father abuse you wasn’t something I expected out of her mouth for one second. It was one thing when she was his wife. It was a whole other when she was his daughter.
The insanity of this was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I dealt with a lot of different fucked-up men, but this motherfucker took the cake. It was his daughter…
Like what the fuck?
She took another deep breath, anxiously shaking a bit. “I was born into this life, Luke. This life is all I’ve ever known. Violence. Made men. Trafficking. Guns. Drugs… it all goes hand in hand. My memories are what keep me up at night. It’s why I don’t sleep. I don’t know how to sleep without worrying that someone is going to come into my room and show me how powerful of a man they are.”
“Darlin’, I?—”
“I’m a woman in a man’s world, and I have absolutely no voice. I do what I’m told, or I’m tortured. There’s no in-between with him. No gray area. He’s always right, and if you argue that, he’ll cut off your tongue. I’ve seen him do it. Come to think of it… there isn’t much I haven’t seen my father do. Including fucking his whores. He gets off on the kink of it. Sometimes he watches me too…”
“Jesus Christ…”
I was winded.
Hurting.
Trying to remain strong for her to confess this to me.
“Papi loves to watch his good girl take it in every hole, Jameson.”
I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat.
“In fact,” she stated in a sharp tone. “I’m certain the only reason he wanted me was to sell me off to whatever benefited him the most. He knew he could use me as a tool for his businesses, and my mom was powerless to stop him. She didn’t have anyone. All she had was him. All we ever had was him.”
She backed away, and I stepped toward her, afraid she would take off on me. She was a loose cannon at this point, and I had no idea where this could turn. I barely knew how to keep it together with everything she shared openly.
She lifted her hand, stopping me. Completely unfazed with my gun still aimed at her forehead.
“The first time he let someone touch me, I was eleven, and I didn’t understand what I was doing, only that I had to do it or else. He didn’t give a shit about the shame or the confusion that caused me. There was no talk about it. He dressed me in a babydoll dress with pigtails, and I knew the second my mother wasn’t with us that something bad would happen. Maybe it was my intuition trying to protect me. We drove to a house I’d never seen, and I followed him inside.”
“Sloan…”
“I was just left in a room with a man I didn’t know, asking me if I wanted some candy. Just like that, my innocence was ripped away from me. On the ride home, he threw some money on my lap and told me to buy myself whatever I wanted. That it was his gift to me for being his good girl.”
I swallowed hard.
“You understand how confusing that was for me, right? Wanting to please him so he’d be nice to me and maybe nice to my brothers and mom too.”
With the coldest, detached voice I could muster, I strained, “And your mother?”
“She found out about it a few days later and went to confront him about it. He was on a call that he was making me sit on in his office. He wanted me to hear him try to sell my virginity for kilos of cocaine since my virginity was literally worth millions of dollars.”
What a sick fuck.
“I remember sitting there, and suddenly, I turned, and my mom stood by his double wooden doors that were usually closed. She turned as white as a ghost, and her body shook like a leaf. It looked like she’d aged twenty years overnight, and it’s the last way I remember her…”
My free hand fisted at my side.
“I was so scared that I immediately ran to her, throwing my arms around her legs as hard as I could, never wanting to let her go.”
Big.
Huge.
Fat tears fell down her cheeks.
“My brothers must have caught on because they came running, too. I remember begging. Just begging over and over again for I don’t know what. She threatened to leave him, yelling and calling him an animal, a monster, a sorry excuse of a man and father. It was the first time I’d ever heard her say anything like that. It was as if it was all pent up inside her, and she just exploded.”
I pictured it playing out in front of me. Everything she went through, trying to keep my own emotions at bay.
“All he did was walk toward her and laugh in her face. I’ll never forget that laugh for the rest of my life. It was such an evil villain laugh,” she choked out, barely hanging on by a thread. “Something in me snapped, and I screamed, ‘I love you, mami,’ and the next thing I knew, he lifted his gun and simply said, ‘I’ll kill you before you leave me.’ I was screaming bloody murder into her legs as he pulled the trigger. Her body fell backward, collapsing on the floor from the bullet between her eyes, and it took me with her.”
“Jesus… baby…”
“He let us mourn her. He let us cry onto her dead body as blood and brains gushed out of her, and then his men came in and took her away.” She shrugged again, wiping all the tears from her eyes, smearing her eye makeup across her face. “We never saw her again. There was no funeral. He simply buried her out back like a dog.”
Her eyes stayed locked with mine. It was almost like they were fused, and nothing could break them apart.
That was when she truly lost it.
That was when it really hit her.
She shuddered, her body giving out on her. Any ounce of resolve she had left vanished like a thief in the night.
My vision blurred.
My throat seized.
The room caved in on her as she unleashed tears from her eyes, sending a steady stream down the sides of her face with nothing but her heartbreaking pain.
She broke down, losing all her strength.
To fight.
To cry.
To hate him.
She fell to the ground, and I went with her. Catching her in my arms, I held her as she bawled her eyes out. I pulled her into my chest, enveloping her so damn tight while she shattered in my strong and comforting embrace.
“Shh…” I murmured into her ear, rocking her back and forth. “Shh…”
She lay against my chest and cried her eyes out for I don’t know how long. It could have been minutes or hours. All I did was try to hold her for as long as she’d let me. It was the only thing I could do. My heart broke for her.
Everything I thought I knew.
Everything I thought I was going to do.
I was all wrong.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
She was as much of a victim of his crimes as I was.
With the back of my fingers, I lightly skimmed the bruise on her cheek, and she looked up at me through her thick, long lashes. She reminded me of a kitten dying for attention.
For some reason I couldn’t place, my attention shifted to her Roman numeral tattoo.
She must have caught my stare since she once again willingly shared, “It’s the date he murdered her. She was only trying to protect me, and it ended up getting her killed.”
“Sloan—”
“It doesn’t matter which way you try to spin this, Luke. It doesn’t change the cold, hard fact that the only reason she is dead is because of me.”
I stared into her sorrowful eyes that were silently pleading for my forgiveness. Our connection was brought on by the darkness living inside us. Which was an understanding only we could comprehend.