Chapter 1 #3
I thought about the weekends when I was forced to be away from Ronan for my training, and how hard it was to focus on anything else.
My admiration for my mamá grew a bit as I was reminded, she continued on all of this time without my papá near her.
Her love, her trust, and her belief in him never wavered, and this allowed her to continue to care for her daughters on her own.
The fifteen-foot-tall glass double door slammed on his foot as Cézar dropped a bag, ”Carajo!” He cursed at no one but himself, and I ran to the door to keep it open for him so he could get by with the bags.
“Gracias, Princesita,” he thanked me, placing a kiss on my forehead. Before he made it out of the door the loud backfiring of a hundred cars rang out.
Cézar threw me inside and crushed me under his weight. He was screaming something I couldn’t make out, but the familiar feeling of not being able to breathe had me instantly spinning out of control.
Cézar was still on top of me but I could hear his gun going off as he shouted to someone, but I didn’t know who. He pushed me further into the house and carried me into the coat closet then shut the door.
“Are you hit, Princesa?” he shouted from outside of the closet, but I didn’t know what he meant.
I was sure I was screaming but I couldn’t be certain that any of the noise was actually coming out of me. I could hear the scraping of something large across my tía’s marble floors and the heavy slam of it against the closet door let me know I was barricaded inside.
“Tell me what’s happening Cézar!” I pounded on the door with all my might, "Please!" I sobbed as the darkness closed in around me, taking me back to the nightmare I dreaded.
Except there was no heat or smoke this time, only the deafening ringing in my ears.
“I have to go check on Rafa. Princesa, don’t move!” I heard his fist on the wall.
I wrapped my arms around my knees and tucked my head in to make myself small.
There was a sharp pain coming from my shoulder where Cézar took me down, but I ignored it and hoped that we would all make it out of this one together again. I knew it was that cobarde hijo de la chingada, Ignacio and his son Carlito, I just didn’t know what it was they had done yet.
I could hear Cézar’s shouting and cursing and guns firing but I couldn’t hear any other voices. Not knowing was the worst, terror began closing in around me again as the closet walls got closer and closer until I could feel them practically crushing me.
I heard the sound of the Benz starting up, and a heavy quiet, draped over me as I slipped into the darkness. I was vaguely aware of someone picking me up and getting placed into the small trunk compartment before the void embraced me completely.
It was the antagonizing sound of the hospital machinery next to me beeping like a perfect metronome that woke me up.
The pounding in my head and the soreness throughout the rest of my body reminded me that I had just recently been tackled by a six foot-two brick wall.
I could hear my heart rate spike as I slowly came out of the fog and I was reminded of the attack in our driveway.
“?Qué chingados?” I groaned, my throat raspy and desperately in need of water.
“Finally, you’re awake. Stay calm Cecilia, I have a lot to tell you.” Each word came out more gently and quietly than I thought possible from Cézar.
I tried to turn toward him in the corner of the hospital room, but my shoulder burned, and I screamed at the pain.
“Don’t move too much, you just had surgery to remove the bullet in your shoulder. You got pretty lucky there princesa,” he muttered, “I did too.”
“How did he hit us?” I asked, my voice void of any emotion as I tried to calculate the possible damage.
I already knew what happened, but I needed to know how bad it was.
“It was a drive-by, but they wouldn’t stop coming. There were so many cars, one after the other. Everything happened so fast,” he buried his hands in his hair as he slumped down in the chair with his elbows on his knees.
“Who’s left?” I asked, the hospital light flickering in sync with my voice.
“I tried to go back outside but every time I opened the door those fuckers were blasting through us like we were paper.”
I could hear the sadness in his voice, but it only stoked my anger since he kept avoiding my question. Avoiding giving me the truth of it all. I clenched my fists allowing the pain to fuel me and ask him again.
“Who’s left, Cézar?” My voice didn’t waver.
“Your mamá had a pulse when I ran to turn on the car, so I put her in the backseat before I brought you out there. She’s in bad shape though Celia.” My old name came out of his mouth sounding so strange and foreign that it took me by surprise.
“Who is left, Cézar?” I asked him one final time because he was choking on the words I needed to hear so badly.
“Everyone else is gone,” his brown eyes met mine and there was nothing but sadness and pain in them.
“Everyone? You checked everyone? You’re sure?” Panic ripped through me at the thought of Carolina or my tía bleeding out all alone in our driveway, but he shook his head at me grimly.
“I’ve never seen a job so overdone, Celia. He didn’t leave any room for error with this one. I couldn’t even recognize them they were all so fucked up. Some of the guys looked like Swiss cheese. It was bad reina.”
“What a joke,” I scoffed, “Reina del cártel… Queen of nothing. He painted such a pretty picture, my whole life I actually thought it would come true one day. He was protecting me though, you know?” I said through my swollen, cut-up lips.
“I know princesita, I know,” Cézar murmured from the chair in the corner as he looked out the window. “He knew that without sons, his seat had a countdown, it was just a matter of time before Ignacio would kill him for it."
“He understood that women in the Cártel only have one place and that’s being married off for an alliance, he would have never let that happen to me though.
Not while he was still alive.” I scoffed, angry at everything, but mostly at my papá for being so naive to think he had the upper hand on his brother.
“I think he would have liked to have seen you come to power, and I think we could have seen it through if he stayed alive until you were old enough to take his place, but now…” he trailed off.
“Todo está perdido”, I said, and Cézar nodded.
“All is lost. Now princesita, you and your mamá must lay low, don’t get noticed, live quietly.
Entiendes?” He asked, and I nodded. “He will not stop looking for you until he can be sure you are not a threat, and even then, he may still find a use for you, and I don’t want to think what that could mean princesa,” Cézar’s words were a warning of the harsh reality I somehow avoided twice now.
Rafael Flores’ only living daughter was sure to have a pretty price tag to the highest buyer.
Bile churned inside my stomach as I realized how vulnerable my papá left me.
I wasn’t even sure how rage was the surpassing emotion over grief at this moment, but I knew the bastard was responsible even for how I was reacting to his own death.
He burned into me long ago exactly who he wanted me to become.
“Where will you go?” I asked Cézar, realizing with my papá gone it was likely Ignacio had already taken his seat and pledged his case to the cártel.
With Papá’s top men out of the way, the rest would fall in where the green would roll from. The lack of loyalty made me bitter. My papá was cold, but he was dedicated to his men, and always did right by them.
“I have some amigos scattered around a couple of motorcycle clubs out East, thought I’d pay them a visit and maybe find some work,” he shrugged his shoulders.
“You? In a motorcycle gang?” I laughed so loudly that my shoulder stung, making me wince. “Hanging up your Armani suits for a leather cut? I’d like to see the day.”
“They’re clubs, not gangs. And I’m not too good for anything Princesita, your papá changed my life when he took me under his wing, but somehow, I always knew it wouldn’t last. Nothing good ever lasts,” he muttered.
“I am harshly aware,” I cut his words with my own and immediately sighed my regret, “I don’t blame you,” I softened to reassure him.
“I know you would have done anything for him, for us. And I know the pendejo would have asked you to save me instead of him anyway. I’m sure he’s proud of you…
en el infierno.” I mumbled the last bit, and he pressed his lips together in a flat line like he hadn’t decided whether he agreed with me or not.
“Listen princesa, one last thing. That boyfriend of yours came running by after I brought you and Jamila to the hospital. I don’t know what he found when he got to your tía’s house, but you better start painting the picture you want him to see before he decides to start turning stones on his own, eh?
” Cézar’s tone changed, and I knew he was right, any breadcrumbs that could lead Ronan to the truth would just put him in danger.
“He’s outside the room right now. You know, one visitor at a time and all, and I made a damn good case that I should be the one with you when you wake up,” he pulled on his suit lapel proudly and I laughed, coughed, and shuddered from pain all at once.
I would miss Cézar like a crab missed an infected limb after they self-amputated it.
I knew that my papá picked him because he saw in him a son he never had, and I felt that same sibling love I had with Caro with him as well. Now we would just be strangers with a shared history of violence and fucked up trauma. I’d be lucky to bump into him at the grocery store on an odd day.
Cézar stood and awkwardly limped my way, he groaned as he bent down and placed a kiss on the top of my forehead, “Don’t look for me princesita. Even if you somehow kill the pendejo.”
He dropped a single gold coin on my lap, but it wasn’t money. It had the Flores cártel symbol pressed into it, a five-petal flower crest. His relinquishing of it was the greatest insult I could probably endure, it meant he was out.
I scoffed to myself because no one got out, not alive at least.
Rafael Flores would have put a bullet between his eyes for leaving me, whether or not he raised him as if he was his own son.
I was not my papá, and I refused to ask a dead man to do my bidding, I was a dead woman too.
With one last look, he turned the doorknob to leave. Before he could fully get through the door, Ronan was already coming in with an intense burning in his eyes as he looked Cézar’s way. Once his gaze turned to me though, that intensity quickly dissolved and transformed into a look I knew as fear.
He rushed to my side.
“Oh shit, Cecilia! You’re awake,” he knelt by my bed as he grasped my hand on my non-injured side.
“I thought I lost you. I heard so many guns going off from my house and I tried calling you but you didn’t answer.
By the time I came over, they were all dead.
Everything was taped off and you were gone!
” He blurted out in one frantic breath, and I could see the tears pooling at the edges of his eyes.
I finally allowed myself to break to the one person I knew could put me back together again.
The tears poured out of me for the first time in longer than I could remember, and he climbed onto the hospital bed.
The pain in my shoulder as he reached to hold me was a dull sting compared to the deep ache inside of my chest.
“I got you, okay? I promise I’m not letting you go,” he vowed, and I knew he meant it.
I pressed the button on my side to call for more morphine and let myself succumb to the drug's call as it soothed my pain.