Chapter 58 Santos
SANTOS
My bullshit karma had finally caught up to me, except the trifling bitch didn’t care who she hurt in the process as long as I got what was mine too.
I practically killed our men, murdered my brothers, and there was a good chance Celia was only here so that Guillermo could force me to watch him kill her.
As a punishment.
Or maybe this was how I’d go too.
We weren’t left alone long. Soon the basement door opened again, and the sound of high heels clicking delicately down the stairs followed heavy boots.
“Carajo, you weren’t lying,” a female voice spoke, and Celia’s head jerked up, her eyes went wide like she recognized the speaker.
She yanked at her chains violently, turning abruptly with eyes jarred open and nostrils flared while she searched around the room for the voice.
“I didn’t think we’d get the chance after Carlitos failed so horribly,” the voice whispered.
“I was hoping this pendejo was gonna do it for me, but it looks like I’m gonna have to teach my primo a lesson, Lina.” Guillermo stepped into the light, and behind him stood a woman.
One whose hair lacked shine, and whose aura seemed smudged and polluted by whatever hardships life had placed in her way. Her eyes were a chestnut brown, and her hair matched the color of the freckles on her skin. They didn’t look much alike, but side by side you could see the similarities.
Impossible to deny that they were sisters. She was, in every way, so much like Celia, and yet somehow there wasn’t a single shared trait I could pinpoint.
“Carolina?” Celia seethed, her voice raspy from the journey and the chains clanking loudly.
“God damn,” she chuckled, stepping towards her sister. “You look like dog shit Celia. Here I’ve been hating you for half my life when maybe you did me a favor. Has it been a rough fifteen years hermanita?”
“What the fuck?” Celia screamed, throwing her body with no success as her chains barred her from much movement. “What the fuck?” she continued to repeat, thrashing against her restraints while her sister threw her head back and laughed.
Celia’s expression briefly showed a glimpse of something that looked like pain before she masked it over with a steel hard gaze.
She cocked her head back and spit a wad of saliva on her little sister’s face.
Carolina reached her hand up silently, and with no command needed, Guillermo placed a tissue in her hand.
It begged the question of who was in charge here.
“Is that any way to greet the sister you left for dead?”
“Left for dead? You were all buried by the time I left the hospital. Instead of finding me you’ve been hiding, conspiring against me? I can see Ignacio raised you. Una rata just like him.” Celia yelled, not bothering to reign in her emotions.
“Tío said you’d say all those things. Told me you would try to poison my mind with Papá’s sentimental lies.” Carolina stepped closer to Celia; a sharp surgical tool was in her hand now.
He’d spent the last fifteen years brainwashing her.
Poisoning her against her family.
In a way, that almost meant he’d won.
“If you think I’d waste a second of my time letting you hear words Papá meant solely for my ears, you’re delusional,” Celia taunted her.
“You did get one thing correct though, hermanita, Ignacio was right, you should have killed me when you had the chance. Because if I get out of here alive, I’m gonna rip you apart with my bare fucking teeth,” Celia roared, thrashing against her restraints while her sister cackled like a mad woman.
The back of her hand slapped violently against Celia’s cheek, the sound echoing throughout the basement.
I couldn’t believe this was the sister I had heard so much about. The sister whose death broke Celia in half and even left a stain of sorrow on Ronan’s life. This same fucking bitch was somehow behind my cousin’s brutality, the murder of my brothers, and so many of our men.
“You still think you’re better than me? Still think you’re worthy of Papá’s favor even though all it got you were scars? We’ll see who’s ugly, you spoiled bitch,” Carolina shrieked, dragging the knife across the side of Celia’s face, stopping just before reaching the corner of her lip.
Carolina’s eyes widened like she couldn’t believe what she’d just done, but Celia’s expression remained cold and unchanged, like she hadn’t even felt the pain of her skin splitting open from the sharp blade.
The blood poured freely down her jaw, staining her chest and dripping down the black leather dress she still wore from the Black Crow Party.
She lifted her chin up again, a sinister look filled with nothing but hate burned straight from her eyes into Carolina’s.
Celia smirked.
She actually fucking smirked, pushing more blood out of the side of her face. Carolina retreated back with shock at first, but Celia’s reaction only forced more anger from her. She lifted her hand as if to slice the other side of her face.
“Dame una sonrisa hermana.”
“Stop. Wait,” I shouted as loud as I could, getting their attention. “Don’t hurt her, don’t fucking hurt her… please. You can do whatever you want to me. Just don’t hurt her,” I begged.
“And what kind of satisfaction am I supposed to get from that?” She laughed and just as her arm came down to cut, Guillermo stopped her with his own hand.
“I can use this. I need to teach this pendejo a lesson anyway.” He yanked her back by the forearm and she winced, rubbing the sore spot that he squeezed too tightly.
“You want to take all her pain? All her punishment? I’m going to make you regret not killing her so badly that you’ll ask me to do it yourself when the time comes to let her go, primo. ”
“You want to teach him a lesson, amor? Consider this the first one,” Carolina declared, her accent heavier than I’d ever heard Celia’s in the entirety of our friendship. “You can have the other half,” she said sinisterly.
She walked over, standing directly in front of me before digging the knife slowly across the side of my face, mirroring Celia’s new cut. I groaned from the pain, biting the inside of the opposite cheek to distract from the sharp pain of her blade.
“Stop it. Fucking stop it,” Celia screamed, shaking in the chains.
But it wasn’t enough, Carolina smiled proudly at herself and looked to Guillermo before sending the knife down the other side of my face, cutting my eyebrow and sending the blade down my cheek.
The burn was intense, and the blood spilled out too fast, forcing me to squeeze my eye shut to keep it from dripping into my vision.
It only made the blood pour down faster.
“Fuck!” I cursed loudly and she cackled, the sound antagonizing Celia as she struggled against her restraints even harder.
“Honestly, this is a gift. Think how hot you’re going to look when this is healed.” She giggled. “Oops, you’re probably not going to get to see it by the time we’re done with you.”
Blood ran down my face and my vision reddened. It dripped into my eyes, my mouth, down my chest, and didn’t stop. She raised her arm to slice again and Celia shrieked, but Guillermo held her back.
“Corazón, they need time to heal, or they’ll bleed out.
They need time to learn their lessons, understood?
” he asked her, earning a bitter look from the youngest Flores sister before pulling her back and standing in front of me.
“Ay primo, this could have been so easy. You were my best soldier. I still have hope for you though. Maybe once all of this is done, you’ll come back to me.
Once you’ve learned the real meaning of family. ”
“I’ll let you teach him your lessons amor, but he’s not yours anymore. Los Muertos is mine, and so is Santito here.” She bared her teeth at him, confirming who was in charge.
But was it her, or was it his dick, following the tightest cunt it could find?
“Get the brand,” she told him, a growl escaping from his chest that she ignored.
Guillermo disappeared into one of the back rooms behind a closed door.
The clanking of metal tools falling on the ground only making Carolina more and more irritated.
He came back into my line of vision, the brand almost as big as my face scorching red hot at the end of the rod.
The five-petal flower glowing bright as it taunted me, promising me the pain of eternal damnation.
“No! Stop!” Celia begged and screamed repeatedly.
I bit my tongue to keep the scream from forcing its way out, tasting the liquid metal pooling in my mouth while the smell of my charred skin invaded my nostrils.
I couldn’t fight my body, and the warm stream of piss dripped down my legs as I convulsed from the pain of the brand blistering away at my skin.
The burning ache over my heart throbbed violently, the overwhelming nausea from the smell of my burnt flesh fought against the need to close my eyes and fade into the darkness.
“Now everyone will know who owns you.” Carolina smiled with satisfaction as she pulled the brand back, revealing where it now burned into where my Los Muertos tattoos once was.
This said everything it needed to.
Los Muertos was part of the Flores Cártel now. Everything my primo had ever wanted. He wanted to rule it, and he found himself at the mercy of a woman. She didn’t know it, but he’d never kneel for her.
They’d never work.
“I guess I don’t have to take you to the bathroom now,” my primo laughed.
Celia let out an unhinged cackle, the sound of her cold laughter shocking me to my core.
“Cállate! Did you already lose your mind?” Carolina spat the words out.
“The problem is you keep trying to take the things that are mine, in typical little sister fashion. But that isn’t your brand hermanita, it’s mine. And you just proved to the entire world that he belongs to me by putting my symbol on his flesh.”
She wasn’t wrong. Because I would kneel for her.
He sent his heavy fist into my stomach, stealing all the air out of my lungs with the sharp hit and forcing blood out of my mouth.
I lifted my neck, tilting my chin back to try to keep the blood from obstructing my visions while I tried to look into my primo’s face.
I breathed noisily through flared nostrils, my anger consuming me in a way I never thought it was possible to feel.
He narrowed his eyes and painted a sinister smile on his face, like he truly believed everything he was doing was for the good of our family. He turned on his heels and walked away, leading Carolina out of the basement with one hand on the small of her back. He knew nothing about family.
We were so fucking far from it.
My family consisted of two dead gringos and a dark haired beauty with half a Black Dahlia wound cut into her face now.
And I’d make sure we were all avenged before this was done.
“We’ll kill ‘em together, eh morena?” I asked her, ignoring the agonizing pain in my mouth while tasting the blood making its way through my cheek and grazing over my tongue.
I forced myself to stay conscious by shifting my focus from the burn on my chest to the cuts on my face, each time the pain became too much to bear I tuned one out and surrendered to the other.
Her chin lifted up slowly before her eyes fluttered open to look at me.
The blood streaked down her face. The stream of red dripping much slower now from the cut on her cheek. She wore a lethal expression. There was nothing but the promise of death in her gaze, and she made her intentions known with just one look.
“I’m gonna do more than kill them,” she rasped out, her teeth coated in crimson as she spoke her curse into the world.
“I’m going to tear them apart until Death herself can’t recognize them.
I’m going to ruin their souls, so la Flaquita refuses to take them into the comfort of her embrace and usher them into the afterlife. ”
Her gaze hardened into a look I didn’t recognize from her.
This wasn’t the woman I knew.
But I had the feeling I wanted to get to know her as well.