Chapter 64 Ronan
RONAN
We were exhausted, broken, and beaten.
But I’d never felt more whole in my life, and in that van, I promised myself I would do whatever it took to make sure that we stayed this way.
I wasted too much time before I realized it.
She was right. Together we were complete.
There was no way out of this without any of them.
Well, maybe without fucking Villabolos, but even that pain in the ass was starting to grow on me again.
He was the only family she had left, even with Carolina rising from the fucking dead. She somehow managed to end up a major cunt, which probably meant she was better off dead.
We ended up stopping at a hotel for the night so Celia and Santos could clean themselves up, and Emory could properly look at everyone’s injuries.
The Doc insisted on sharing a room with Celia and forced me to stay with César and Santos with Mateo.
I wanted nothing more than to sleep with my arms wrapped around my girl again, but she denied the opportunity immediately, and told Celia just how bad the extent of my gunshot wounds were.
She sided with the fucking Doc.
But now it was a new day, and we were in the car ready for whatever would come next.
Celia was showered and her hair was brushed silky straight, so black it looked hot to the touch from the sun scorching above us.
The scar on the side of her face was red and bright.
It looked painful but it wasn’t as deep as Santos’.
She untucked her hair from behind her ear to cover it up once she noticed me staring.
I grabbed her chin with one hand and tucked her hair back again. She challenged me with a look, exaggerating those damn lines in the middle of her brows. I placed a gentle kiss on the scar.
“So what will this key open?” I asked while César pulled into a small bank outside the city.
“All of the secrets Jamila refused to take to the grave with her,” he answered.
Celia was tired of secrets; I could see it on her face.
The fact that her mother likely had a million more hidden somewhere only that little key would open was infuriating.
How long had Celia been carrying that thing around her neck, too afraid to find out on her own?
Or better yet, why had her mother kept this from her?
The thought briefly occurred to me that maybe Jamila had somehow been the better parent out of the two. Doing what she could to keep her daughter away from the violence even if it meant keeping her away from the money.
No matter how you looked at it, it was blood money.
And accepting it meant also accepting her father’s sins as her own.
“How do you know this?” she asked him.
“I’ve been here before, when I was just a kid, before Ignacio burned down the villa. Your mamá wasn’t a secretive person, but the few times she brought me here, something was just off. I’m betting my life that key opens up a box here. I saw it too many times in her hand to think otherwise.”
It was just a bank, nothing out of the ordinary and nothing suspicious about it. It smelled like old paint, and there was a single teller behind the counter.
“Nombre?” the clerk asked.
“Jamila Gomez.” She gave her the alias that belonged to her mother.
She shook her head and denied her request, so Celia tried once again with the Flores name instead, along with the rest of her identifying information she still knew by memory. The teller searched and searched until finally her face lit up with a match.
We walked through metal detectors, all of us setting it off and relinquishing our guns into plastic tubs.
The clerk led us down a hallway filled with lockers and took out her own set of keys, opening up a small door with a 131 on the front.
There was a single box inside, made of metal, big enough to hold a few letters.
We followed the clerk again, past the lockers, to another door which she unlocked with an electronic keycard before pushing open and guiding us inside. She told us in Spanish to take our time and to shut the door once we retrieved everything we needed from the box.
“I’m really fucking anxious.” She exhaled, holding the key between her index finger and her thumb, tapping it against the key slot on the small metal box the clerk placed on the table.
“Do you want to be alone?” I asked her, and she responded with a hard glare.
“Never again, I’m just… nervous.” She looked down at the box before looking back at me again. “What if there’s nothing there?”
César laughed. “I wouldn’t put it past Jamila.”
She stuck the key in the box, shaking out the last bit of her nerves with a little dance before she put her hand back on the key and turned it. She opened the lid and the four of us crowded around her, waiting to discover what should have been seen fifteen years ago.
There was an envelope and a torn piece of paper. Nothing else.
“She’s really going to kick me down one more time even in death, isn’t she?” She exhaled deeply before picking up the little piece of paper.
“What is it?” Mateo asked.
“It’s coordinates,” César said, reaching over his shoulder and grabbing it from her.
He plugged the numbers into his phone while her hands trembled with the envelope in her hand.
“I don’t want a letter. Someone else open it. There is nothing she could possibly say to me that I would want to hear right now.” She tossed it on the table, shaking her hands frantically like she was drying the water off of them.
Mateo picked it up, ripping the envelope open to reveal what looked to just be a bunch of documents. Santos picked one up and looked it over before handing it to her.
“It’s just birth certificates,” he told her. “This one is yours.”
She took it from his hand and set it on the table without a single glance.
“Whose is that?” she asked about the one in Mateo’s hand.
“Carolina’s. This one belongs to big brother here. I thought your last name was Villalobos?” he asked him, shuffling the papers around.
“It is,” he said, his annoyance obvious.
“No, this says César Ortíz. Your mom was Maria Villalobos, but your father was Diego Ortíz,” Mateo said as César ripped the document from his hand.
“What the fuck?” Celia looked pissed. “Did you fucking know?” She stepped up to her brother and I flipped over her own birth certificate, her mom’s name bright and clear.
“You’ve said a lot of dumb shit before princesita, but this one takes the cake.” He shoved her shoulder, and Mateo and I both shifted towards him.
He eyed both of us, raising his hands up in defeat, before he’d even gotten a point across.
“None of this makes sense. Diego was my tío’s name, he was my mamá’s brother. Her last name was Gomez.” She ran her fingers through her hair, like she was trying to make sense of all this new information.
I picked up her birth certificate again.
“No.” I shook my head, handing it over to her. “This says her name was Jamila Ortíz.”
“No.” She shook her head in disbelief. “That would mean—”
“We’re cousins,” César finished, but Celia continued to shake her head.
“It means that it’s technically, his cártel. No?” Mateo asked.
César wrapped his hands around Mateo’s neck and slammed him into the wall. His nostrils flared widely for a few moments before he decided to finally speak.
“Listen here pendejo, I’m only ever going to say this once. You ever repeat those fucking words again, I don’t care what you mean to her, I’ll gut your gringo ass alive. Understood?”
“Roger that, hermano.” Mateo said with an exaggerated American accent, pushing him away.
“I was four when they took me in, I kind of always knew I was Diego’s son.
I think you knew it too. We knew we were already family, but it always felt like brother and sister, so why mess with that?
There was no way I was a random stray, Rafa?
He was too cold to just take in some pup from the street.
I knew there was no chance I was his bastard either, she would have hated me if that was the case, Jamila was good to me.
They never talked about Diego, and she always sent me those sad eyes if someone brought him up. ” He scratched the back of his head.
“Why so testy about it?” Mateo asked.
“Something deep in my gut tells me my dad didn’t want to be a part of this shit.
I don’t either. I just wanna finish this war for her, go home to my club and live the rest of my miserable life.
Is that too much to ask?” He turned back to her.
“He raised you for this shit. You’ve bled for this, princesa.
This isn’t my empire, it’s yours. And I’ll kill anyone who says otherwise. ”
“Tia Larissa wanted as far away from this desmadre as physically possible. That’s why she moved to Ocean Valley.
Now it’s clear it wasn’t just because she was protecting my mamá, but because she’d seen the carnage of it all first hand.
She grew up with this too.” She lamented, piecing together her family’s history.
César simply nodded.
“How many times did we hear Diego’s name but nothing about him? No memories, no stories. They buried him just like they buried all the lies and secrets they thought we weren’t old enough to handle.” Celia’s voice shook with anger.
“Age had nothing to do with it princesa, it was about the fact that no one wants to be the person who shares the painful truth. They’d rather absolve themselves from the burden and leave it up to the universe, or some higher power to bring you to find it yourself.” César said with a sneer.
“God didn’t bring me here. Revenge did.” She peeled her upper lip and he nodded in agreement.
César pulled a lighter out of his pants, flicking the flame on and touching the corner of the paper to it.
It quickly lit, and he dropped it to the ground, letting it burn to completion on top of the stained concrete floor.
The flames triggered the smoke detector and an alarm went off, causing the sprinklers to pour down on us in a heavy torrent.
We ran out of the room, leaving the empty box on the table before collecting our weapons and running out of the bank at rapid speed. We piled back into the car in a rush to avoid the angry bank teller cursing us down.
Celia stared blankly at the piece of paper that had her birth name written on it after we left the building. Her eyes didn’t unglue from it the entire ride out to the middle of nowhere.
Because of course the GPS took us to the fucking desert.
The mystery coordinates, on the random piece of paper in a fifteen plus year old safety deposit box, took us to the middle of nowhere.
Why the fuck would it not have?
And of course we all fucking followed it, with the insane hope that none of this was a trap or a terrible idea. When we arrived it was practically dark already. We left the headlights on to provide us with a fraction of visibility to find the exact location we needed.
Celia and César took turns digging at the precise location where X marked the spot—figuratively of course.
Celia insisted that the three of us were far too injured to be exerting ourselves that way and refused to risk us opening any stitches.
Villalobos grumbled something about not wanting to deal with the Doc’s wrath.
She hadn’t come out unscathed though, her scars weren’t so visible this time, at least not all of them. But they were still very much real.
Santos could barely stand straight. His entire upper body was draped in markings of all textures, shapes, and sizes and for this very reason he was now wearing a long sleeve turtleneck in ninety degree weather.
We were coming apart at the seams, just as we were figuring out how to become whole.
“Fucking finally. Carajo,” César shouted from the bottom of the hole.
The sound of the shovel hitting metal over and over again rang out until finally the two of them were able to get it loosened from the soil.
The box was big enough to hold a body, though I wasn’t sure if it said more about me or them that it was my go-to measuring format.
There was at least a sixty percent chance there was a body in there.
“Put it in the car so we can get the fuck out of here. Let’s go home,” Celia said.
Her face changed when she said home.
“You don’t want to open it now, jefa?” César asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Now, later—I already know what’s inside.” She shrugged, walking back to the car.