Chapter 8
Lili
The car was silent for the first hour of the drive. It was almost pleasant simply to exist next to one another. It had been like that in high school. We didn’t need to fill every second with talking. We could just be.
But as time dragged on, that same silence became oppressive. “So, we had sex.”
Matteo jerked in his seat, nearly turning the car into the next lane. “Mierda!” He smoothed out his driving again before glancing my way. “Is that how you start a conversation?” he demanded. “You say whatever thought comes to your mind?”
“Do you normally ask questions to deflect from conversations you don’t want to have?” I countered.
“I’m not deflecting,” he insisted, and when I stared at him for long enough, he groaned and rubbed at his eye with the heel of his hand, muttering under his breath. “Yes, we had sex.”
“Was it because you needed an excuse?” I didn’t want to ask such a stupid question, didn’t want to show him my soft underbelly, as it were, but I couldn’t sit in silence anymore.
Ten years had passed since I loved Matteo Rojas, and after a few hours with him, I was that stupid, na?ve girl all over again.
“An excuse for what?”
“To show Felix that you were still on his side?” Matteo glanced at me. I could see him grinding his teeth; I reached out and brushed my fingertips over his jaw, which had gone tight. “Stop before you need dentures in your thirties.”
“Look, what happened at the office was a mistake,” he said. “I shouldn’t have put you in that position to begin with.”
That didn’t answer my question at all. “Matteo—”
“Let’s focus on our son,” he said, cutting me off. “When this is over, we can discuss what happened in that office.”
“Okay,” I said and tried not to pick at my cuticles. It was a nervous habit that my father literally tried to beat out of me, and whenever I noticed I was doing it, I would stop immediately. But it was hard not to in a situation like this.
I leaned against the window and closed my eyes. The day had suddenly collapsed in against me, and as the car continued to bump over the highway, I drifted off.
The setting sun had turned the sky a fiery orange by the time I woke up. We were parked beside a derelict-looking laundromat. “Where are we?”
Matteo looked at me; his expression was blank, but his eyes could never hide how he was feeling.
Something was wrong. I looked at the clock.
We should still have an hour of driving ahead of us.
“I got a message from Felix,” he said. My stomach dropped to my knees, and that feeling didn’t abate when Matteo handed me his phone with shaking fingers.
I looked at the message. It was a video clip of a little boy sitting at a kitchen table, playing with a Nintendo Switch. “Camilo,” a woman’s voice called, and the boy looked up. Seeing his face was a sucker punch to the gut: a Castillo smile beneath Rojas eyes. His hair was a nest of dark curls.
I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a sob.
“Camilo,” I said out loud. It wasn’t a name I would have chosen necessarily, but I loved it—and him—immediately.
The video continued for a few moments more, but it was the last image that made my blood freeze in my veins.
The screen panned over to a man sitting at a counter a few feet away.
It was Felix Suarez, and he was wearing the exact outfit from earlier in his office. I looked at Matteo. “How?”
“His golf game,” Matteo said. “It was obviously a lie so he could drive to Tampa.” He pointed to the message bubble beneath the video: Call me at 6PM. No excuses.
I glanced at the clock. It was already getting close to time. “What are we—?” My question ended in a shriek when my door was suddenly opened, and I was yanked out into the humid evening air.
Whoever was holding me was freakishly strong, but I screamed and struggled and tried to land blows to the man’s solar plexus before a hand came up to slap over my mouth. “Do you think your cell phone is my only way to track you, hermana?”
Angel. I stopped struggling, almost melting in his grip. As soon as the fight drained out of me, my eldest brother let me go, and I was able to see that Omar had Matteo kneeling on the ground, hands on his head, with a gun trained on him. “Don’t!” I called out.
“Give me a reason,” Angel said.
“Matteo, give Omar your phone. Show him the video.”
I watched my brother as he saw his nephew for the first time. His expression was impassive until the moment Camilo looked at whoever was filming him; I watched as he took in the resemblance to his own son, Felipe. “Angel.”
My eldest brother kept a grip on my arm as we walked closer.
Omar restarted the video and held it up for Angel to watch.
When Camilo looked up, Angel sucked in a breath.
“Mierda.” He looked at me, eyes hard and angry, and I cringed.
I hated being on the other side of that particular stare. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
I wanted to laugh. Did he not remember our padre?
The man who sent his pregnant daughter-in-law to certain death simply because she made Angel too happy?
“I thought he was dead. The nurse at the hospital told us that he was born blue with the cord wrapped around his neck.” I wrapped my arms around myself.
“At the time, I thought I was being punished for betraying my family.” I glanced at Matteo, still kneeling on the ground, eyes trained on Omar’s gun.
“So I buried it all, and I tried to pretend it never happened.”
“You could have—” Omar started.
“What?” I snapped at him. “I could have said something to you, have it get back to Padre, and been beaten to death? Or worse, sold off to some old man as a business deal?”
Angel and Omar had no reply to that, not that I expected them to. They knew better than anyone what our padre was capable of. “Lili, it’s almost six,” Matteo said.
I snatched the phone from Angel’s hands. “Maldita perra!” he growled, trying to grab it back.
I practically danced away from him, clicked on the number attached to the text message, and made the call. Felix answered after a single ring. “I see you aren’t as stupid as you look.”
Putting it on speaker, I held it out for Matteo. “What are you doing with my son?” he said, and I was surprised at how calm he sounded when I would have been screaming profanities and making death threats I’d enjoy fulfilling.
Felix clicked his tongue against his teeth, chastising him. “That’s no way to begin a conversation, boy. What are you doing with the Castillo scum?”
Omar’s eyes darted to mine. How did he even know that? “Answer my question first,” Matteo said.
Another unhappy click. “Camilo is quite fond of me,” he said. “I’ve been Tío Felix ever since he was in diapers.”
Matteo gritted his teeth. “Why?”
“Leverage,” Felix answered easily. “I knew the boy would be useful to me someday, so I had Luis place him with the Nunez family until then. Luis was very…unhappy about your bastard, mijo. He would have choked the life out of him the moment he saw him if I hadn’t intervened. You should be thanking me.”
“Gracias, jefe.”
Felix sighed, and it rasped over the line. “There you go again,” he said. “Saying the right thing, but you’re telling me to go fuck myself with your tone.”
“I’m sorry, jefe.”
Another discontented noise; I was going to yank his vocal cords out through his nose by the end of this. “Give me back my son!” I screamed, my anger and impatience getting the better of me.
Felix laughed, and the sound slithered against my skin, making me gag. “No, I don’t think I will, Senorita Castillo. Unless you want to convince your brother to turn himself over to me.”
“Just name the time and place, cabrón,” Omar snarled. “If you think I won’t rip your fucking head off.”
“Omar,” I said, fear spiking in my veins. What if he did something to Camilo?
Felix laughed. “I would like to see you try, La Bestia.”
“No,” Matteo said. “I’m done playing games, Felix.
” His hands dropped from his head, and before I could scream or Angel could stop him, Matteo grabbed the gun that was tucked into the waistband of his jeans.
He fired two shots in Omar’s chest, close range, and my brother collapsed into a heap on the ground.
Then Matteo turned the gun on me. “One move,” he told Angel, “and I’ll put a hole through her, do you understand?”
I felt a scream building in my chest; I couldn’t stop looking at Omar, who wasn’t moving.
I couldn’t even see if he was breathing or bleeding or anything because my vision kept blurring.
How could he do that? How could he? I was going to throw up.
Through a fog, I heard Felix. “That is not what I wanted, Matteo.”
“I would say sorry, jefe, but we both know that I wouldn’t mean it.”