Drug Lord

“Stop,” I told him before catching his wrist and spinning him before twisting his arm behind his back.

“Let go of him.” Naelle’s face was full of fury and confusion.

“Listen to me, both of you.” I tightened my grip on her father’s wrist.

“I didn’t know who Naelle was, or more importantly who you were. I fell in love with your daughter purely by chance.”

“Love,” he spat as if it were a foul taste in his mouth. “You’re not allowed to love my daughter.”

“What are you talking about?” Naelle asked.

“You knew who she was,” Naelle’s father said. “You manipulated her to get to me. You knew that I was investigating you and wanted to keep me from busting you for the drug lord that you are.”

“Is that true?” Naelle said, tears in her eyes. “You’re a drug lord, the kind of scum that my dad has hunted for years? You just played me?”

I looked at Naelle full in the face. “Naelle, I proposed to you because I loved you. Your ring…my promise…none of that has anything to do with your father. I didn’t know until I looked into your background a little more deeply.”

Her eyes were still filling with tears, but her voice was steady as she told me, “You need to go now.”

Her father took that moment to stomp on my instep. I let go of his arm and he whirled around the face me.

I opened my palms and raised my hands to show him that I was unarmed. I had a gun in my boot, of course, but I wasn’t about to use it on her father.

“I’ll go. Naelle, we’ll talk later. I’m so sorry about this.”

“Sorry,” she spat like it tasted awful. She shook her head. “There’s nothing to talk about,” she told me. Now, her voice was beginning to shake. “Goodbye.”

I looked at her eyes, which were full of unshed tears, and then I looked at her father, who looked like he was about to draw the gun in his shoulder holster. I could see the outline of it under his suit jacket.

“I’ll go. Naelle, when you’re ready to talk, I’ll be waiting.”

It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I walked out that door, leaving Naelle.

Devastated

Naelle

I watched as the door closed after Emilio.

“Do you know who that is?”

“Emilio,” I said, my salty tears falling down my cheeks.

“Emilio Gabria!” My father paced. “You brought home Emilio Gabria!”

“I had no clue who he was,” I protested. “When they found cocaine on the jet, he said that it wasn’t his. And I got the impression from the police officer that the police didn’t think that the Omega cocaine was his, either.”

“That’s because his cartel’s biggest rivals are the Omegas. If you found cocaine with their mark on it in his plane, then they’re trying to get rid of him.”

I blinked at my dad.

“So you weren’t the one who kept me from coming back to America?”

“You better tell me the whole story, pumpkin.”

He walked into our living room, which was as pristine as my mother always kept it. It felt surreal to walk into my DC life as if nothing at all had happened. I’d fallen in love like a ton of bricks, and all that it had earned me was heartbreak.

“There’s not much to tell, Daddy.”