Each stair seems taller than the next as my legs are weighed down with growing apprehension. The expansive front doors are wide open, which further alarms me. My hands shake so violently I can barely hold the gun. Marco reaches the doors first and stands off to the side, signaling for us to move behind him. He lifts his gun, aligning his sight with the barrel as he enters the mansion. My throat feels like I’ve swallowed an orange whole and sweat races down my spine as I follow him inside.
The Guerra Cartel visiting the mansion to retaliate is confirmed with bursts of crimson spots exploding over the white walls. The red and white canvas exemplifying some twisted and poetic version of my plan’s failure. If life represents art, I guess this is the piece that currently defines my existence. Although I pray it doesn’t signify my future, like a symbolic looking glass into the curtain call of Maria’s final performance. It can’t. I know she’s alive.
I’ve hurt a lot of people. I’ve made infinite mistakes and I deserved my punishments, but I served my time. I finally have it all figured out, and I refuse to believe fate would be so cruel as to bring her back into my life, only to tear her out of it an instant later. The horrific scene, like something out of a movie, presses me to believe otherwise.
The thick red orbs trickle down the wall, gaining speed as they chase each other to the floor. Men I don’t know lie lifeless at my feet. It takes everything I have to choke back vomit as I follow Marco. I hear Torrente’s shallow breaths behind me. Marco continually turns his body left and right as he inches into the front room containing more misery and death.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Only Eduardo was supposed to get hurt, but instead this was a massacre and I’m responsible for it. And yet a part of me is rejecting the entire scene.
Maybe I’m just relieved I haven’t found Maria, because none of what I’m seeing feels real. Like this is all a bad dream and if I squeeze my eyes shut, I’ll wake up. Maria and I will be happily married and Eduardo will be eight-feet under. Only on some level, I know I know I’m not sleeping. I’ve had this dream before and I don’t wake up.
I turn around and catch Maria’s father scanning the room with anger blistering his features. These people were his employees, people who spent many years working for him. And people he considered friends. The breath he had been holding rushes out of him with a strangled noise like a wounded animal in the night.
When I twist by head back to Marco, he ticks his head for us to follow him. But I don’t think I can do it, because he’s heading toward Eduardo’s office. If Maria is here in the mansion, she’s with him. Dead or alive.
I don’t want to face what I may find. Still, I know I have to. I can’t leave without knowing if she’s in this house or not. It takes me a moment for reality to fully sink in that there’s a real possibility Maria didn’t make it out of the house. When I find myself at the half-open door to Eduardo’s office, that possibility stretches closer to reality.
Eduardo lying flat on his back with bullet holes littering his chest doesn’t prove as satisfying as I expected. Instead, remorse crawls up my neck as I stare at a man I once feared, clutching a handgun that did nothing to save his life. In the end, Eduardo Montez was as helpless as any of the victims he’s murdered.
I can’t allow myself more than a second to soak in that I brought evil to this house, because Torrente’s screams match my own as we enter the office.
The final possibility is now reality, smacking me in the face with the sting of a blazing branding iron. Marking me with another one of my mistakes. I allowed one hour with Maria to soften me, and I told her my plan. If for once in my life, I didn’t cave to a woman, if I had any balls at all, I wouldn’t be staring at a chair where my heart and my hope and my future no longer has a pulse.
Until this moment, I thought I could handle any situation, like what I watched my mother do somehow prepared me to face anything. But nothing, no matter how horrific, can prepare a man to find the one person who makes him whole is gone. While he’s alive, knowing he could have prevented her death. I never learn from my mistakes. It’s the Hunter family perpetual cycle of having to prove how much power we have. Like my mother, I couldn’t get past the betrayal until someone was dead.
I know as I look at Mr. Torrente holding his little girl in his arms, that I’m just as crazy as my mother ever was.
I sink to the floor and die right there beside Maria. While I may continue to breathe, I refuse to live without her. My mind fails to register the sharp pain in my chest or the tears falling from my eyes. Maybe they’re a result of pain and suffering but more likely they’re tears of fury and rage.
I am fully aware my hand shakes uncontrollably as I attempt to cup my hand over her cheek. Her skin burns me before I even touch her as though she telling me I don’t deserve to grieve. Now my mind accepts the agony I’m in as I feel every ounce of pressure squeezing my heart until it feels like it shatters into tiny pieces.
The cloak of guilt that followed me in the door wraps around me until I can barely breathe and I welcome the dark it brings. I took this man’s daughter from him, and yet when I look up at Alejandro Torrente, he appears to offer sympathy for my pain. Like he’s the one who’s sorry.
“This wasn’t the cartel,” he tells me, his voice straining as he sucks in a sharp breath. There’s only one bullet . . . This was a mercy killing . . . Eduardo killed her to protect her.”
“Do you hear what you’re saying? If he wanted to protect her, he should have let her go.”
He blinks, gently closing her eyes with his fingertips. “It was too late. Guerra’s men would have raped and tortured her—forced him to watch. Eduardo saw to it she didn’t have to experience the grotesque nature of these men.”
Does it matter who pulled the trigger? Or why? If it was one bullet or a fucking dozen? It’s my faults she’s gone. It’s my fault her little boy will grow up without a mother. That’s the real fucked up part about all of this. Not one of the adults in Javier’s life ever considered what our choices would do to that little boy.
Part Two—A New Beginning
Month One . . .
The last few days have been the worst kind of hell, and not because Guerra threatened to kill me. I would have welcomed that fate if for nothing else I wouldn’t be left groveling to a dead woman for forgiveness. I’d no longer have to see pity in the eyes of my family. I wouldn’t have to weep every time Javier asks if his mommy is in heaven now. But Guerra wouldn’t have been satisfied with just my death. After learning of my involvement, he wanted me and my family.
If not for Maria’s father, Mr. Guerra would have followed through on his threats. But at the end of the day, Mr. Torrente still held a great deal of power amongst the cartels. The men he had been in business with for over twenty years still respect and fear him.
Torrente was able to explain how Eduardo’s alliance with the cartel was about saving his own skin and how he kept Torrente and his family hostage. Immediately after I returned Guerra’s money, the incident was forgiven and I was granted asylum to live in the prison of suffering I created.
Once things were resolved, Torrente expressed his interest in retiring, citing grief over losing Maria. His request was granted as Guerra had a family friend interested in heading the cartel in Monterrey. How convenient that I was the one who provided him the opportunity to expand his family’s reach.
Today is the day we’re supposed to say good-bye. The day I’m supposed to pretend Maria’s in a better place. How can there be any better place for her, other than with her little boy. Regardless of burying her next to her grandfather in Watsonville, and my family insisting her death wasn’t my fault, I own the blame. The woman in that coffin agrees w
ith me and will never rest peacefully until I’m made to suffer for my sins.
The sadness I’m forced to feel, seeping out of the man sitting next to me in the limousine grows unbearable. There’s no doubt in my mind that once Maria’s father has time to grieve, he’ll ask me to explain. He’ll understand I’ve been right all along.