Queen of Nothing

Mateo

Ididn’tactuallyhave a damn clue what was going on in that closet, aside from Álvarez being too pissed off to even look at Berserk for the last two days since he finished building it and mentioned putting her in there. Aside from the non-stop pounding ache in my head that only quieted with music, it was completely quiet down here. I figured if it was really so bad in there, I would be able to hear something about it, but she wasn’t even shouting or banging on the door.

I sat there for three hours like I had been told to. It wasn’t until I opened the door to the room and the heat poured out of it along with the blaring sound of gunshots, that I realized the bastard put her in a soundproof box inside of the closet. She was sitting there with her eyes open; a dry stream of tears marked her face as she tiredly rested her elbows on her knees and clutched her ears with her hands.

She had the most vacant expression on her face, one I recognized from my own nightmares, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself from picking her up and cradling her in my lap as she wept. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t me. I don’t know why but I needed her to know that her misery was not my doing, that I didn’t know what was happening in there. My words seemed pointless though and I couldn’t find a way to will them out of me.

Once her tears stopped and her breathing became shallower, I took an Air pod out of my pocket and placed it inside of her ears. I thumbed my playlist with one hand and turned on ”Carnival Of The Animals: The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saëns, and let it work its magic on her as it always did me. She gazed into my eyes for the entirety of the song, feeling every heartbreaking pull of the cello string through as she exhaled into me.

We sat there on the floor for longer than I planned, but it felt like it went by in the blink of an eye and I was secretly dreading the minute reality would take me away from this moment. I lazily ran my fingers through her hair, it smelled like coconut, though I wasn’t sure how because there was definitely no coconut shampoo, it was just dial soap we let them use every few days. I made a mental note to get some coconut shampoo for her, never wanting this scent to fade away. I eventually decided to stand, picking her up and carrying her back into the kennel as she laced her hands behind my neck. I sat down on her bed to put her down but as I went to get up, she tightened her hold on me, and I understood her silent plea to stay.

This was so completely fucked, there was no way that asshole was going to make me put her through this again, if he wanted to torture his ex-girlfriend, he could come clean up after himself too. I mean, I understood his pain, I made it my own for so long. When she first showed up, I was excited to see my brother get a taste of revenge. She wasn’t some Yakuza or Bratva bitch who was going to lead us to the big fish though.

It was too personal, too close to home and Ronan fucked us all when he brought her in here.

It had been over a month now since we locked her up and all I could see was a chick who was tougher than nails and refused to break for him. Every time I looked into her nightshade-colored eyes; I could see her hatred for him growing tenfold with every new thing he put her through in his mission to get answers from her.

I had my own questions too; they were burning inside of me as I shoved them down day in and day out. I wanted to know everything about her, what created a woman like this? Out of what ashes did she emerge from that stoked the inextinguishable flame in her eyes? That look of revenge that could never be satiated, a bloodlust that couldn’t be fulfilled.

I wanted to know what kind of music played through her head when she was all alone. Did someone like her even care about music? What were her favorite things? I realized I wanted to know everything I could about what made her tick. What made her, her. In that same train of thought I realized I was fucked beyond return now, and it was just a matter of time before Ronan killed me just for looking at her.

I sat next to her while she rested her head against my shoulder for the better part of an hour until she fell asleep, and I stood up to make my way out of the kennel without paying any mind to the other occupants. I didn’t need to lock it behind me, the doors had an automatic lock once they closed so the keys were only for opening them. Before I arrived in the lobby, I heard Berserk calling my way.

“All good?” He asked nonchalantly with his arms folded behind his head casually, though I knew he had likely been watching me through the surveillance for the last hour.

“No. Not all good. Fucking asshole,” I muttered the last part as I stormed out of the room to try to avoid giving him an actual piece of my mind. Before I could make it to the elevator, he was cutting me off and blocking me with his arm. “You want to tell me what happened over there?” He raised his eyebrow at me, but I shook my head at him. “You don’t get to play jealous boyfriend while you’re making me torture her.” I pushed his arm off the wall and entered the elevator. He didn’t follow me in, so I closed the door and pressed the button to go back up to the penthouse. When I walked in, Álvarez was in his usual position sitting on the couch with a drink in his hand staring off at the wall.

“He’s crossed a line,” I said to him.

He just rolled his eyes at me and raised his glass, “I’ve been saying that for five weeks now man, welcome aboard the S.S. Sanity.”

“I don’t even think we’re working the others right this year. Everything feels off with her here. His attention is everywhere but where it needs to be.” I said and Álvarez nodded quietly as he opened up the laptop on the coffee table in front of him.

He pulled up the live feed for the kennel’s surveillance which showed her there, exactly as I left her, with her eyes closed and holding on to the smallest granule of peace she was offered.

“Last year they had all broken at this point, remember we joked that he should go work for the CIA with how fast he made work of the Irish and the Odessa?” Santo asked without lifting his eyes from the screen, and I grunted my agreement at him. “Something bad is gonna happen, man, I can feel it.” He lifted his gaze up to me and I could see the concern in my brother’s features. Even though I knew it was his superstitious Mexican bullshit tugging at his thoughts, there was more to it than just bad juju floating around. Everything was wrong this year.

“We’ll sort it out together,” I promised him.

“There’s no together if Berserk is on this revenge mission. He’s gonna destroy her, and then he’s gonna destroy himself. He’ll take us all down with him.” He warned and worry began to fill me from the inside because it was true.

All I knew was the life I worked so hard to build with my brothers, without them I was a nobody, with nothing. We may have been kings in the hill we conquered for ourselves but at the end of the day we were all just shadows of the little boys we used to be. We sat on a throne out of the skeletons from our past hoping we could muffle out their cries and screams.

Santo was always just barely drowning in regret from all the things he did in Los Muertos, all the lives he was forced to take that were innocent to their war as he fought to make his way out of something you can only understand if you were born into it. I thought about my little sister Andrea and sorrow permeated through me as my mind froze on the image of her lifeless body in her bedroom. I tried to clear it from my head, but I couldn’t, I knew I would have to drink tonight to clear the memory long-term as my heart held on to the feeling of failure.

That feeling is why I agreed to do these trials to begin with, to save a few innocent girls where we could, even if it wasn’t in the nicest way possible, a little brainwashing for a couple of weeks and a few months from now they would all be free to live their lives exactly how they wanted, this was a future that wasn’t possible if they’d stayed locked up and sold by the gangs who previously owned them.

With Cecilia, there was no justification though, what I saw today didn’t have a higher meaning or purpose. What would happen once she gave him the information he was looking for? Would she be free to live her life a few months from now? Would Zerkos ever let her leave? How far would his punishment go? There were so many unknowns and the biggest one that swirled through my mind were the words she spoke to me today.

Because he’s making you?

I trusted Ronan with my life, he’d saved it enough times in the twelve years we spent inseparable, and he’d never led me wrong. Something inside me knew this wasn’t right and the memory of my little sister was haunting me to make better choices.

“I’ll tell him I won’t work her anymore.” I finally said out loud, “If he wants to keep breaking her, he’s going to have to do it himself. I’m not going to be responsible for this.”

Santo clapped me on the shoulder like he was proud of my decision and nodded his head in approval. I knew he could see what was haunting me, but he never pushed and I never wanted to talk.

“He’s so wrapped up in his revenge and what he lost that he doesn’t see the truth. And he won’t until it’s too late,” he said to me.

“And what is that?” I asked.

“She’s protecting him from something. I think she always was,” he said, and his words brought clarity to my mind that opened my eyes to a possibility I had never even considered.

“That’s why she didn’t steal the money when she left,” I said as I pieced together the pieces of the puzzle I knew, and he nodded at me.

“All he is doing is pushing her away, and she gets further and further from trusting us enough to tell us the truth. If you want my opinion, this is going to blow up all over us.” He no sooner said, and the elevator dinged.

I sucked in a big breath in anticipation as I waited for Ronan to make his way in. He looked at us both on the couch watching the surveillance and raised both eyebrows at us. “Say what you need to say, you’ve clearly been talking.” He crossed his arms over his chest as he waited for us to berate him.

“There’s nothing to say man, you made up your mind about her…” Santo said.

I cut him off to announce my piece, “I won’t work her anymore.”

Berserk’s eyes opened in alarm at my proclamation. “Is that so?” he asked me, turning his head like a confused dog.

“Yeah asshole, that was fucked up. If you want to torture her, do it yourself. I don’t need one more thing keeping me up at night,” his demeanor changed with my last remark as he softened from my words.

He sat down on the white leather chair opposite the couch as he slumped his shoulders. “I get it,” he said, and even though I was kind of taken aback by his understanding, I wasn’t completely surprised. He knew what kept me awake in the dark of the night, and he wouldn’t fight me on this.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of it was. I don’t know what it was supposed to be like, because I lost that a long time ago. But having her here, in our home, all of the time. She’s under my skin. She’s in my head. Always laughing at me for pulling one over on me when she got the opportunity. And every time I give her the chance to tell me the truth, she reels back farther from it like I’m the one who deserves to be punished,” he said scratching the side of his head in anxiety and in that moment, I felt for my brother again. He too was just a lost little boy whose heart was broken by the only real thing he ever had.

I rubbed my temples to ease the pressure building up again, and Santo looked at me with concern, but I shrugged him off.

“It’s like watching a wolf with the moon,” Santo said to our brother, looking up from the monitor once again. “You lose your fucking mind over her, obsessing non-stop, all day. But if you had her, really had her again, and not just locked up downstairs. You’d probably go full lunatic.”

Ronan shook his head as he drowned in his self-created misery, and said, “I’m gonna go work out. Call me if you need me.” He headed to his room and came out almost instantly holding his gym bag.

“Is that all you do now?” I asked, pushing to get a rise out of him. He spent most of his time in our gym now, either lifting weights or beating the shit out of the lower-level grunts in the fighting ring. The guy was getting bigger than I even thought was possible for him.

“If I don’t take it out somewhere, I’ll take it out on her and…”

“You don’t want to do that?” Álvarez interrupted him, scoffing at our brother’s selective methods of cruelty.

“Fuck you,” he swung his bag over his shoulder hitting Santo in the head as he made his way out to the elevator. The gym was on the fourth floor so he wasn’t going far, we kept it tight around here so that we wouldn’t have to leave the security of the high-rise for a lot of things we needed to do on a daily basis. It was important that we stayed in the high-rise unless we were doing business that required us to leave. It wasn’t something we required out of all of our men, but as the ones making the decisions it was necessary for us to not only stick around, but to stay behind to protect our people.