Sweet Collateral

“It’ll cost more to make. Less markup.”

“I don’t care. Tell the distro’s that they’ll have their first batch in a week. On the house.”

He looks at me, and I can see the argument on the tip of his tongue, but he says nothing. It’s a win-win. The dealers are happy because they’ve got free shit, and this miraculous new coke will be up junkies’ noses and firing around their bloodstreams. They’ll want more, and more until nothing else will do. An epidemic. And Dominges can’t fight that because he doesn’t produce his own cocaine, and no one else bothers with ether washing anymore. There’s less markup in it.

I’m not here for money though. I’m here to win. And I have ten tonnes of backed up coke to do it with. I have to win, because I won’t bring Anna back to an unsafe city, but the more time I spend without her, the more I realize I don’t think I can just let her go. I’m fighting a war for her.

58

Anna

Pain explodes across my jaw before my back slams against the floor.

“Concentrate!” Una’s face moves into my field of vision. “You have to focus.” She offers me her hand and pulls me to my feet. My entire body aches from weeks of my sister’s ‘help’. The bruises on my skin detract from my battered heart though, and so I embrace it. Some days are better than others, but today is not one of them.

“I need a minute.”

Una folds her arms over her chest, lean muscles flexing with the movement. My sister is lethal, unyielding and hard in every way. Reaching for me, she grabs my chin, and I wince against her grip. “Fine. Put some ice on your face.”

She follows me to the kitchen, and I can feel her eyes burning into my back as I take an icepack from the freezer.

“You’re distracted today.”

I’m both distracted and trying to use the violence as a distraction because Rafael tried to call again last night. It’s been four weeks since I left, four Fridays in a row that he’s tried to contact me. Four calls I haven’t answered, because I can’t handle speaking to him. I’m still too hurt. Part of me wants him to stop calling altogether, while the other wonders why the hell he hasn’t tried more than once a week. My only fix is calling Lucas a couple of times a week. He feels like family to me, my best friend, and I crave the familiarity that my heart can’t take from speaking to Rafael.

“The gym is my distraction,” I say, taking a seat at the breakfast bar.

“Maybe you should stop looking for distraction. At some point you have to let him go, Anna.”

I feel myself bristle, my defenses shooting up instantly. “I don’t want to talk about Rafael again.” She’s been saying the same thing ever since I got here, and every time I shut her down and change the subject because I don’t want to talk about it.

“You’ve been through so much, Anna, but in many ways, you’re so naive.”

“Because I’m not willing to kill people?”

She turns that icy gaze on me. “Because you think you love him, and so you are stuck, unable to go back, unwilling to go forward.”

“I do love him.” Although at times I wish I didn’t. It would make this easier.

She takes a seat beside me. “He’s not the savior you think he is.”

“I know exactly what he is.”

She takes her phone from her pocket and taps the screen before showing it to me. There are a series of images, which she flicks through. Women hung from a bridge, children dead in the streets. Blood and torture, carnage and destruction.

“This is what he is. He’s a killer, just as I am a killer, and you, sweet sister…you’re good. You need to let go.” I almost feel like she’s goading me, mocking me with my inadequacies.

“You don’t know me, Una. I’m not good, and that…” I point to the phone and shrug. “Is just the cartel. I’ve seen far worse. I know what he is, and I love him.” I swallow heavily, dropping my chin to my chest and staring at Dante. Rafael gave me freedom from slavery, strength from weakness. Love when I’d never known what it was to be cared for by anyone. How do you walk away from that and not mourn it? How do you live a life you have no idea how to live? She tells me to let go and avoid my misery, but I’ve only ever known misery, and in much worse forms than this. In a way, I think I like this pain because it reminds me that there are things in this life that are beautiful and pure. It’s okay to grieve the loss of those things.