a dark-haired, mean looking fucker steps forward.
“No,” he growls. Him I know too, and all too well. His name is Manuel, and he’s one of the lieutenants of this place.
Manuel shakes his head and glances back at me before barking orders at his men. The rest of them leave, carrying Carlos with them, and Manuel turns back to me.
“You’re welcome,” he growls in heavily accented English. Manuel is Columbian—a veteran of a hundred other drug lords just as sadistic as Jorge.
I just hold his eyes, silent. Like I always am.
“Uh-uh,” he mutters, wagging a finger. “You gotta play nice, Hush Hush.”
That’s what they call me here. Take a guess why.
“I could have let him shoot you.”
I blink, silent.
“But el hefe, Se?or Del Campo? No, he wants you tonight. A special fight, cabron.”
He grins.
“Might be your last.”
I smile, and his lips curl.
“You think that’s funny? No, Hush Hush, some fights even you don’t win.
He winks at me.
“Don’t worry, my moneys on you.”
When I still say nothing, he frowns. “Still no talking?” He spits. “Ungrateful bitch. You think this scares me? No, this silent bullshit?” He leans close to the bars, grinning at me.
“It doesn’t scare me one—”
I bark, like a dog, loudly. Manuel screams and jumps about four feet back from the bars as I just smile wider. He swallows, visibly shaking and white.
“Fuck you, Hush Hush,” he growls.
I blow him a kiss.
“Tonight, Hush Hush, maybe you meet the devil, no?” Manuel laughs as he turns and walks away from the bars, leaving me in my cell.
But I just smile thinly. I don’t need to meet the devil, I live with him. I exist entwined with him.
In this hell, I am the devil.
But last night, this devil saw an angel, and now?
Now, heaven help them all.
Chapter Two
Catalina
“Vamanos, mija.”
I blink, startled by Elena’s voice. I turn towards my aunt and smile as she rolls her eyes.
“My God, Catalina,” she says with a sigh. “It’s good to be a dreamer, but you’re going to bump into something with your head in the clouds like that.”
I roll my eyes right back.
“Sorry, I didn’t sleep well last night.”
She scowls. “Well, my idiot brother should not be bringing his daughter to those disgusting fights.”
I swallow, and my nose wrinkles at the memory. Last night wasn’t the first fight my fathers brought me to, but last night was… different.
Very, very different.
“Ay, Dios mio,” Elena mutters, shaking her head. “Your mother, God rest her soul, would never have allowed it. I’ll grant men their filthy hobbies, but Christ…”
She crosses herself.
“No, those fights are no place for a girl.”
I’m torn. On the one hand, I want to rail against this old-world idea that “a girl” can’t see something like a fight. But at the same time, she’s kind of right. My father’s fights aren’t boxing matches like on pay per view. They’re not pro wrestling. They’re brutal, bloody, savage spectacles. They’re more like the Roman gladiator fights in the Colosseum, which is actually not a stretch for an analogy. My father loves ancient Roman shit—Caesar, Nero, the Colosseum, all of it. I’m almost amazed he hasn’t brought in actual fucking lions yet.
My dad isn’t a bad man, he just…
I frown.
He just does bad things. A lot of bad things. I look around at the sheer opulence of my bedroom, and as it always does when I’m visiting here, it gives me a weird mix of feelings.
On the one hand, this life I’m afforded, and this room, and my spending account, and all of it… it’s amazing. My life is gilded, and beautiful, and something most people would envy. Then there’s the other side of the coin. It’s realizing that the gilded life is really a gilded cage. It’s never having had any real friends, just bodyguards. It’s never having had a boyfriend, because my father terrified the shit out of any boy would could possibly be brave enough to even talk to me, with who I am.
Catalina Del Campo, cartel princess.
If this were a movie or whatever, I’d have “no idea what my father really does.” But this isn’t a movie, and I’ve known what my father does since I was seven. I’ve seen the men who lived in the huge compound that was our home. Lots of rich people, especially in Mexico, and especial in this part of Mexico, have guards, and walls, and guns and all of that. Few have an army like my father’s.
Seven is when I realized this wasn’t normal. Seven is also when I