I have my army here to defend them.”
“Then let me take over the plants once Gomez is dead,” he offers smoothly. “You’ll keep your distribution lines to the US and Se?or Sanders. You have my word on that.”
His word?
“Do you take me for a fool, old man?” I say, chuckling darkly. “You’re high off the thought of a power change. If you have Gomez’s operation under your control, you’ll favor distribution to the Russians, not the US. I know your sister is married to the Pakhan of the Ronov Bratva.”
He tried to hide it from us, but Joseph Grayson can sniff that kind of shit out a mile off.
For me, it’s about keeping the Russians out of the play. Call it a personal preference, mixed with a vengeance that will never die. Stop the drug money flooding the Bratva bank accounts and they have fewer dollars to transfuse their sex trafficking businesses, which I’ve dedicated the last year and a half of my life to bleeding out.
The only decisive way to quell this uprising is to resurrect the old Santiago cartel era, instilling enough fear in Fernandez and the rest of Los Cinco Grandes to keep them chained to their respective corners of Colombia. But that would mean destroying the fragile equilibrium that I’ve achieved in my personal life. Eve would hate it, and end up hating me. The safety that my private island provides would be replaced with a shitty mansion like this one, and painted red targets on our backs everywhere we go.
I refuse to do that to her.
I refuse to do that to Ella.
“Are you saying that particular solution is out of the question?” Fernandez’s gruff hostility brings me back to the conversation at hand.
I stare at a sunset that’s blazing a bloody trail across the sky. “You heard correct.”
“Then, regrettably, we are finally at war, Se?or Santiago,” he declares, even though I know he’s fucking hard over the prospect. He wasn’t around the first time a chancer cartel tried to take me on. He doesn’t know the lengths I’ll go to for revenge, but he soon will.
“Go fuck yourself, Fernandez,” I say coolly, hanging up on him. I don't negotiate with cartel assholes.
Glancing back at the house, I seek out Joseph’s bedroom window. These latest developments need to be discussed and deliberated over, but I have a hunch he has other things on his mind right now.
Took them long enough.
So now what?
Now I kill.
Calmed by that thought, I pick up the half-empty bottle of bourbon and take my drinking and murder indoors. That bitch, Viviana, is taking up too much oxygen around here. Gabriela’s a fool to think she can keep on hiding her from me. My men and Gomez’s soldiers have the whole place surrounded. No one is going in or out without my say so.
Kill or be killed. Family loyalty is a postcode lottery, and mine will always fall on the losing side.
Taking the long route back to the kitchen, I enter using the side entrance after detouring via the cellar for another bottle of bourbon. As I do, I catch a cloud of black hair sprinting for the main door. I have my gun pulled on her so quick she’s not even crossed the threshold. One bullet fired into the frame above her head has her stopping dead in her tracks. She cries out in fear, but I’m dead to all that keening shit.
“Viviana Martinez, I presume?” I slow my articulation to solidify my disdain. “Or should that be Viviana Santiago?”
She turns, and my grip tightens on my gun. Holy fuck. She’s a carbon copy: Same oval-shaped black eyes, same wound-up tight features... same psychopathic disposition? I’d need further proof to confirm that.
“Please—” she begs. “Don’t shoot. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Then sit down.” I indicate to a long wooden table in the center of the room and she obeys without question, avoiding my gaze. Even so, she’s more stoic than I was expecting. She’s not a trembling wreck, by any means, and that rose tattoo is giving off some sassy vibes. “Keep your hands where I can see them.” She plants them in front of her. “How long have you known you’re Emilio’s daughter?”
“How did you find out about me?”
I smile coldly. “I’m not into the rhetorical, sweetheart. I ask the questions and you answer them, or I blow the top of your fucking head off, right here, right now. Understood?”
She nods and swallows. “My birth mother left me on the steps