Page 4 of Trapped

Present: Seven Years Later

I run my finger over the front of the picture. The one I kept hidden under my mattress for days like this. Days when nothing seems to be going my way. I’ve been on edge the last six months, since I found out I am the target of a string of morbid threats sent to the hotel.

Every day, I worry about what sick fuckery I would be sent next. Sometimes, it was dismembered baby doll parts, other times, they were more creative. Like the empty carseat set on fire in front of my gynecologist’s office yesterday. I was already dreading getting my coochie probed, so the threat was just the cherry on top of everything. Like every threat before, there was always the same message attached.

Where’s the baby, Thalia?

The baby.My heart wrenched at the word. That word would make its way into my dreams and pull out dark memories from my past. A past I am constantly numbing myself to forget. I need to find out who is behind these messages. I made a lot of enemies working with the cartel, but none of them would have access to a secret like this.

My family worked hard and well to protect this from getting out. There was strategic planning and negotiating when it came to keeping something like this hidden from our enemies. My uncle, Patricio Consuelo, is an expert at keeping our family’s secrets out of the public eye. Not even the best of journalists and spies caught on after all was said and done. The same way my uncle hid Adrian, he strategically hid my child. A child that was unaware who I was. A child out there calling someone else Mommy, while I wasted my life working for the family business.

Owning one of Houston’s most luxurious hotels gave us that benefit. That, and the fact most of my family was connected to the Houston Cartel in some way or another. We had eyes and ears everywhere. So, how was all this getting past us? Someone had to have been disloyal along the way. Someone had learned about the child I had left behind in the wake of Silas’s death. I’ve accused everyone that knew about the baby at least once in my head. Every time I thought I had enough to pinpoint a culprit, I came back to a loss.

I stare at the picture, waiting for an answer to jump out at me. In the picture, I am wearing a white designer dress. My wedding dress. The same one that Olivia helped me pick the week before. It was just her and me searching for a wedding dress for me and maternity clothes for her. Her growing belly was her only symbol of hope in the loveless marriage. I look over at Luca, lying on the edge of my bed. His features are dark like his father’s, but his smile is all Olivia. He is one half of her symbol of hope. The twolittle beings that helped her through one of the ugliest divorces Houston had ever seen. The other half had yet to make her diva presence. Luca and I stay sprawled out in my big bed, hiding from the diva, who would be up soon, barking orders at us.

I look back down at the picture. It’s not the dress I’m fixated on in the picture. No, that particular dress I had burned, and scattered the ashes in a full drunken rage.What? I never claimed to be emotionally stable.My focus is on the wide smile spread across my face, and Silas’s arms draped over me, with a similar smile on his face and a tequila bottle in his free hand. Sometimes, I would stare at the picture and wait for my wide smile to turn into a screaming, broken one. The same face I had the day after the wedding, when I found out my father had set Los Reyes of Tamaulipas up.

“Do you take this woman to be your wife, to live together in holy matrimony, to love her, to honor her, to comfort her, and keep her in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, for as long as you both shall live?”

“I do.”

That first kiss, and every moment after, was a memory I could never quite grasp for long enough. He was another person added to the long list of heartaches that my father forced on to me. I had less than twenty-four hours with Silas as my husband before my father took him away from me. Twenty-four hours of bliss, and seven years of heartache. Seven years held down by the weight of his absence. Seven years since I saw those two little lines on the pregnancy test. After all these years, my heart still feels trapped in the cage of those dark memories.

A therapist once told me it was a delusion. She didn’t know about my child, but everyone knew about my dead husband. She was convinced I created something more from the short-lived relationship as a response to my childhood trauma. I was sodesperate for love I had fallen in love with the first person I felt safe around. The first person to kiss me or touch me.

It was after that session that I finished an entire bottle of 1800. Which then led to burning the dress behind the hotel. I gave up on therapy after that and found refuge in violence.

“Luca! It’s time to get up!” I hear the little diva before she makes her way into the room.

“Lucia, let him sleep,” I whisper. It’s six in the morning, and the four of us—Lucia, Luca, Olivia, and I—live on the thirteenth floor of the hotel, in a spacious penthouse.

“He’s my brother!” Lucia retorts. I sigh and put the picture back under the corner of my mattress. “Is that your Prince Charming?”

I look to see her little eyes narrowed on the corner of my mattress. She had seen the picture plenty of times before. I’d told her the same story over and over, about a prince I’d fallen in love with, who was turned into a frog. It was a reverse version of the Disney film she watched. My version is incomplete, with no happily ever after.

“Yes,” I say, and her eyes brighten. Her smile has a way of making my heart skip a beat.

“He’ll be back one day,” she says. Even at six years old, she was a hopeless romantic. Who could blame her when she was still too young to have her dreams shattered by reality?

I pull myself out of bed and make my way into the kitchen. It’s Saturday, so Olivia is already busy with the brunch rush at Calavera Hotel’s famous five-star restaurant. As the chef, she took pride in her culinary skills and her ability to run a successful business. She had won awards and was popular even among the locals. I, on the other hand, failed at making cereal in comparison. My only win over her are my Saturday morning pancakes. I add in all the sugary stuff Olivia doesn’t allow thekids to eat—chocolate chips, whip cream, Mexican sweetened condensed milk, and a gallon of Mrs. Butterworth syrup.

In order to live here with Olivia and the kids, I was forced to carry my own weight. Olivia’s ex-husband had been incarcerated since before she gave birth. We live like co-parents, each taking turns with chores and caring for the children. Unfortunately for her, I am the drunk father of our duo—a functioning alcoholic who knows that, other than air frying chicken nuggets or sorting laundry, I am useless. Olivia is a super mom, though. She takes Luca to his therapies, Lucia to her dance classes, and volunteers for everything in their classroom. In all honesty, I am jealous of how easy it is for Olivia to be selfless for these tiny humans she is raising.

Being a mother is easy, but being a good mother means sacrifices and selflessness. I don’t think I could do either of those things. That small fear of not being a good mother led me to decide, when I looked down at my newborn baby, that I could not be the mother they needed me to be. At seventeen years old, I knew I couldn’t make the commitment, but that doesn’t mean I don’t mourn the opportunity I had to try.

“Luca hates blueberries,” Lucia says as she looks down at the smiley face pancakes I made for them.

My nephew Luca is autistic and nonverbal. Lucia has made it her mission to be his voice, as well as a mini overbearing mother. I watch as she plucks the two blueberries I used for eyes and throws them in the trash. Luca smiles and returns to his stack of pancakes. Lucia gives me a sour look, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s spending too much time with Ariella.

My sassy cousin had moved from California into Calavera Hotels over the summer to start her internship. She resides in the penthouse on the opposite end from us. It is a miracle she isn’t here at the house right now, suffocating me with her presence. I love her to death, but she has a bad habit ofsmothering me. She grew up with two overbearing brothers and a kingpin father. I am one of few female friendships she is allowed to have.

I had been thrown into the life of the Cartel, but Ariella was sheltered from it. Sure, she can load and shoot a gun, but she never had to take a life like I had. She never had to cleanse her conscience with tequila or cry in the dark, because she was scared about messing something up somewhere along the way.

I live in a constant state of panic that one day a bullet will hit me, and that will be the end. I’d choke on my own blood while life drained out of me, a picture slideshow summary of my life filled with all my regrets flashing through my mind. I’d see those tiny eyes that haunt me in my final moment of consciousness. I’d take my last breath, and if I was lucky, Silas would be waiting for me to join him. Death didn’t scare me. It was a long awaited reunion my heart longed for. Maybe my eagerness to die should be what scares me, and yet, I still feel that death would be a peaceful escape. The only thing that stops me from finding that peace is my family. Leaving them unprotected is anything but peaceful for me.

My black nails tap against my thigh in a steady motion. I spent all morning with the kids until Olivia came home, and then I was forced to get ready for this mandatory meeting. My uncle, Patricio, and my half brother sit beside me in the back seat of the limo, but they are too busy arguing to notice me. They have spent the last twenty minutes engaged in another lengthy debate about our future involvement with the Houston Cartel Connect. Patricio and Adrian had a rough beginning; it had been complicated before Adrian had even been brought into this world. Yet, since my father’s passing, Patricio felt it was his place to make everything right for Adrian and me. I pull my phone out of my purse and smile when I see the group chat notifications.

Alma: What the hell is this? Fermented milk? (vomit emoji)

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