Page 2 of Phantom Mine

I jump up onto the couch and run the length of it, launching myself off the armrest and down the hall to my room, screaming, “That’s barely enough time to make myself look presentable!”

“You don’t need to look presentable. We’re having a picnic, not sitting front row at London Fashion Week.”

I peek out from the doorway of my room. “If we were, would I have more than ten minutes?”

“Nope.”

“Monster,” I quip back.

“You’re losing precious seconds arguing with me,” she says, looking down at an imaginary watch on her wrist. “Eight minutes left.”

I dive back into my room and try to transform myself visually from ‘chill self-care afternoon’ into ‘could potentially bump into my future husband at the park today’.

Unlike Adri, I’m not comfortable going outside without some level of makeup. She’s unconcerned and unbothered, more interested in plants and nature than she could ever be in cosmetics.

Not that she needs it—her bare, fresh-faced look has stopped many a man in his tracks before.

Literally.

Just last week, we were crossing the street as a man was coming the other way. One glance from her stopped him in his tracks, resulting in a near catastrophe when a passing bicyclist nearly collided with him.

“Five minutes!” Adri calls from the living room. “What episode were you watching?”

“The Paris episode, don’t you dare finish it without me!”

“Fine,” she grumbles in return, and I can’t help but smile.

Adriana is, for lack of a stronger word, my soulmate. She’s my friend, my sister, my savior. Everything good in my life, I owe to her.

When I lost my parents as a child, Adri brought me home with her. I remember getting into the back of a fancy black car and being taken to a compound with what looked like a veritable princess’s castle to my four-year-old eyes.

There, Adri had dragged me to an office where a towering, terrifying man dressed in black sat in a large chair and seemed to loom over us.

That was my first time meetingPapá. In retrospect, one of his bodyguards must have warned him I was being brought to his house because he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He’d stood and rounded his desk, then dropped down to his knees before me.

“Hola, Valentina,” he’d said, his big burly voice curling comfortably around the syllables of my name. He’d wrapped his arms around me and hugged me into his big chest. “Welcome home.”

Scared, abandoned, four-year-old Valentina had melted into his embrace and accepted everything he had to offer.

It’s been my home and he’s been myPapásince that day just over nineteen years ago. My heart squeezes thinking about him.

This is the furthest Adri and I have been from home. As our graduation gift, we’d asked for a girls’ trip to London.Papáhad agreed, always willing to give his girls whatever we wanted, even as Thiago, our older brother, grumbled in the background that it wasn’t safe.

Papáis the head of the Da Silva cartel, the largest criminal organization in South America, but neither Adri nor I are involved with the cartel, so we did what all sisters would have done and told our brother to mind his own business.

“Two minute warning,” Adriana calls. “Shit.”

Alarmed by her soft cry, I go to her room and find her sitting cross-legged on the floor, clutching her hand.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “What happened?”

“Nothing serious, don’t worry. I just burned myself on my straightener.” Adriana waves a defeated hand in the direction of her hair and sighs. “I was trying to tame the frizz. Stupid humidity.”

I head to our bathroom and pull out our makeshift first aid kit, digging around until I find the antibiotic cream. I squeezesome out and gingerly apply it to the raised pink mark on her fourth finger.

“How did you manage to burn yourself here?”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” she admits, pointing at an open book in front of her. “I was reading about plant ecology,” she adds with a guilty smile.

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