Page 40 of Vicious Savage

“Have you had something to eat?” I ask her, realizing she hasn’t eaten anything since probably before we picked her up at the auction.

“Why won’t anyone answer my questions?” she asks, furious. Cesar reverts to grunting as his main method of communication and leaves the room, opening the door for me to deal with Luna. I relent and sigh, then ask her what she wants to know. Eventually, she’ll know. And what’s more important is that we find her brothers — the Castillo boys — before they find us. “Who are all these people, and what areyoudoing here?”

It’s the first chance we’ve had to talk since the auction and the death of the man she considered her father. I fall into position on a sofa and watch as Gabriel rises and walks quietly out of the room, giving us some privacy. It amuses me that Luna refers to him as Scarface, but I guess she had no other option considering the circumstances. She sits on the same sofa, then angles her body so one leg is resting underneath her thigh and she is facing me. Maria was thoughtful enough to send over a bag of Luna’s clothes, and she’s settled on a comfortable sweatsuit that looks like she was poured into it.

“Well, you know who TJ and I are, but those two,” I wave my hand toward the window, “are colleagues. Dante Accardi and Caleph Rojas.”

She gives me an odd look. I believe she’s heard the names circulated before, because she doesn’t probe in that direction again.

“But who are you,really?” she asks. “I know your name. But that’s all I know. Why are you everywhere I turn? And why did you kill my father?”

“It’s a long story, Luna.”

“And I have all day.”

I sigh and run my eyes over her. She’s starting to get her color back, although I think she’s lost weight since I last saw her a week ago.

“Your father’s death was inevitable,” I tell her. She may not want to hear it, but she needs to know that her father was going to die regardless of what he was doing to her. He was not a good man.

“My father was an evil man,” she affirms. “But why did you come to Mexico?”

“He came here because we had unfinished business with Coyin Castillo.”

Cesar walks into the room, his large frame overshadowing everything around him. His choice of words is not lost on Luna as she looks up at him. Cesar, in turn, looks at me. “She has to know,” he tells me. I wanted to delay this as much of possible, but he’s lifted the timestamp I set myself and forced my hand.

“Know what?” Luna gasps, looking from Cesar to me then back to him again.

“Your father was not a good man,” I tell her, still referring to Castillo as her father. Cesar, I know, is angling for a different direction.

She looks disgusted. “You think?” She of all people would know what her father is capable of.

“Your uncle killed my wife,” Cesar tells her, his voice low and solid, matter-of-fact. “Your father killed Caleph’s parents and he also killed your mother.”

Luna’s eyes shoot toward me. She’s looking for a reaction from me; when she doesn’t get one, she understands that I already know this information. And she’s wondering how we know this information if she never told us.

41

LUNA

I’m glad I haven’t eaten anything, because if I had, I would have hurled everything right then and there. As it stands, bile rises up my throat until I’m almost choking on it, then settles there like a nasty vapor waiting to be let out.

So many things they’re telling me make sense right now. But that thing… that thing about my father killing my mother. That episode that he tried so hard to repress, telling me I imagined the whole thing, turns out it’s true. He did kill my mother. There’s no two ways about it.

Everything that comes after that horrifies me. My mother was having an affair; had been for years and years. With my biological father. That’s when my father found out that I wasn’t his daughter. That’s when he turned on me. And killed my mother, depriving me of her. Then he killed my father. I don’t stop to ask his name. It’s too much. And there’s only so much I can take.

I start to hyperventilate, until Attila orders me to lean forward and walks me through breathing exercises. My shallow breaths even out and I raise my head, my eyes moist with tears. I don’t want to go through this again. I can’t go through this again. I urge him on — I want to know everything, and I want to know it now. Because I never want to go through this pain again.

“Castillo came up in the ranks by picking off competition one by one. He also staged elaborate armed robberies; banks, hotels, wealthy clients. That’s how he came into contact with Caleph’s parents. It was a home invasion that took their lives. I met Caleph right after his parents passed; he and Dante had been family friends for years, but it was only then that the three of us became close.”

“What about your wife?” Luna asks, looking up at Cesar. She looks sick to the stomach.

“My wife was at an ATM while the bank was being robbed. She had no idea. As she walked away from the machine, she was accosted by your uncle and gunned down. It was caught on the cameras. She died instantly.”

I’m horrified, my body shivering with an overwhelming pain as I think of all the lives my father has destroyed. I try to hold back the liquid pooling in my eyes, but it starts to slide down my cheeks as I digest the information I’m given. The images in my mind of the suffering these men have had to endure. I thought the worst possible thing my father could do to hurt me was to kill my mother and sell me off. Turns out, there’s more than a dozen other ways that my father could run a knife through my heart.

“You’re not like him,” I whisper, my eyes flitting from TJ to Attila. I remember them following me around, then saving my life. More than once. Tracking me down, then saving me again from an uncertain future. At any point in time, they could have killed me, got their vengeance and stuck it to my father. But they didn’t.

“We’re nothing like him,” Attila growls, his dark blue eyes turning midnight.

---