Page 11 of Nocturnal Sins
CHAPTER FOUR
Santana
Once I saw the pale light beneath Sammie’s door go black, I sighed. I didn’t know if I’d be able to sneak past her room so I could meet up with Pop. If she caught me and asked where I was going, I would probably spill everything and Pop would be pissed.
He wanted her out of it so I had to keep her out of it.
I crept down the steps shrouded by darkness and exhaled with relief once I was in the foyer. “You know you don’t have to sneak, right? Sam knows I go to the restaurant after hours,” Pop stood at the door with his hands in his pockets, regarding me curiously.
“You know how Sammie is. If she opened her door and saw me going anywhere, she’d demand to go with me and if I told her no, she’d spew a million questions at me. I have to sneak, Pop.”
“You know what? You’re right, son,” he laughed. “You and your sister have a different kind of relationship. You two have always been more like an old married couple than anything else. Your mother and I used to joke about it all the time.” We headed out the door and I took a second to suck the night air deep into my lungs. It would be at home with the other darkness spreading in my chest.
I’d always had inky dark thoughts fleeting in my mind but tonight with Sammie in my room, the darkness seemed to thrum. I stared out at the white stars against the purple and navy sky while Pop drove. He’d been talking to me for a while but I only tuned in when I heard him mention Marco.
“What you did today was stupid, Santana. You can’t jump all over every guy that makes a pass at your sister. She’s gorgeous. She’s going to have men saying stupid shit left and right.”
“I know that. He was out of line though. He told Sammie to come to his house later.”
“And do you think your sister would actually go?” His words were tight and low.
“No. Of course not but it’s the principle,” I pointed out.
“Stop losing your head. Look, I’m bringing you into the family business because evidently, you’re drawn to it. I tried to keep you and Samira out of it. I tried to let you two live a normal life but you…” He shook his head and scoffed as the tires ate up the pavement, bringing us closer to our destination.
“Pop, you shouldn’t have kept this from me. This is huge,” I felt the space between my brows crease from the weight of frustration.
“Well, now you know. It’s time to throw you in head first,” he muttered, pulling around the back to the employee parking lot. He killed the engine and looked over at me. “Any grievances you have with these motherfuckers during the day…handle it at night, Santana. At night, our sins don’t seem as bad.” He fingered the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror.
“Marco is going to be here for the meeting. If you had a cooler head, you would have fed him your fist the second you walked in the door tonight. During the day though? Papa’s is sacred. It’s holy ground as far as you’re concerned. Got it?” His tone left no room for debate so I gave him the nod I knew he wanted.
I really did hear his words though. I let them sink into me. I had to cool the fuck down. Pop was getting ready to take me fully under his wing. No more secrets. Everything was out in the open.
The back room of Papa’s was a medium-sized space with concrete floors and pallets of non-perishable food items stacked high on the walls. They created barriers that acted as mini offices. Nothing was out of the ordinary there.
The out of the ordinary shit came when you accessed a door behind the pallet holding the giant yellow and red cans of stewed tomatoes. That door led to an interconnected maze of hallways and rooms that held the largest supply of drugs I’d ever seen in my fucking life.
My father was on the rise and positioned to be the biggest drug connect in Rhode Island. He ranPapa’s Family Mexican Restaurantduring the day and pushed premium product during the night. His soldiers flooded the streets once he distributed the drugs and brought him back so much money he was able to pay for me and Sammie’s Dartmouth tuition and keep us well taken care of through our childhood.
When he told me about his after-hours operations, I was floored. He’d been dealing drugs since Sammie and I were kids. It started small at first then grew and grew. He didn’t want us anywhere near it though.
“Tonight’s a shipment meeting and I want you to be seen and not heard, Santana. Understand?” Pop looked at me as we walked through the back room and over to the pallet of stewed tomatoes.
“Can I punch Marco in the face one more time?” I asked him.
“No. You got your lick in. Let it go.” He moved the stack of pallets and pushed through the concrete door. The heavy scraping sound was one I’d have to get used to.
The first room we walked into smelled damp but other than that, nobody would ever know it was basically a fucking dungeon. Everything inside was plush and rich from the mahogany desk to the expensive art on the walls.
He cut on the Bluetooth speakers and had a seat in his Italian leather chair. “Why haven’t you told Sammie about all this?” I gestured around his office. Pop chuckled a bit then shook his head.
“Sam is too good for this type of shit. She’s smart and kind. She doesn’t have the heart it takes to do this type of work. You gotta have a hard heart. You have to be able to switch from diurnal to nocturnal. Sam is all sunbeams. There’s nothing dark in her.” He was right and wrong simultaneously.
I knew my baby sister and I saw the darkness that she talked about earlier in the evening. I saw it even more when she was perched on top of me, staring into my eyes. Whatever it was in her, I had it too and it started to thump louder now that I was back home and around my sister.
I took a seat in a plush chair across from his desk and said, “Sammie isn’t as innocent as you think, Pop. Have you heard the way she curses?”
“Not my Sam.”
