Page 6 of Bad Blood
I fight with all of my tiger heart, too, but I always come up short, even when I’m winning. I begged for years to attend a US college like Ella, and then I dropped out after one semester.
One whole semester.
Sam calls it the Freshman Fuck-up Special. He lasted a whole two years before he was tossing his frat house keys in the trash. There was only one way he was going, and that was straight into the family business…
The Santiago Cartel business.
As for me, I’m like one of those insects that dances above treetops on a summer’s evening, with too much energy and no place to go.
“Good night, last night?” Ella finally glances up from the screen as I stumble into the room, leaving a trail of bleeding Louboutin’s behind me.
“It was okay.” I reach for the volume control on the portable speaker, hitting the mute button with a frown. “You know you’re the only person under forty-five who thinks Fleetwood Mac are cool, right?”
“Don’t diss the Mac,” she whispers in mock horror, raking red-rimmed eyes over my non-existent cocktail dress. “And what the heck are you wearing? You’ll give Reece a heart attack.”
“Heck” is the closest Ella ever comes to cursing.
“Reece was already flat-lining in the hallway about something else.” I go to pick up her iPhone from the coffee table.
Now it’s Ella’s turn to cluck with disapproval. “Don’t tell me you ditched your security again? You know it’s not safe on the East Coast. Edier warned us about standing too close to Mexican fire.” She waves her hand. “Or something like that.”
Ignoring her, I flick through her Spotify playlist for something that wasn’t born and bred in the era of bad fashion sense. “Does Edier know you’re a flower-powered soul trapped inside the body of a twenty-one-year-old goddess?”
Ella blushes. “Why would Edier give a damn what I am, or what I wear, for that matter?”
“Damn” is her second closest word to cursing. Somehow, she ended up with all the good girl genes.
She’s making me feel guilty again. The heat on her face is like a love declaration with a megaphone. Ella’s had a secret, long-term crush on another of our childhood friends, Edier Grayson, for longer than she’s dreamed of being a reporter.
Unfortunately, Edier doesn’t know she exists beyond the parameters of their friendship. Or if he does, he’s smart enough not to cross those lines. He’s another man who’s fully entrenched in my father’s cartel. He runs the New York Santiago territory with Sam as his second, and despite their yin and yang personalities there’s not a whole lot of mercy going on between them. Sam’s the hot-headed arrogant one, with smooth dealings and fatalistic charm. Edier’s like deadly nightshade in comparison—deceptively handsome, but lethal as hell. Sometime over the last decade, my childhood friends turned into killers and sinners, and I guess I’m still mourning the loss of their innocence.
“What’s your assignment about?” I ask her.
My sister is so out of place in this dangerous world of ours, and I worry about her constantly. The slightest knock sends her spiraling. I once heard Sam describe her as a fragile flower trying to flourish on a mountain of shit.
She has health issues, too. Ten years ago, I found her crying on the bathroom floor, curled up in a ball of agony. Every muscle in her body was on fire. Next, her knees and fingers swelled up, and then came the rash, ulcers, and the fever. After seven doctors, we finally had a diagnosis, and our father had a new enemy—Lupus.
Her future is unpredictable, a lengthy remission damn near impossible… I toss the iPhone back down on the coffee table with far more force than necessary. I can’t think about that right now. I can’t think about an existence without her. She’s the person I adore most. The one person I would do anything for.
My thoughts stray to last night’s blackjack table.
I’m winning.
I’m losing.
“Fascism during the second world war,” she answers with a frown.Did I mention she’s a history major, too?“By the way,papácalled.”
“Fascism, huh?” Oh, the irony. “Speaking of which…”
“You’re going to have to speak to him sometime, Thalia.” She candy-coats her censure with a smile, but all I see is her sadness. She hates it when we fight, but it’s the one thing I refuse to compromise on. “That’s unless you want him turning up here in New York…”
A shiver of fear hits my spine. He’s too perceptive. He’ll know something’s wrong the moment his boots cross the threshold of our apartment.
“I’m going to go take a shower,” I say, backing out of the room.
“You know what your problem is?” Her soft words trail me into the hallway. “You and he arewaytoo similar.”
I stop dead, clutching at the door frame as a deep-seated pain takes hold of my stomach and twists...hard.
