Page 49 of Empire (Cartel)

Oh, God. My stomach lurched again as I remembered the taste of Murphy’s blood in my mouth, the way he’d bled everywhere. All over me, all over my bed, all over the floor.

Dominoes. We’d piled them up, he and I, and they were starting to fall. One by one, the lies would set us free, even if that freedom meant certain death.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘No, I don’t.’

And the truth was, I didn’t know. John had handled the burning of his body. And, I assumed, the disposal of whatever had been left over. Gravel and ash. Hell, maybe he was still at the same crematorium where Guillermo and I had taken the baby only yesterday. As far as I was concerned, the whereabouts of Christopher Murphy – what was left of him – was a mystery to me.

I would have to ask John what he did with Murphy’s remains, assuming I made it out of Vegas alive.

‘The FBI are looking for him,’ Dornan said, taking my hand again and squeezing my wrist.

I didn’t bother pulling away, the image of Agent Lindsay Price clear in my mind – the FBI agent who’d cornered me in the locker room at the gym Guillermo and I frequented, stolen my towel, and asked me where Murphy was. I’d never told Dornan. I couldn’t. I no longer trusted the man who, once upon a time, would have laid down his life to protect me.

‘The FBI are looking for him,’ Dornan repeated, ‘and they’re getting closer.’

‘Great,’ I replied. ‘Maybe when they find him, they can ask him where he stashed hundreds of thousands of dollars of your father’s money.’

Dornan turned and smashed his fist into the mirror. Shards exploded in a rain of cold glass, sharp and tacky.

‘They’re going to call you as a witness, you stupid bitch,’ he said, ignoring his bleeding knuckles as they dripped all over the floor.

Something reached into my chest and squeezed violently, the part of me that screamed MURDERER.Ikilled Murphy. The blood was onmyhands, inmyapartment, in the grout betweenmybathroom tiles. And even though John had it swept clean by a specialist crew, I’d watched enough TV to know that it’d only take a single missed speck of blood to put me away for the rest of my natural life.

And I couldn’t be in prison. I could plot and thieve and run from the Gypsy Brothers and Il Sangue, but I couldn’t break out of a federal penitentiary. That was beyond my particular set of skills. I couldn’t ever,everbe caught for the terrible things I had done in the name of survival. Two police officers – Murphy, and his squeeze and DEA partner, Allie Baxter – were both dead by my hand.

Dornan must have seen something on my face. ‘You know where he is, don’t you?’

I shook my head vehemently. ‘No.’

‘Then why do you look like you’re about to pee all over the fucking floor?’ he growled.

‘They’ll arrest me for money laundering,’ I said quietly, my eyes wide, my breathing laboured. I wasn’t putting on an act. They really would arrest me for that. And ironically,the sentences for white-collar crimes like funnelling money – profits of drug supply and human trafficking at that – to every known tax haven in the world were probably harsher than if I’d just stepped out onto the strip with a machete and started hacking gamble-happy tourists to pieces.

America, the land of the free, really fucking liked collecting taxes. It didn’t like it when you tried to hide money. Especially when you got that money for doing very bad things.

‘Why do you think we’re here?’ Dornan asked, his anger subsiding for the moment. I glanced at the broken mirror, the remaining shards casting a haunting image of us, shattered and warped a thousand times over as our reflections existed in tiny slices of glass.

‘Because you don’t have to testify against your spouse in court,’ I said vacantly, rubbing my wrist as faint bruises began to appear. I mean, I’d been a little slow to catch on, but I wasn’t an idiot.

‘Bingo,’ Dornan said. He wrapped his hand in paper towels to stem the bleeding. Then, as I continued to stand there like a waste of space, he put his hands on my hips and guided me over to the unbroken mirror that hung over the neighbouring basin. He started to fuss with my hair, moving strands to where they belonged and smoothing down the knots he’d created when he fisted clumps of my hair and pulled. There were flowers woven into my hair, my messy topknot.

‘Did you put these in my hair?’ I asked slowly, horrified at the way he’d dressed me and arranged me as if I were his doll.

‘I did,’ Dornan replied, tucking a small pink rose back into my hair. ‘You can thank me later.’

Somehow the act of decorating my hair was more disturbing than almost anything he’d ever done. It was his way of communicating that he could do whatever he wanted with me – and if I didn’t like it, he’d force it anyway, just to get things the way he wanted.

I watched him silently in the mirror’s reflection, weighing my options.

They were feather-light.They didn’t exist.

‘You good?’ he asked. It was like the fight had bled out of him. Maybe it had. I nodded.

‘Then let’s go get fucking married,’ he said, pulling the bloody napkin from his knuckles. ‘Don’t worry. If you still hate me this much in a year, we’ll just get fucking divorced.’

His casual words belied the intent in his eyes. I knew that look. We would be married, but we would not ever be getting divorced. The only way I would ever be undoing what was about to happen would be if one of us died and the other was widowed.

John was going to want to murder Dornan when he found out about this.

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