“God, you’re such a prick.”
“Prick I may be, but Joey and Mickey are going to sell us that godforsaken club, and your Russian friend will get his family heirloom back. This puts everything on track.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“Feel good, wife. You’ve been very helpful.”
He drives off with the AC blasting, and I don’t feel helpful, I don’t feel helpful at all. I don’t feel much of anything, except a vague sense of pity, and rage, and exhaustion. There’s no escape for me, no escape for Joey or Mickey or anyone else caught up in Casso’s web of death and money and power. I wish there was, but there’s not.
Only Danil’s got a different game running. If I can figure that out, maybe I can find a way to escape my situation. I hated the strange looks Danil kept giving me and the eerie way he sat straight-backed and exceedingly calm, but I’ll take any chance I can get.
Chapter 12
Olivia
Back at Villa Bruno, Casso makes an excuse and disappears. “Got work,” he says and slips away into this office. I watch him go, wondering what this work actually means, and the fight between him and that massive Joey guy plays out through my mind again: Casso, vicious and brutal, easily taking down a man that outweighed him and was bigger than him without breaking a sweat.
The efficiency terrifies me. I head out back and stand on the patio looking out at the desert beyond the pool, and I close my eyes, breathing hard and trying not to panic, as the sheer violence of the moment plays over and over again, the spray of blood as Casso’s knuckles snapped into Joey’s face, the grunts of agony, the fear.
I know who these men are. I grew up in a cartel and I’ve met dozens of soldiers like Casso. And yet seeing what he’s capable of, the mindless viciousness, it scares the hell out of me. Papa worked hard to keep me away from the harsh and ugly realities of his job and I was able to pretend like the danger, the gore, the hard truth of broken bodies and ruined lives didn’t matter to me or at least didn’t affect me, but looking back now it’s so disgustingly obvious how violence pervaded every aspect of my world. There’s a reason I was practically kept locked in a cage back in Mexico—it wasn’t safe for me to be out beyond the walls of the compound.
It’s not so different here. I have more freedom, but my leash is only a little bit longer. What Casso did, that intense and sudden brutality, the guns, the knife, it all underscores just how deep I’ve found myself buried and trapped.
Casso has changed a lot in the last ten years. When we were kids, he was tough and seemed to relish getting into fights, but he didn’t have the same level of callous and ferocious expertise he now employs. It’s like he was raw back then, but now he’s been refined and it’s terrifying. That’s the man I want to fight against, the man I want to piss off and tease. He could break me into pieces without slowing down, and I goad him into anger for fun.
I open my eyes again and knuckle the tear away. What am I doing here? Other than being married to that bastard. I should be hunting for Manuel’s killer and instead I’m on some rabbit-hole quest with Casso, running from one failure to the next. How am I supposed to survive when it’s crocodiles down below and starving lions up above? I shake my head and grip the railing tightly. The stone is warm under my fingers. The midafternoon sun is brutal and I’m starting to sweat, and the only respite is inside in the constantly blasting AC, but I don’t want to risk running into Casso right now. I’m too afraid of what I might say.
“Olivia!”
I blink rapidly and spot Elise sitting by the pool waving at me. I smile slightly and wave back. I should’ve known she’d be there—Elise is always lying by the pool or lounging around somewhere—but I’m too emotional right now to make sense of much of anything.
I pull myself from the railing and head down toward her.
She sits up and tilts her sunglasses down. “You okay, girlie?” She smiles tentatively, like she’s testing it out, not sure just how bad things are. In this family, tears can mean a lot or a little, all depending on the whims of whatever brutal dickhead’s hanging around that day.
I nod and wipe my face. “Totally fine. Just standing alone on the patio crying a little bit. No big deal.”
“Pretty normal for girls around this house.” Her smile remains, but it’s tinged sad. “Sit down and tell me about it.”