I close up the suitcase but pull off the lock. I saw the combination, but I don’t trust Luigi’s, so I snap my lock onto it. I lift the suitcase off the table as Joaquin takes a messenger bag from Alvaro.
“It’s all here. Just like my uncle promised.” Oh, it’s all there all right.
Alvaro is Paco’s younger brother, and something like a second cousin twice removed. He’s one of the few men we trust to carry a bag full of money. Joaquin opens and tilts it toward Luigi for him to see. My brother pulls out a stack and flips through them, picking three bills from the center and handing them to Luigi. They’re the only three bills in there that’re legit. Joaquin marked them before we left my place, so he’d be sure to grab the right ones.
Luigi holds them up to the light before nodding. “Thank you.”
Joaquin zips the bag and hands it over. I’m passing the suitcase to Alvaro while another one of our guys opens the hotel room door and checks the hallway.
“Todo bien.” All good.
We get the signal it’s clear for us to leave. None of us waste a moment. Joaquin heads out before me, but he and I stand just outside the door with our weapons pointed at Luigi and his goons to make sure all our men can get out. Once we’re in the hallway, we don’t wait around. We’re not exactly running, but neither are we taking our time to walk down the hall to the elevator.
We don’t linger for the parting gift we left Luigi to detonate. It’s not a bomb per se, but we’re certainly not exploding die packs on the bills. Instead, when he opens the bag andrummages around inside of it, he’ll knock the cap off the bottle inside.
“Did you have any trouble with it?”
Joaquin will have loosened it a bit more as he pulled out the stack of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.
“No. I prepped it this morning. It was easy to unscrew it the last bit when I reached inside.”
They may or may not realize what’s happening, but they’ll soon be dead. The bottle contained highly concentrated hydrogen sulfide. At an amount enough to make someone nauseated or give them a headache, it would smell like rotten eggs. However, at a thousand parts per million, it’ll be scentless and immediately cause cardiopulmonary arrest.
Next, our team of men—our cleaners—will slip in and clean the room of bodies and anything else they left behind. There won’t be even a scintilla of trace evidence that any of us were ever there.
It’ll look like the Chicago Mafiosos left without paying their bill.
“Done.” Joaquin turns his phone toward me, much like I did mine earlier.
He and I and our other brother, Jorge, aren’t triplets, but we may as well be. Joaquin is eleven months older than me, and I’m ten and a half months older than Jorge. You never find one without another, if not both. We’re known asTres J’s. We’ve been inseparable our entire lives. Out of necessity when we still lived in Bogotá and by choice now because my brothers and our cousins are the coolest men I know. If I’m forced to spend time with anybody, I prefer it to be my family.
Joaquin and I are quiet in the car on the way to ourtío’shouse. I gaze out the window as we cross into New Jersey from Brooklyn. I can’t get the woman out of my mind. That niggling feeling that she’s familiar won’t go away. I say nothing asJoaquin and I head intoTíoEnrique’s house. We kiss our aunt-to-be on the cheek when we pass her at the front door. I really like Elodie a lot. My brother and I head intoTíoEnrique’s office where he and our cousins Pablo and Alejandro, plus our other brother Jorge, are. It’s whenTioEnrique reaches for a paper on his desk that I suddenly know who the woman is.
Chapter Two
Maddy
Javier Diaz had no idea who I was.
Neither did Joaquin, and that’s just as well. I’m at least fifteen pounds lighter than I was the last time we saw each other, and I don’t look better for it. It makes me about fifteen pounds underweight.
He and his two brothers are men I’ve known since they moved to America twenty-odd years ago. That’s because I grew up next door to theirTíoLuis. I’ve known that man my entire life, just like I have their other uncle,TíoEnrique.
Our families were once super close. Luis and Margherita had two sons who were both older than me. The younger one, Juan, was the same age as my older sister, Laura. They were just a couple weeks apart.
I grew up with those two guys being more like my brothers than just next-door neighbor friends. But Juan fucked around and found out when he went after Laura because not only did she dare not love him back when he decided he was ready to pay attention to her, she also made the cardinal mistake of marrying the bratva’spakhan. I adore my brother-in-law, Maksim, andthe rest of his family. I think of them—refer to them—as my brothers rather than in-laws.
Because of that, I’m not saying a fucking word to anybody about Javier bursting into my hotel room. Not only do I avoid shit between the bratva and the Cartel, I’m also not ready for anyone in my family to know I’m back in NYC. I’ve lived in Albany since I left for college ten years ago.
I’ve been a nurse up there ever since I graduated. I became a nurse practitioner midwife a few years ago. Right around the same time I met that motherfucking, shitty, son-of-a-bitch, cunt-eating bastard, otherwise known as my ex-boyfriend, Drew O’Sheehan. He can fuck all the way off with bells on.
I’m not bitter or anything.
He’s the reason I’m fifteen pounds underweight and hiding out at a hotel, rather than being with my family. I’m not ready for my family to see me like this, and I don’t want Drew to find me.
To say our relationship was turbulent is putting it mildly. Why I stayed for so fucking longisn’tbeyond me. I like to think I’m pretty intelligent, that I have common sense, and I’m not one of those women who thought I could change him. I knew exactly who and what he was, and that’s the reason I stayed.
Of course, I didn’t know who and what he was when I met him. I didn’t even know who or what he was for the first two years we were together. He hid that so damn well he should’ve won an Oscar every year. However, I’ve known for the last two years, and I finally broke his hold on me. But I’m not just on the run from him. It’s his entire family because you don’t get one without the other.
