Catalina hardly seems interested in those things—or, if she is, she’s doing me the conscious favor of concentrating on something else, something less serious.
“I’m easy, huh?” she simpers. “I’ve never been called that before.”
A sudden lightness takes over my heavy head at the playfulness of my partners pawing. Catalina’s teasing smirk is bright enough to push its way in front of all the coldness and all the darkness raging behind my eyes. My thawing heart twitches alive just a little bit more. I don’t stop it. Not yet. This is the rest I need before I have to plunge myself back under the icy surface of my mysteriously frozen-over lake.
I feel my eyebrows ra
ise in amusement. Something in me can’t help but play along. “Really? No one’s ever called you easy?” I tease, before squinting in faux-concentration. “I think you’re forgetting how this all started.”
A sudden flash of seriousness explodes behind Catalina’s big eyes. Her nose twitches in a subtle but angry sneer. “Yeah,” she practically hisses, suddenly not so playful anymore. “You kidnapped me.”
Her change in attitude doesn’t do much to change mine. Even like this, Catalina is still a relative ray of sunshine in my constantly overcast world. “No,” I shake my head, taking on a new role. Now, I’m the one who needs to ease Catalina, instead of the other way around. Luckily, I’m an experienced tiger tamer. “At the gala, you approached me first.”
Catalina huffs, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms. “If only I knew better.”
“If only you weren’t so easy,” I tease.
“You haven’t gotten anything out of me yet,” she immediately shoots back.
If only she knew. The distraction she’s providing me right now is invaluable.
But her crossed arms also push up her plump and perky breasts. She’s right, despite my original intentions to use her as my plaything, I haven’t made my move yet. “We’ll have to change that,” I tell her, lowering my voice an octave.
Catalina rubs her arms, and I don’t hold back my mischievous smirk. Her skin pimples with obvious arousal and I remember back to how hard her nipples were when I’d tied her up in the dungeon.
Maybe I’ve been too busy and distracted to pounce on her yet, or maybe I just don’t feel any need to rush it. She wants me, and half the fun of this relationship is playing with her and her expectations.
A silent standoff consumes the unsteady air between us. My eyes wander over Catalina’s body; I can sense her trying to stop herself from doing the same to me.
The beast in me wants to grab her by the wrist and drag her back to my building. Hell, I don’t even know if we’d get that far. I’m sure an alley wall would do the trick of satisfying the intense urges Catalina kicks up in me. I wonder if she’d go for that?
But the boss in me doesn’t have time to truly consider the carefree act. Other responsibilities weigh heavy on my mind, and the longer we sit in silence the more obvious it becomes that I shouldn’t be here right now. I should be out working. For someone like me, life isn’t separate from business; failing at one almost always means failing at the other—and failing doesn’t mean going on welfare or getting a job at the local supermarket just to make ends meet. It means going to jail; it means death.
“You should get going,” I mumble.
“Yeah,” Catalina whispers back. There’s an uncertainty in her voice that gives me hope that she doesn’t really mean it. She wants to stay close to me, I can feel it, but I can also feel the fight happening inside of her between the reasonable Catalina and the emotional part of her that gets aroused when I speak of carnal things.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I rip it out. A message from one of my few remaining personnel, another young guy. No one at the safehouse in San Cayetano.
Fuck. I’d sent the kid over there because I knew it was a favorite hang-out spot of some of my more veteran guys, guys I need right now to help me find out what the hell is going on.
If they’re not there, it means they are truly gone. To where? If I knew that, I might not be so stressed out. Things are getting so bad so quickly that I’d almost be relieved to find them dead. At least then, I’d know what I was dealing with.
Right now, everything’s in limbo. I can’t even get a hold of my brother—though, that’s nothing new. I’d be more worried about him if he hadn’t left for another international vacation before shit started to get weird. Most other gangs and competitors in and around Cali don’t have the funds or connections to go after Dante in another country...
But they do sure seem to have a lot of power in my hometown.
What am I missing?
Catalina and I leave the restaurant in silence. Every step we take draws me further away from the little slice of peace that we found for a brief moment over breakfast.
Daunting and uncomfortable questions whirl through my mind like painful shrapnel. When did I slip up so bad that so much wrong can happen right under my nose without my knowledge? When did anyone suddenly have the guts to take a run at my throne?
Because it has to be that, right? An insurrection. A young go-getting group of criminals who see me going legitimate as an opportunity...
But even that hardly makes sense. The men I employ aren’t pansies. The ones who have lived long enough to serve me surely know better than whoever could come at them, right?
The warmth between me and Catalina is gone by the time we arrive back at my building. My attention has been fully recaptured by the darkness of my enigma.