I stared at the fountain, comforted by the sound of running water. Why were women trapped, and how come nobody had freed them? Did Cristiano really have something to do with that? Until the dark day in question, he’d always been respectful of my mother, and she had cared for him. As a girl, I’d caught Cristiano watching me many times with something that’d felt akin to affection. Nothing that’d made me fearful. Maybe I’d just been too young to know better, though.
“What about the women trapped there?” I asked to stop my mind from filling in the blanks.
“It’s terrible, Tali, really,” Diego said. “You don’t want to know. It’s my father all over again, which is why I don’t understand how Costa could go into business with Cristiano. He represents the same things my parents did.”
“Human trafficking?” I asked quietly.
“It’s fucked up.” He tapped ash from his cigarette, looking somewhere over my head. “But not all that surprising, I guess. Cristiano and my dad are a lot alike, which is why they never got along.”
“The women are mostly foreigners if that makes you feel any safer, Tals,” Tepic said.
Who could feel anything but disgusted hearing that? My stomach churned. Had there ever been anything redeemable about Cristiano? Why had my mother not only taken him in, but, as I remembered it, treated him with tenderness?
“It makes me feel like shit,” Diego said, glancing down at me. “I don’t want you anywhere near him. If he ever gets you alone, you scream, hear me?”
I had screamed—and screamed and screamed. And nobody had been able to stop him. Not in my parents’ bedroom, nor their closet, nor the tunnel beneath it.
I removed my arms from around Diego, suddenly warm. “He can’t get away with this,” I said. “If any women, from my country or another, are being held by Cristiano, my father wouldn’t accept him back.”
“And yet it seems he has,” Diego said. “It’s just another business to Cristiano. He traffics some, and other women are there for him and his gang’s use.”
I couldn’t keep my disgust at bay any longer. Bile rose in my throat, even as I tried not to let my imagination wander down that path. This was the side of my father’s world he tried to shield me from, but I was in it nonetheless. Did that make me complicit? What about Diego? Could either of them even stop someone like Cristiano?
“Are you sure?” I asked.
Diego glanced at me and flicked his cigarette butt away. “Jesus,” he said, taking my shoulders to hold me at arm’s length. “You’re pale again. I told you not to ask.”
“It’s okay,” I said. These were things I had decided long ago I didn’t want to know about. But now that I did know, I was less frightened than I thought I’d be and more quietly enraged. What about the millions of women in my country who didn’t have access to the defenses I did? Who was on their side?
Cristiano had always been a calculating killer, that was no shock—but apparently, he’d grown into a disloyal degenerate, a callous crook, a master of mind games. Hades of the Badlands.
Diego massaged my shoulders. “Relax. This is not something you need to worry about. I will always protect my sun—without you, I’d live in the dark. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Cristiano can’t get away with all the things he has,” I said. What did he have over Papá? It had to be big for him to ignore the horrors I’d just heard. After all, he’d taken down Cristiano and Diego’s father for similar offenses. “He must have a reason.”
“Who, Costa? He has none. He’s lost his mind,” Diego said and gestured at Tepic. “¿Tienes otro?”
Tepic passed him another cigarette, then dropped his and used his heel to stamp out the butt. “I’ll see what I can find out from Barto and the guys.”
Diego nodded him on. “Go.”
I tried to wrap my head around why Papá would do this to us. To himself. Just seeing Cristiano brought back scores of memories better left to rest.
Had he manipulated my father? Or could there be any truth to his claims?
Was there even a sliver of possibility that Cristiano was innocent?
It was a thought I knew I should ignore, because if he was or wasn’t, either answer would only incite more questions. And if my curiosity was an affliction, then my curiosity about a man like Cristiano could be of the fatal sort indeed.
6
Natalia
Some details from the Day of the Dead eleven years earlier were hazy, and some crystal clear, but I’d never doubted that Cristiano had left my mother for dead and had been about to take off with our valuables.
As Tepic returned to the ballroom on a quest for information, and Diego removed his arm from me to light a fresh cigarette, I paced by the fountain and tried to figure out the riddle before me.