The air became dank. Musty. My sneakers chewed dirt on the concrete as we made a right, and then another, until Cristiano opened a door and gestured for me to enter.
As my eyes adjusted, blood drained from my face.
Weeks ago, the scene before me would’ve been enough to send me running, but not before I’d called Cristiano every horrible name in the book. Now, I understood better.
There was more than one way to make the world a better place. Good didn’t always prevail.
Sometimes, monsters had to take the reins.
12
Natalia
Four shirtless men with duct-taped mouths stared back at me. Flanked by Alejandro and Eduardo, they’d been hooked to the low ceiling by their chained wrists, their toes barely grazing the dirt floor.
Four men, when Cristiano had hoped for one at best.
Four lives hanging in the balance.
Three were around my father’s age or older, and the last even younger than I was, possibly still a teenager.
Their bodies seemed mostly unharmed, but bruises darkened their faces. Multicolored confetti underneath them was evidence they’d been tasered.
To my embarrassment, I was too shocked to even move. Knowing these things happened, even hearing them from the next room, was entirely different than witnessing them.
As a rivulet of blood slid from the corner of one man’s mouth, the contents of my stomach churned.
But I’d promised myself that I could do this. So when Cristiano said, “Fíjate bien”—look closer—I did.
“Read their tattoos,” Cristiano instructed.
“What tattoos?” I asked.
Only a few decorated the older men, but they were simply faded sketches that meant nothing to me.
Cristiano guided me forward, staying close enough that I felt his heat even through my hoodie. It wasn’t until I was standing within arm’s reach of the eldest man that I saw it. Faint, nearly erased ink in scrawling gothic lettering across his chest. The other two older men had the same word. “Valverde,” I read.
“They tried to have them removed. Like cowards.”
Two of the four men jerked, their chains and muffled cries echoing around us.
“Silencio.” Eduardo smacked one in the back with the butt of his AR-15, and they went quiet. The youngest and the eldest of the four both remained still.
“Perhaps they should’ve cut their names off if they didn’t want to be found,” Cristiano said, walking toward the men, his back lengthening so he stood at his full height. “They’re going to confess their sins. Whatever it takes. I want you to hear it from their fucking mouths.”
And if I told Cristiano that I believed, down to my very core, that he was innocent—would he still proceed with whatever he had planned?
I met the pleading eyes of the youngest one. He couldn’t have been anything more than a toddler when this had happened.
“What if they didn’t do it?” I asked Cristiano.
“I didn’t hunt them down to ask if they did. I brought them here to find out why.”
A sense of dread worked through me. For more than eleven years, I’d wished for answers. Now, they’d be granted by the last man on Earth I’d have expected them from. My husband showed me more every day that he made his own destiny, and that I could make mine.
Cristiano paced, pausing in front of each man. “You know why you’re here. You ordered a hit on Bianca Cruz. This is her daughter. My wife.” He met eyes with one, and the ferocity in Cristiano’s gaze made even my stomach drop. He shrugged in that menacing way he’d perfected. “The more you cooperate, the faster this will end—but I’m a merciful man,” he said in a tone that was anything but compassionate. “I’ll let one of you go—the first to confess.”
None of them reacted, not that they really could, but their silence got under my skin. The lives of everyone I cared about had been irrevocably changed for the worse because of the men in front of me.
Maybe they needed to be forced to speak.
The thought caught me off guard.
And brought understanding of Cristiano and Diego in a new way. I’d fantasized about justice for my mother’s killer, but not in the direct, brutal way that was currently on offer. I’d thought a bullet in the sicario’s head was a way of evening the score, but that was nothing. It’d been over before I’d even known it was happening, before I’d had a moment to relish the payback.
Cristiano turned to me. “This is where you get off the ride.”
That was it? I’d come for more, though I couldn’t say what exactly. Was I willing to witness torture? And if so, what holes would it fill within me to watch men crucified for a decade-old crime?
Even as their gazes burned into me, Cristiano and I locked eyes—until the eldest of the four shook his chains. Cristiano turned to him. His gray eyes morphed from dull to expressive as he tried to tell us something from behind his gag.