I nodded at him. “Look at you—a suit, a pressed shirt, five-hundred-dollar shoes, and a palace to go with it.”
“The shoes cost a grand, but I wouldn’t expect you to know these things, Santiago. Look at you—a piece-of-shit white-trash biker in the wilderness, speeding around in your own little Wild West rodeo.”
I only lifted an eyebrow.
“I’ve grown up, ese. While you? You’re stuck in the camouflage grunge of our younger days.” His fingers waggled in the air, two gold rings glinting in the sunlight coming from the wall of windows. “You could have been at my side, like you were from the very beginning.”
“At your side? I was your drudge, not your partner.”
“You did good work, my friend. So dependable. You always went above and beyond the call of duty. You were so very responsible, too. A very unique quality. I needed you, and I took care of you. And what did you do to repay me? You killed my brother.
“Even though you were just a kid, you were the best, so focused, so vicious. You wanted to excel, and you did. No gratitude though, El Hueso. None. Without Felipe and me, where would you both have gone? What would you have done?”
“You wanted me to pay for that for a lifetime.”
He tilted his head and made a sucking sound with his tongue behind his teeth. He held my gaze, but I gave him nothing.
“You took her, Alejandro. You used her, lied to her, made her candy-sweet promises.”
His eyes lit into me, his voice puncturing my veins. “Lied to her? You never understood this, but she came to us, Santiago. She wanted us. You couldn’t accept that, could you? I admit, at first, she was a new, pretty acquisition. Fun. But Felipe and I adored her. We loved her. It had been going on for weeks before she finally left you. I know, in some ways, she was…delicate, but she was always intriguing, a surprise.” He took in a breath. “Our perla negra.”
“All this was her idea,” he continued. “Us getting off the streets, leaving the bullshit pissing contests behind. The companies, the moving forward into something better than our”—he gestured at me with a flick of his tan hand—“grunge. It was hard and very bloody, but with her at my side, it was all worth it.”
Inès—The face that had launched our thousand ships.
“The one horror was that you’d killed my brother like the little savage you were. That devestated her and me both, but Inès made me promise not to hurt you. She felt guilty about what she had done to you. You were family, after all.”
Family. My eyes shut tight. Family didn’t burn you, throw you away, leave you bleeding to die on the side of the road like an animal.
“So, I kept my word.” His voice was hushed, slow. “I let you go. Thankfully, you left Denver and never came back. At least you respected me in that way. At least. But you destroyed my Perla in the end.”
My eyes snapped open. “What are you talking about?”
“After you’d killed Felipe, she’d started doing blow regularly and had that first miscarriage. We’d gotten married, two more miscarriages, more coke, a bit of smack, eh. Sometimes, she would talk to you in her little hazes. Babbling on about some childhood nonsense or other, crying.”
I clenched my jaw and looked away.
“For years she’d go on and off the medication she was supposed to be taking. ‘Lithium gets in the way of the good things,’ she’d say. A month ago, one night she was home alone at our country house and threw herself off our bedroom balcony.”
I held his black gaze. “She killed herself?”
Alejandro lit a cigarette, some foreign brand I’d never seen before. He blew a long thick stream of smoke from his lips. “She was flying on heroin at the time. I tried to keep it away from her, but my little crazy thing, she liked it, like she liked two cocks in her. When she got emotional, there was no controlling her.
“Over the years, she would often disappoint me with the things she did or said, but she was young. The things she’d do afterward to make up for it…ah.” He sucked on his cigarette, a grin searing his face. “And I loved her all the more for it. My wife was everything to me.”
He offered me a cigarette, and I shook my head.
“Your girlfriend—she’s a cute nugget, eh?” He tossed the pack of smokes on his desk. “Banal though.” He slid his fingers down his blue silk tie. “Ah, well, they’re all banal after you’ve had the one you know you’ll never find again. Am I right?” He took a deep drag and crushed his cigarette into a huge red crystal ashtray that looked like some sort of sea creature, his eyes piercing mine through the smoke. “My tigresa wanted her master’s blood smeared on her tits, not just my cum.”