Page 149 of Plunge into Obsession

“My father ruled the Michoacán Cartel with an iron fist. He might have been a mean bastard, but there was no denying he did what my grandfather hadn’t been able to do. He brought the cartel to new heights. And I was set to rule this empire. As the oldest, I was trained my entire life to be just as ruthless as he was.”

She turned to me. “Trained?”

Emotions flitted across her eyes, shadowed by everything heavy in the world. I guided her head down so it rested on my chest, and she was no longer looking at me.

“Trained,” I confirmed. “I won’t go into detail,mi corazón. I’m not going to fill your head with all that shit.”

“What about your mom? Didn’t she try to protect you from all that?”

I laughed, the sound bitter and dry. “By the time Luis was born, my bastard father had already beaten the life out of her. If there had ever been a time in her life during which she was anything more than a shell, I don’t remember. I don’t blame her. And I don’t resent her. She was as much of a victim of my father as Luis and I were.”

She swallowed loudly.

I held her tighter to me, and I wondered if it was to comfort her or me.

“I always thought it would be me and Luis against the world. That shit might be bad, but at least I had my brother by my side to weather it all. But I was too close to him to see it. I didn’t even know when the change had happened, or perhaps nothing had changed. Perhaps all that happened was that he got tired of always wearing a mask, and I didn’t want to see that mask. I didn’t want to see Luis for who he was. That was my mistake.”

“W-what did he do?”

“After our father’s death, he staged a coup with some of my father’s generals who never believed my father had died from a heart attack—and he tried to kill me.”

She didn’t say anything, but her hand moved, settling right over the scar on my side. I supposed she had already guessed. I didn’t confirm or deny it.

“His mistake was not making sure I died first before they drove me to the Chihuahuan Desert and dumped my body there. They figured if I didn’t die on the journey there, then the predators of the desert would take care of it for them.”

“How did you survive?” she asked, not looking at me.

“Raphael had just joined the cartel. He suspected something was up when he couldn’t reach me. But at that time, he had no power. He called the Vasiliev Bratva for help.”

She didn’t say anything to that, though I felt her fingers moving gently over my scar, her touch feather-light and fucking with me in the sweetest way possible.

“The pakhan, Damien Vasiliev,” I continued. “We formed a friendship pretty early on, and Damien had just gotten into power. He’d wanted to form a business relationship with the cartel, and I was set to take the helm. But with me out of the way, Luis cut his ties with the Bratva, knowing Damien wouldn’t want to work with him, and instead formed an alliance with the Agnello Famiglia. It made it nearly impossible for us to go to an all-out war with the cartel to take back what was mine. I bided my time for the last decade. It wasn’t until the Bratva was able to challenge the Agnello Famiglia and weaken their ties with the cartel that I could finally attack.”

“How?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything for a beat. Even for the brief time Bianca had interacted with Catalina, I knew she was fond of the shy girl. “They took Catalina. Agnello’s daughter.”

“What?” she asked sharply, placing her hands on my chest and pushing up.

“Don’t look so horrified,mi corazón. Catalina is now the treasured wife of the Bratva. And she wasn’t really Agnello’s daughter, but Francisco Bianchi’s daughter, the head of the Bianchi Famiglia. But that was a whole mess of a story that we didn’t know about until Bianchi made himself known.”

She still looked disgusted.

I let out a small sigh and pulled her back. She resisted for a bit before she realized what a losing fight this was and gave in.

I cupped the back of her head. “I won’t go into the details with you. But that’s how I was able to get back my empire.”

“Recently?”

“About two years ago,” I said.

Which wasn’t long at all, but fuck me if it didn’t feel like a lifetime most days.

I thought I felt her breathing increase.

“And your father? You said you killed him? That the old generals didn’t believe he had d-died from a heart attack?”

“You really want to know,mi corazón?”

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