Page 51 of The Love Language of the Cartel

“Right hand to God,” he assured me. “You never forget your first kill.”

I paused, unsure whether or not to let my curiosity take over. “W-who was yours?”

As the warm bubbles continued to rise, Ozias turned to face me. His expression was soft yet weighted with words he had yet to speak. His strong hand found mine and swallowed it up as he looked into my eyes. I saw a flicker of hesitation as if he were grounding himself before taking a giant leap into the unknown.

“If it’s too personal, you don’t have to—”

He waved his hand to silence me. “It’s not that. It’s just I’ve never talked about it before. Not outside my head, at least,” he admitted.

I waited patiently, recognizing the turbulence inside him. “Does not being able to talk about it mean you regret it?”

He swung his head in a sharp no. “I could never regret doing something that needed to be done. I think you’ll feel the same. Not today. But one day.”

I scoffed. As much as I wanted to tell him he didn’t know me, he’d called it. Ididn’tregret it. Sure, I was fucked up about it. I felt a lot of fucking emotions. Regret just wasn’t one of them. When I took too long bouncing around the thoughts inside my head, Ozias spoke up again.

“I think in order for you to understand the significance of my first kill, you’d first have to understand more about me and who I am.”

“Then tell me,” I insisted, listening attentively.“You hardly ever talk about your past.”

Ozias reached for me, his hands slightly trembling as he slowly undressed me. I stared at him in uninterrupted silence, noticing the painful weight of years etched into his every gentle move. Once I was fully naked, he scooped me into his arms and eased me into the bathtub, submerging me under the bubbles.

“I was born into chaos, and that shit molded me in ways I haven’t always been proud of,” he said as he started to wash all my father’s blood off my hands, both literally and figuratively. “I took my first breath in Corpus Christi, Texas. Then, I moved to a small city in Mexico with my mother after she split from my drug-dealing father when I was around two years old. Life there was full of struggles, but it all got ten times worse when my mother was killed by the cartel when I was five.”

My eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Oh my God. I-I’m so sorry.”

He dipped his chin. “Yeah.”

“So, what happened after that? You were so young when that happened. Where did you go?”

“I was headed to the orphanage when a man who said he was a friend of my mother’s came to get me. His name was Armando Diaz. Armando took me in, raised me, and offered me the kind of protection I needed at that age. He was kind and street smart but also heavily connected to a world I was too young to understand at the time.” Ozias paused, staring down at the bubbles as if searching for answers he still hadn’t been able to find after all these years. “By the time I was fourteen, I was following in his fuckin’ footsteps like a dutiful son. You couldn’t tell me I wasn’t his blood. I thought I was paying him back for taking me in after losing my mother, y’know, proving my loyalty and shit. But instead, I let him mold me into someone I never thought I’d be. I started at the bottom, training as a drug mule while learning weaponry and other combat skills. Over the years, I became the top enforcer for the cartel, which is how I got the nickname ‘El Diablo,’” he explained.

“How many lives have you taken?”

“If I told you all the horrible things I’ve done or how many men I’ve killed, would you run away?”

“I could’ve run away from you a million times, and I haven’t gone anywhere yet. Not even a bullet can seem to keep us apart,” I replied.

“Over a hundred,” he admitted. “None of them fucked me up like the first because, just like you, it was personal.”

His words made a lightbulb go off in my head. “Oh shit . . . Armando was your first kill? The man who raised you?”

Ozias dipped his chin to confirm my suspicions. “Yes.”

“But why? I don’t understand.”

“Because he was the one who ordered the hit on my mother.”

My heart sank to the soles of my feet. “Oh my God. And then he turned around and raised you? How did you find out?”

“He kept a photo of her inside his office desk drawer. He thought I never knew about it, but I did.”

“I’m confused. Why would he have a picture of your mother?”

“Because he loved her, and she ran away to America, met a black man, and had me. When things didn’t work out, she was desperate and reached out to him. He arranged for us to move back to Mexico if she agreed to become a drug mule for him. She did it for a few years, but I was getting older, and the jobs were getting riskier, so she told him she was done with the cartelandhim for good.”

“She wanted out, and he had her murdered?”

“In cold fuckin’ blood.”

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