Prologue
Stealing from Ignacio Garcia Hernandez was risky at best. At worst, it was your death, but first, things worse than death. Maria de la Cruz knew this, and yet she had stolen from her boss. Just a little of the crude opium that grew wild in his fields. Just a few bulbs at a time. Without the opium, Maria thought she might die.
But now, with a machine gun aimed at her head, it seemed that even with the opium, death was certain.
“Take her up to the tower,” Ignacio ordered his men. “It’s almost dark.”
At his feet, a heavily pregnant Maria pressed her hands together, her knees squashing precious poppy bulbs that grew all around them. Ignacio tried not to think about how much her bony kneecaps were costing him right now, what with the groveling and the trampling and the blood that was tainting his precious opiate flowers. Hector and Rico made quick work of dragging the laboring woman to her feet and up toward the disused water tower in the middle of his poppy fields.
“Watch the fucking flowers!” he barked at their suit-clad backs.
“Please,” she begged, screaming as another contraction overtook her. Ignacio held up a hand and his two burly guards dropped her arms, letting her writhe on hands and knees in the dirt this time. Ignacio waited patiently as she crested the peak of her pain and breathed back down the mountain of it, her pupils giant in the weak light of dusk, her hands covered in the blood of the dead husband who lay a few feet away. Ignacio glanced at him, the man whose name he couldn’t remember, the man who had stolen from him, the man who would never again step foot onto his property, because he was about to be buried beneath it. The skeletons in these fields could tell all kinds of secrets if they were ever exhumed – but here, in the most remote pocket of Mexico’s mountain valleys, there was nobody to dig.
In the tower, Hector and Rico set Maria on the ground. She was bearing down, the life inside her demanding a swift exit. That was good. Ignacio was a terrible man, but he preferred not to murder babies unless absolutely necessary. Ignacio loved babies. He desired the innocence they possessed. He coveted the malleable nature of their youth, the ability to bend them according to his whims.
He imagined his supper at home, cold, as Rico headed back down the steep flights of stairs to bury Maria’s thieving husband.
“Ignacio, please!” Maria screamed, clutching her swollen belly. The waves were so close there was barely pause between contractions now.
“Please what?” Ignacio asked, in a voice that was far too calm.
“Please let me g-go!” the woman begged. “I promise I won’t t-tell anyone. I swear!”
Ignacio crouched before Maria, careful not to get dirty. Nobody had been in this tower for years. It was filthy and barren and the perfect place for what he had planned. “You stole from me, Maria. You took drugs that were not yours and probably hurt this poor child.” He placed a hand on her belly. “And you think I am the bad man here?”
Maria continued to sob. “I’m sorry,” she said, strings of saliva hanging from her lips as she tried to beg for her life while giving birth at the same time. Not an easy feat, by any means. Ignacio wrinkled his nose up at her animalistic grunts and screams, so primal, so Neanderthal. His first wife – before he’d stabbed her to death after learning of her infidelity, God bless her soul – had birthed all of their ten children at home, in the bathtub, in silence. Ignacio had caught more than his share of children in his lifetime; such was the wonder of holding a child in it’s very first moment, of whispering in their ear your plans for their destiny, for Ignacio was a maker of destiny and fate. To hold a brand new being in the palms of your hands and begin shaping them to your will as they took their first breath; new life was exquisite, something to be revered.
Ignacio checked his watch again; he had to hurry this up. “Give me your jacket,” he said to Rico, who obliged immediately, shrugging his meaty arms out of his suit jacket and handing the pile of material to his boss. Ignacio folded the jacket lengthways, sitting it on the ground on front of the spot where Maria was laboring. He rolled up his sleeves, mindful not to get any blood on the starched white linen he preferred to wear in the summer heat, and got down to business.
Maria screamed when he used two fingers to check her dilation. She was barely awake, though, so depleted of strength that the pain was the only thing stopping her from passing out.
“Come on now, Maria, you’re completely open in there. Open like a beautiful flower. You have to push,” Ignacio said, shaking his head as if they were talking over dinner and not holed up in the dark in an abandoned water tower, surrounded by poppy fields in the Sierra Madre Mountains.
Maria, carried by her body’s urges rather than Ignacio’s, bore down, screaming as she pushed, and a baby’s head appeared. She leant against the wall in between contractions, her breath ragged, the fields absolutely silent on this balmy spring night.
The desolation only added to Ignacio’s feeling of excitement, of wonder – right now, the rest of the world didn’t exist. His men melted into the background, dutiful soldiers who were there merely for their muscle and ability to fire a gun, nothing more. No, right now it was Ignacio Garcia Hernandez and Maria de la Cruz and – one more push! – now they were three, Daddy Bear, Mommy Bear, Baby Bear. Maria reached for the baby as it slithered out from her body, but Ignacio was faster. He took the child, still attached by reams of umbilical cord much like a bungee jumper to a bridge. Ignacio didn’t cut the cord right away. He’d read somewhere – or was it his wife who had told him? – that the best way to ensure a healthy baby at birth was to wait until the cord stopped pulsating before cutting it.
This was also the reason he had not simply killed Maria and cut the baby from her flesh, though he was hardly about to tell her that. Mothers tended to get violently hysterical when confronted with their own mortality.
The baby was still. He turned it over and gave a great slap on the back – a sharp intake of breath, the very first air to touch its lungs, and then the baby cried, strong and sharp.
Ignacio Garcia Hernandez held the wet, screaming bundle in his palms and smiled. A healthy child, with a thick head of blonde hair. Bright blue eyes and the most adorable little fists that were currently clenched as it wailed. Ignacio moved the umbilical cord to the side and confirmed what he’d already suspected.
His newest possession was a girl.
Of course. He smiled, bringing the tiny infant to his chest, bundling her into the space between his shirt and bare skin to keep her warm.
She quieted immediately, her little eyes wide, her clumsy head rooting around for mother’s milk that would never come.
“Milk,” he ordered, and as if by magic, a bottle of formula appeared in front of him in Rico’s outstretched hand. Ignacio took the bottle and teased it around the baby’s mouth, a surge of affection running through him when she attached and started suckling greedily.
Maria de la Cruz was watching all of this from the floor, her eyes already full of the knowledge that the rest of her life was now measured in seconds, not years.
“Let me feed her,” she whispered, holding out her arms. “Let me hold her, Ignacio, please—”
She never quite got to finish the “s” in please, because Ignacio, multi-tasker that he was, balancing baby and bottle in one thick arm, withdrew the Gold-plated pistol from his shoulder holster with his spare hand and shot Maria de la Cruz right between the eyes. She died instantly, sagging to the side as the bullet’s exit path through the back of her head painted a bright red line of blood down the wall.
The baby girl in his arms stiffened at the sudden explosive sound; her back arched, she spat the bottle teat out and scrunched up her face, wailing as her mother had wailed only moments earlier. “Shhh,” Ignacio murmured, rocking the tiny thing gently as he holstered his gun. “Come on, my girl. Everything will be okay.”
She quieted, finding the bottle teat again, pulling milk by sheer instinct and the ravenous hunger of being born.
“My beautiful girl,” Ignacio murmured, gazing down at the child whose mother and father he had just murdered in cold blood. She was falling asleep already, her thick lashes fluttering as she dreamed earth side for the first time. She was so pretty already, but more importantly, just like her mother, she would be an exquisite beauty. A beauty that Ignacio would shape and mold like a potter sitting behind his wheel, wet clay skimming against his hands, forming a masterpiece.
“All of this was meant to be, little one,” he whispered, rubbing his thumb along his baby’s forehead. “All of this was fate.”
He smiled. Fate had always been kind to Ignacio.