Antonio Wayne ran his thumb over the blade of the knife. He slouched down in the driver’s seat of his SUV outside Kentucky Country Day, one of Louisville’s elite private schools. Roxanne had her Nikon D-3100 at the ready, excited to be able to put her photography hobby to good use. Her new long-range zoom lens was exactly what she needed for this. She lowered the camera to adjust a few settings.
With a sidelong glance at her husband, she took advantage of the momentary lull to ask the question that had been on her mind all day. “You wouldn’t ever hurt a child, right?”
“We’re just doing this to send Briggs a message. The man needs to understand my brother and I aren’t going to go away.”
“I thought there was an unspoken rule about not hurting wives or kids.”
“Look…if it will make you feel any better, I promise I’m not a child killer. But I don’t have time to fuck around with this morally superior son of a bitch, so I’m going for the jugular. Hopefully a few pictures will be all it takes.”
His expression shifted, becoming pensive and maybe a little wistful as he looked at the children running around on the playground next to the school. “So, I have a question for you. Do you ever regret not having kids?”
She closed her eyes for a moment before answering. “No. I have my hands full with you, my love. I have everything I could ever need or want.”
“I know things were…difficult--” he began, only to have her cut him off by placing a finger over his lips.
“Shhh. No. You know I don’t like talking about all that. It’s just too sad, baby,” she said gently, her eyes shining. She turned back to look out the car window, swallowing hard.
He nodded slowly and she cleared her throat as she resumed her position with her camera. They rarely talked about it, and he understood. But with a few minutes to go until the school let out for the day, he gave himself rare permission to look back on that sad chapter in their life together.
A few years into the marriage, they had decided to start a family. Ricardo and Juanita’s twins were adorable and they wanted that kind of contentment for themselves, liked the idea of Victor and Tony having cousins. Getting pregnant wasn’t the problem; getting the pregnancy to the finish line was where the trouble was.
After three first-trimester miscarriages, Antonio Wayne had declared that they were done. Roxanne agreed and resumed birth control. Life went on. He was more than content with their life as a couple and if children weren’t in the cards for them, he was at peace with that. But more importantly, he couldn’t bear to put Roxanne through the heartbreak and grief again. He didn’t know if he could endure it again himself.
As her husband and her Dom, he prided himself on attending to her emotional and physical needs. His protective, dominant nature had kicked into overdrive when she was pregnant. So it had been nothing short of maddening when each pregnancy and subsequent loss proved to be a vicious rollercoaster ride over which he had no influence. It wasn’t in his nature to be ruled by anyone or anything, much less a plus or minus sign on a plastic stick. In his world, blood was a source of pride, a sign of power, not a source of grief.
So, enough.
But Mother Nature was a bitch from hell and, despite resuming birth control, Roxanne became pregnant again within a year. He faced the unexpected blessing with more than a little trepidation. While she embraced the pregnancy wholeheartedly, he spent the nine months breathing into a paper bag when no one was looking. It felt that way, anyway.
But this time around, the pregnancy held firm. Despite it being her fourth pregnancy, it had been the first time that she had sported an honest-to-goodness baby bump. There was something to be said for seeing your woman round with your child, knowing that you put a baby in her for all the world to see. It was chest-beating, victory roar material right there.
Roxanne was magnificent in pregnancy, as he had known she would be. She was luminous in her happiness. Her body was soft and luscious, her sex drive was insatiable, and the fucking was off the charts. With her safely through the second trimester and easing into the third, he finally relaxed and just enjoyed the ride. They prepared a nursery, bought the usual furniture, diapers, and tiny clothes. It was a happy time of infinite possibility. Smooth sailing. When she went into labor, even the drive to the hospital was almost too easy, nothing but green lights.
No labor is easy, of course, but as labors go, Roxanne’s progressed normally. She fought hard to meet their baby, and he marveled at his woman’s tenacity. She was unstoppable, relentless even as the baby’s progress through the birth canal during the final phase of labor seemed to take forever. When the baby’s head finally crowned, he was there at Roxanne’s shoulder, lips pressed to her temple, whispering encouragement in his native language as she squeezed his hand until it went numb, and then pushed a final time.
Eager for a father’s first look, he straightened in anticipation of finding out whether they were welcoming Antonio Jr. or Sofia. But there was no happy announcement, only an ominous stillness that seeped into his pores and settled over the room like a shroud. The roaring in his ears was broken only by Roxanne’s fatigued sigh of sweet relief, quickly followed by a new mother’s easy, light laughter as she held out her arms, eager to hold her baby for the first time, oblivious to the horror unfolding around her.
One look around the room at the grim, pitying faces staring back at him, and Antonio Wayne knew. It was over. There were no heroic efforts to stem the tide of whatever had gone wrong. No frantic calls for assistance. Just…nothing.
“Stillborn,” the doctor whispered as the room tilted and spun. The grandfatherly man pulled him into an awkward huddle, speaking quietly to him even as Roxanne began raising her voice, demanding to see her baby. The cord had been wrapped around the baby’s neck. If the baby had survived the journey through the birth canal, the situation might have been recoverable but…no.
It happened sometimes, the doctor had said. Yeah, no shit. It had happened to them, and their little Sofia had not survived. There was nothing to be done, except somehow tell his wife.
Antonio Wayne had spent his life wielding absolute power without mercy, deciding who would live and who would die. But in that moment, his power turned to dust. There was nothing he could do to save their daughter or change the fact that her father had let her die all alone. Nothing he could do to save his wife from the horror that awaited her. And nothing he could do to save himself.
So, Antonio Wayne did what had to be done, as he always did. And to the end of his life, it would remain the single hardest thing he was ever called upon to do. After ensuring that his wife’s immediate physical needs had been met, he cleared the room, took their daughter’s swaddled body in his arms…and broke his wife’s heart.
Roxanne’s reassuring voice brought his aggrieved mind tumbling back into the present, even as her steady gaze told him that she had noticed the faraway look in his eyes and knew what it meant. “I’m happily married to you and the cartel. And, anyway, I don’t think the cartel could have endured another chapter in its history like the one that followed our tragedy.”
“I wasn’t that bad,” he said with a scowl.
“It was a bloodbath and you know it. Ricardo had to sideline you, for God’s sake. He couldn’t get intel out of anyone because you were tearing them apart, quite literally. Everyone understood, of course; you’d been through hell. But something had to be done.”
“I may have gotten carried away.”
“Like I said, I’m happy now. I have my hands full. Nothing makes me happier than spoiling you rotten and driving you crazy while I do it.”
“That, you do.”
“I wouldn’t want it any other way. I mean it. Anyway, Ricardo has already taken care of ensuring the Ramirez name will carry on. Those boys are like my own children—our children. Oh, look, there they are--” She quickly raised her camera to her face as her two targets scampered down the front steps of the school.
She didn’t know if she believed her husband or not when he said he wouldn’t hurt a child. She had no doubt that he would have been a wonderful father, but he was crazy and he would do whatever it took to get what he wanted, and he wanted that television station. Antonio Wayne wasn’t a man who was used to hearing the word no, or tolerated it when he did.
She also took a couple of pictures of the woman driving the ‘soccer mom’ van. Photos of his wife and children would be all they would need to let the station owner know they were more than willing to take things to the next level. She could only imagine how the man would feel when he realized how close the cartel had gotten to his family.
How ironic that they were having to break the law to go legit. Roxanne wasn’t naïve enough to believe there would be no more bloodshed. When an organization was going legit that’s when all hell broke loose. She hoped that wouldn’t be the case, but in the cartel life you never knew what that bitch karma might do. Roxanne hoped like hell it didn’t hit too close to home. No matter how many years she had under her belt in the cartel, the nagging fear was always in the back of her mind, wondering if they would reap what they had sown.
It would be just like karma to wait until the Ramirez family finally went straight before she dealt a death blow. Roxanne wondered if her family was so close because they all shared the same unspoken fears; things that were too sacred to utter lest your words bring the nightmares to fruition.
If gangsters had one thing in common, it was that they were all superstitious. For a family who annihilated their enemies without a second thought, they still dealt with fear in their own way. But their enemies weren’t what frightened them. No, it was fear of the unknown, of what the future held, that kept them up at night. But Roxanne believed, right down to the marrow of her bones, that if they all stood strong together they could weather any storm.