They made it exactly three blocks—not even enough time for the heater to thaw out the car or soothe Natalia’s nerves—before Ana Maria’s patience dissolved and her curiosity seized her.
“What the hell, Natalia? His office? Do you have any idea what would have happened if anyone other than me had seen you picking that lock?”
Natalia cast her a furious glare. “Which is why you should have walked away when I told you to,” she snapped. “We’ve talked about this before. When I tell you to do something, you do it!”
“He saw you, and you just stood there,” she said, petulance pitching her voice high and sharp, like an angry, out-of-tune bell.
“No, I didn’t. I can handle Carlos.” She clenched the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip and edged them onto the highway. Her heart pounded like a manic metronome. She’d been caught, and worse, she’d pulled Ana Maria into it, the one thing she’d wanted to avoid.
“But you didn’t! One of us had to do something,” Ana Maria hissed.
“But not you, Ana Maria.” She took a turn a little too fast, then forced herself to relax. “Nothing can ever happen to you,” she whispered, her voice an angry buzz of disturbed bees.
Judging by the way Ana Maria sat slumped in the passenger seat—her arms crossed over her chest, her brow furled, and her lips drawn in a pout—she was bracing for a lecture. Good. Natalia wasn’t about to disappoint her. Today had been bad enough, dangerous but without immediate consequences. And if it had been an isolated incident, Natalia might have been able to dismiss it. But Natalia couldn’t ignore the suspicion that had been building within her since she’d confronted Ethan at his apartment.
Since he’d accused her of decency and kindness, of having a gentle heart.
Since he’d accused her of discovering the evidence of Will’s captivity.
Because she hadn’t. Until today, she’d never so much as glanced at her uncle’s computer. She took every effort to avoid his presence and his office, where he was most likely to set down a directive she didn’t want to hear or follow or live with.
So no, she hadn’t discovered William Bennett, hadn’t done anything to save him.
But she knew who had.
“I’m not an idiot, you know,” Ana Maria said sullenly from the passenger seat.
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t know,” she said, turning to glare at her sister. “Tell me about the American, Ana Maria. Tell me about the video.”
The air in the car went heavy with the weight of the silence simmering between them, the efforts of the heater the only noise. Ana Maria tilted her head, staring out the window, her gaze fixed on the side-view mirror. Natalia pulled her focus back to the road. Forced herself to keep driving, to keep her hands on the wheel, to stay in control. Calm. Reasonable. When all she really wanted to do was throttle the sister she’d given up so much for to protect. How dare she take such a risk? How dare she gamble her future on a man she’d never met, on an outcome she couldn’t possibly control?
How. Dare. She.
“I thought we’d settled this,” Natalia ground out, fighting against anger and fear and a whole tidal wave of vicious, unfair thoughts. After everything she’d done, everything she’d sacrificed so that Ana Maria could have a life to be proud of. A life to protect. She shook her head. “You promised me, Ana Maria.”
“So you’re the only one allowed to have a conscience in this family?” she asked with a huff that ruffled her hair. “The only one allowed to take any risks, the only person who can do the right thing—”
“Yes!” Natalia exclaimed as she pulled onto campus. “Yes. That’s the deal, Ana Maria. You don’t involve yourself in the cartel. Not ever. Not for any reason—”
“But I am involved in the cartel,” she whispered, the words a knife to Natalia’s heart. “You can pretend that I’m not, that it doesn’t affect me, doesn’t touch me, but that’s not true. You’re just too stubborn to admit it.”
Pulling into the garage, Natalia searched for a parking spot and the right words. Words that wouldn’t drive a wedge between them. Words that wouldn’t hurt, wouldn’t bite, wouldn’t reveal just how betrayed Natalia felt. She parked the car and killed the engine, her hands still white-knuckling the steering wheel as she fought a whole host of emotions she didn’t know what to do with.
The realization that Ana Maria wasn’t entirely wrong, that she was involved in the cartel. She didn’t get her hands dirty, oh no, that was Natalia’s burden to bear, but Natalia couldn’t claim Ana Maria was free of it, either.
But mostly, she wrestled with the resentment. With the bone-deep exhaustion, with the things she didn’t think about, the sins she didn’t acknowledge but were lined up, miles deep, ready to tear her down the moment she stopped moving forward.
“It’s not the same,” Natalia whispered, staring through the windshield and into the shade of the parking garage. “Everything I do, I do it to keep you safe. To give you a chance at a life—”
“What life?” Ana Maria shouted.
Temper fraying like a wire holding too much weight for far too long, Natalia turned on her sister. “What life?” she repeated incredulously. “How can you even ask me that? You have a car, college. Friends and volunteer work. You have freedoms I’ll—”
“It isn’t real, Natalia.” Ana Maria sat there, calm and placid, her face smooth and open and so damn grown-up. As if she’d always felt this way but was only now voicing it, as if she were the adult, dropping a few harsh truths on a child. “I have privileges,” she stressed. “And I’m grateful, I really am. You don’t talk about it, but that doesn’t mean I have my head in the clouds. That I don’t know.” She heaved a breath. “I see you when you come home late at night. I hear you sob in the shower. I know that every concession is bought and paid for with unspeakable things. But I’m no more free than you are.”
Natalia shook her head against the tears stinging the backs of her eyes.
“Don’t shake your head,” Ana Maria snarled. “You know it as well as I do. You’re just good at pretending. And you know what?” she asked, arching a brow. “So am I. I pretend I don’t see what this life has done to you. I pretend I don’t know what our uncle does. I pretend it doesn’t disgust me—the way he killed our father, the way he raped and ruined our mother.”
Natalia flinched, from the truth and from the way it dropped like lead from Ana Maria’s mouth.
“I pretend that it’s as you say, that she died in her sleep, that a heart attack instead of a handful of pills and our uncle’s vicious obsession didn’t drive her over the edge. That she didn’t leave us with him.”
Natalia released a ragged breath and, with it, just one of the tower of secrets she’d hid, unsuccessfully, apparently, from her sister.
“She was weak,” Ana Maria continued, her voice icing over with long-held resentment. “She abandoned us, both of us, and I’ll never forgive her for it.”
“She tried—”
“No. You tried. You’re still trying.” The tension abruptly left Ana Maria’s face, returning her to the girl Natalia recognized instead of the cold, unforgiving woman who’d just moments ago revealed the depths to which Natalia had failed to protect her. “I love you for it, I do. But it’s not enough.” She turned away, brought a hand up to smooth back an errant strand of hair. “I’m two semesters away from my degree, Nat. But what then? Do you think I’ll have a job? An apartment? That I’ll get to live paycheck to paycheck figuring out this whole being-a-grown-up thing? That I’ll have a closet full of shoes and a pantry full of ramen? That I’ll be allowed to make mistakes, fall in love, or have a family?”
“Purses,” Natalia whispered. The thought was silly but the only one she could pluck from the turmoil in her head.
“Huh?”
“Shoes have never been your thing,” Natalia explained, casting a long look at the ratty old pair of UGGs she’d bought Ana Maria more than five years ago. “You’d never go hungry for shoes. But I’ve seen you flip through the Louis Vuitton Christmas catalog. Watched you dog-ear the pages of Vogue. For the right bag, you’d eat peanut butter on crackers for a month.”
That startled a shallow laugh out of Ana Maria, and though she shook her head in denial, her smile called her a liar.
“I want all that for you, you know?” Natalia said, speaking the only truth she really knew.
“A shitty apartment, a designer purse, and jars of peanut butter? I’m rethinking your birthday present.”
Natalia released a shaky sigh, relieved to be back on familiar ground. And yet . . . and yet it felt as if everything had changed. As if the truth of their life had been named and shamed and put on display so that Natalia could no longer ignore it. It seemed that everyone was dead set on pointing out her shortcomings. First Ethan and now Ana Maria.
She was trying to find them a way out, goddamn it.
“I know,” Natalia said for lack of anything more appropriate. “I’m working on it, okay? I need you to trust me.”
“Like Garrison Coates did?”
As if she’d been punched in the gut, all of Natalia’s breath left her in a rush. “That’s not fair.”
“He wanted to help us, Natalia,” Ana Maria whispered, accusation sharpening her words to a lethal point. “He wanted to help us, and you killed him for it.”
Natalia scrubbed her hands over her face. How had they gotten here? “We talked about that.”
“No, you talked about it. I was just expected to accept it. To let it go. To pretend it never happened. As if I could ever forget.” Ana Maria snapped off her seat belt, struggling with the strap in her anger. “Well, you know what? I am sick to death of pretending!”
She reached for the door, ready to storm out in a huff, but Natalia caught her arm and pulled her back, then engaged the locks. Then did it again when Ana Maria went for the unlock button. Then again and again and again in a petty war over the door.
“Enough!” Natalia roared.
Ana Maria stopped, settled into her seat, her breathing labored and her expression stormy.
“Enough,” Natalia repeated in a whisper. “You think it wasn’t hard for me? That I wanted him dead?”
“You didn’t give a shit about him. If you had—”
“What? What could I have done differently?” Natalia asked incredulously. “Hernan caught a DEA agent in his home, in his business. Do you have any idea how much worse it could have been? What he’d have done if he’d caught him in your bed?”
Ana Maria’s eyes went wide with shock, and a hand came up to toy with the tiny diamond necklace their mother used to wear.
“Yeah,” Natalia sneered. “I knew about that. But I looked the other way because I want you to have every normal, wonderful thing in this life—sex included.” God, what wouldn’t she give to allow her sister to fall in love, to suffer a broken heart, to bounce back and do it all again. What wouldn’t she do to share those moments, to giggle over a bottle of wine or cry over a pint of ice cream, all the while discussing men. She wanted those things with a desperation she couldn’t express. And she did her best to give them to Ana Maria, to take comfort in the fact that even if her sister couldn’t have the world, couldn’t have everything, she could have so much more than Natalia did.
“I didn’t know who he was,” Natalia admitted. “Not until it was far too late.”
“Like it would have mattered,” Ana Maria grunted.
Natalia sighed, tucked her chin to her chest, and took a deep, steadying breath. “It might have,” she admitted quietly. “I’ve thought about it, you know. What it would take to bring all this to an end, to set us free. I want that more than you can possibly understand.”
“Just not enough to do anything about it.”
Natalia shook her head on a rough sigh, pushing away the anger and the hurt and the betrayal. This, too, was her fault. She’d kept Ana Maria separate, sheltered. She couldn’t understand the risks, the danger, the consequences, and that was as it should be.
Still, it hurt Natalia’s heart. The urge to blurt out everything, to reveal what she was doing with Ethan, consumed her. Let Ana Maria carry some of the worry, some of the stress, just for a little while.
“I’m doing everything I can—”
“It isn’t enough,” Ana Maria snapped.
“And, so what? You thought you’d take the reins, send in that video? What was the point, Ana Maria? Where did it get you?”
Her sister stared at her with sullen eyes and a mulish expression. “It wasn’t my idea. Garrison found it. He’s the one who sent it in.”
Natalia nodded. It made sense, she supposed, that Garrison Coates would have had a hard time ignoring William Bennett’s plight. They were cut from the same cloth. Good, decent men who had paid dearly for trying to do the right thing.
“He got caught, Ana Maria. The second Hernan knew who he was, what he was trying to do, he was dead.”
“Yeah. And you made sure of it, didn’t you?” Ana Maria bit out, then popped open the lock and got out of the car.
Natalia followed, passing the keys over to her sister, numb to everything but the cold reality that Ana Maria knew so much more than Natalia had ever credited her with—knew, and hated her for it.
Ana Maria took a half dozen steps away, then stopped and turned, hiking her bag up on her shoulder. “I know you didn’t have a choice,” she acknowledged quietly.
“Do you?” Natalia asked, the frigid air of the parking garage slicing through her jacket but still far warmer than her sister’s condemnation.
“Aren’t you tired of it?” Ana Maria asked. “I want more than this, Natalia. More than a handful of shitty choices and shackles wrapped up and presented like freedoms. I want to see the world—or just spend a weekend in New York. I want to fall in love. I want to graduate and get my master’s or find a job or backpack through Europe.”
Natalia wrapped her arms around her middle. “I want those things for you, too.”
“And I want him to pay for everything he’s done to us.”
Natalia went rigid with fear. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel the same, but to say it out loud? It felt too much like inviting death.
Ana Maria smiled at her, but it was sad and brittle and full of pity.
“You can’t even hear it, let alone say it. And that’s how I know you’ve given up.”
What? She shook her head. “I’d never—”
“Not on me. No matter what else happens, I know you’d never do that. But you won’t acknowledge what we both know—Hernan has to die, Natalia. He deserves it.” She shook her head. “And worse? You don’t talk about what you want. College. Medical school. Doctors Without Borders and foreign exchange programs. You used to dog-ear the pages of Vogue, drool over shoes too expensive to be comfortable or practical . . .” Ana Maria trailed off, her hands clutching the strap of her bag, her eyes blinking at Natalia as if she were some sad caged thing in a zoo. “When was the last time you thought of the future? Of next week or next month or next year?” She took a slow step back. “When was the last time you wanted something for yourself?”
Two days ago. It felt like this morning and yet like another lifetime altogether. But when Ethan had put his mouth to hers, when he’d gripped her ass and pulled her close, Natalia had wanted to get lost in the moment. To get lost in him.
But before that? Before Ethan had stormed into her well-ordered life and tipped it like a snow globe? She couldn’t remember; it had been so long.
“I want things, too, Ana Maria.” Freedom. Heady kisses and lingering looks. Indulgent interludes and wild passion.
“Then, for fuck’s sake, go do something about it,” Ana Maria said, then went still and quiet. “Or I will.”
Ana Maria walked away, ensconced in the comfort of her conviction. In the belief that there was still the possibility for something bigger, something better.
It was, perhaps, the greatest gift Natalia could have ever given her: hope.
Maybe it was time Natalia indulged in a little for herself, too.