Page 22 of Scarred Souls
“Hit me with it.”
He picked up a coffee mug and took a sip. “I guess it begins when Carlos met his American bride-to-be, Angelina Demarco, in Florida. Her family didn’t approve of the match, and she became estranged from them after moving to Acapulco to wed Carlos. Elena María Espinoza Demarco was born less than a year later. Two years after that, her brother”—Brandon leaned toward his laptop to look up a detail—“Rafael arrived. When Elena was six, her mother and brother were killed in a car bombing intended for her father. To protect his only remaining heir, Carlos sent Elena to the US, where she lived in New Jersey using the alias María Demarco. She has dual citizenship, which must’ve made the relocation easier. Elena already spoke decent English because of her mother, and once in the States, she was raised by an American nanny.”
Now it made sense that her accent was different from the locals’ and that she sounded as American as me when speaking English.
Brandon continued. “She was homeschooled by a private tutor. Bright girl. Studied economics at Princeton with solid grades. Carlos did everything in his power to suppress her identity. She had no social media, always had bodyguards watching over her, and rarely socialized outside of attending class. Very few people from Mexico knew what she looked like as an adult or where she’d been hiding all those years. It must’ve been like living under witness protection her whole life.”
Which was why no one in the village knew that the daughter of a cartel boss lived right under their noses.
“Found a couple of interesting rumors,” Brandon added. “Apparently, Espinoza was going to bring Elena home and introduce her to the less salubrious side of the organization once she completed her degree.”
“And she never finished it?”
“Nope. Only six months shy of graduating from Princeton with honors.”
“What’s the other rumor?” I asked.
“She is—or was—engaged to this guy.” He spun his laptop to show me an image of Elena and a man at an expensive-looking restaurant. Brandon clicked through to the next image of the pair sipping champagne on a luxury motor yacht.
A sour taste filled my mouth because I recognized who she was with. “Jorge Ortega.”
As Carlos Espinoza’s second-in-command, Ortega was another of our high-value targets.
I scratched my jaw, baffled by Brandon’s intel. “Elena Espinoza is engaged to el Señor del Dolor?”
Ortega’s moniker translated to the Lord of Pain. If the stories were true, even the most loyal of men sang like canaries, hoping Ortega would deliver them a swift death. He rarely did, and the mutilated bodies he left on the streets had perpetuated his reputation.
Ortega wasn’t responsible for my torture, but given my history, my hatred for el Señor del Dolor bordered on obsessive.
“That’s the one,” Brandon said. “He was a street kid until he completed his first hit for Espinoza at ten years old. Carlos took a shining to Ortega and treated him like an adopted son. He earned his stripes when Espinoza gave him the Colima Plaza to run, and he’s been second-in-command for the Pacific Coast Cartel for almost a decade now. Jorge was one of very few people permitted to visit Elena in New Jersey. Looks like a quarterly booty call was enough to keep their long-distance relationship fresh.”
I felt sick. Elena was engaged to a sadistic fuck who was no better than the men who’d kept me in a cage. She had to know about Ortega’s reputation. He lived for the notoriety it gave him and thrived on its intimidation power.
How could she want to spend the rest of her life with a psychopath who made delivering pain an art form? What kind of person did it make her? That was a cartel princess for you. Born into the narco life and accepting of all its ugliness. I’d misjudged her. Thoroughly.
And I’d just saved her undeserving ass from those thugs. I should’ve let her deal with them on her own. Except the scorpions freshly inked on their necks identified them as Pacific Coast Cartel. They’d had no idea who she was, but why had she been so angered by their arrival? After all, they were her father’s men. Ortega’s men. Something was off.
But that wasn’t important right now.
“So the Alvarez Cartel found Elena in New Jersey and kidnapped her?” I asked.
“Not even close. Here’s where her story takes a bizarre turn. Three years ago, Elena boarded a commercial flight to Guadalajara and surrendered herself to the Alvarez Cartel.”
The PCC’s rival and enemy?
“What?” I recoiled. “Why?”
“Because a friend of hers from Princeton, Natalie Parker, disappeared. According to her missing person report, she was last seen stumbling out of a club in New Jersey, leaning heavily on the arm of a dark-haired man after only one drink. I guess Elena used her connections to figure out that Natalie had been trafficked to Guadalajara by the Alvarez Cartel. She offered herself up in exchange for her friend’s release.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t Elena ask for her father’s help to have her friend released?”
Brandon leaned back in his chair and braced his hands behind his head. “Maybe she did. Carlos Espinoza’s relationship with the Alvarez Cartel has always been tense. He wouldn’t have wanted to ask them for a favor.”
I shook my head. “You’re telling me Elena sacrificed herself to save her friend?”
“By all appearances, that’s exactly what happened. I think we need to consider the possibility that Elena Espinoza isn’t tarred with the same brush as her father.”
I choked back a bitter laugh. “I wouldn’t be so hasty drawing that conclusion. You’re forgetting she’s engaged to a deranged murderer.”