Page 104 of Reckless Woman
I laugh bitterly at this. “Are you delusional? You shot my husband, you crashed his plane, you tried to kill himagainin that motel room…trust me, Vi, there aren’t enough painted rocks in the world that could achieve those dizzying heights.”
“Please don’t blame Edier for any of this,” she begs, sweeping a hand across her eyes. “He was just doing what I asked him to.”
“I wouldneverblame him,” I say angrily. “I know exactly how much of a scheming cow you are.”
“At least let me explain—”
“Why the hell would I let you do anything?”
“Let her talk, Anna.” Gabriela appears in the open doorway of the apartment, looking old and crushed. “Words can’t mend what she’s done, but an explanation might bring you some peace in all of this.”
“How could you allow her to come here?” I yell back, feeling the sting of a double betrayal. “After everything she’s done!”
Her kind face disintegrates. I was right. This deception is tearing her apart. “Because I swore an oath to the orphanage that I’d raise her as my own, no matter what,” she says, pleading with her eyes for a sliver of understanding. “I owed it to her to listen to her story.”
“She’s a damn snake. She’ll just keep biting you, over and over.”
“Anna…” Vi takes a step toward and then rapidly retreats when she sees the look on my face. “I know you don’t believe me, but I never meant to hurt you. It washewho warped me, twisted me...hewho made me hate a man through lies and deceit.Hewho insisted that it was Santiago who had sold me at four years old—”
“Sold you where?” I demand.
Her face crumples under the terrible weight of pain and misery.
I recognize that face, I think with a jolt. It’s the same one I saw staring back at me in the mirror every day after Joseph rescued me.
“Holy shit,” I breathe, sitting down hard on the edge of the couch as a memory comes rushing in like a violent tide. “That’s why you reacted the way you did when I told you the name of the man who’d abused me. It was him, wasn’t it? The trafficker, Sevastien Petrov.”
She nods, fighting tears again. “I was stolen from my mother’s arms at four-years-old, along with my cousin, Isabella. I didn’t even know who she was back then. I didn’t even know we were related. By the time I escaped, four years later, I didn’t even remember my birth name.” She flashes me a razor-blade smile that cuts me to the core. “They only ever called us ‘girl’ to dehumanize us. We didn’t deserve anything else. We were just pretty little toys to be played with and abused. Thirty ‘girls’ who they ruined beyond repair.”
Nausea swells in my stomach.How can one man have perpetuated such abuse?From Eve to me and Viviana…
“You escaped and ended up in the orphanage?”
She nods, sitting down on one of the chairs at the table as the truth forms a fragile truce between us. “By chance, I found myself trafficked back in Colombia. The man I was supposed to be ‘entertaining’ that night fell asleep. His guards had gone for a smoke…I took the opportunity, and I ran. I was picked up on the street the next day. The only name I responded to was ‘girl’, so they had no choice but to institutionalize me. A month later, Gabriela was helping at the orphanage. She didn’t know I was Emilio Santiago’s daughter, but I reminded her so much of Isabella she agreed to adopt me. It was a chance fate that saved me from another hell.”
“And this is how you repay her?”
Gabriela steps forward. “What she said is true, señora. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her with my own eyes. They are so alike.”
“How did you know Viviana was your real name?” I ask skeptically.
“Gabriela received an anonymous letter when I was ten. It also said that my true parentage would come to light when I was older. ‘Viviana’ was a name that sounded so familiar to me, so we figured it must be true. It was onlyafterthat I found out it washewho sent the letter.”
“‘After’ what?” I say, pouncing on the word. “And who the hell is ‘he’?”
Her eyes drop to her floor.
“Tell me, Viviana… Is this the same guy behind Vindicta? Behind all of it?”
She nods slowly, and I see the hate flaring in her eyes.
“He summoned me not long after Manuel was killed. I’d just enrolled at a college in the US, but I was a mess again after losing Manuel. He looked like a monster from a nightmare, and he was spouting all these monstrous things at me. He told me that it was Dante Santiago who had killed Manuel in cold blood—a boy who’d loved me like a sister from the minute Gabriela bought me home—and not the lie that had been fed to us. He told me that it was Santiago who had sold me and his own daughter into Sevastien Petrov’s trafficking ring when we were four. And the hurt,parcera…” She shuts her eyes tight as if she’s frightened of what they’d betray. “Theragehe made me feel for Santiago. I wanted to rip him apart with my bare hands. I was prepared to do anything to make it happen. Now I know it was a lie.”
This time, I don’t shout at her for calling me “partner”. In a way we always will be. We’re both survivors from the same hell.
“Vi, Dante didn’t kill Manuel,” I tell her. “Your father did. Eve was there. She watched him shoot Manuel in our old apartment.”
There’s a sob from Gabriela at hearing the brutal way her son died.