Consumed by Desire: A Dark Mafia Romance, page 1
Consumed by Desire
BB Hamel
Copyright © 2022 by B. B. Hamel
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
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Trigger Warning
1. Olivia
2. Olivia
3. Casso
4. Olivia
5. Casso
6. Olivia
7. Olivia
8. Casso
9. Olivia
10. Casso
11. Olivia
12. Olivia
13. Casso
14. Olivia
15. Casso
16. Olivia
17. Casso
18. Olivia
19. Olivia
20. Casso
21. Olivia
22. Casso
23. Olivia
24. Casso
25. Olivia
26. Casso
27. Olivia
28. Olivia
29. Casso
30. Olivia
Preview: Possessive Devil
Also by BB Hamel
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Trigger Warning
This book contains graphic descriptions of sexual content, explicit violence, some mild drug use, and past trauma. These scenes were written to create a more vivid, in-depth experience, but may be triggering for some readers.
Read at your own risk.
Chapter 1
Olivia
The quiet back seat of Papa’s Range Rover feels like a hearse on the way to my own funeral.
The air conditioning blasts and a partition’s up between the driver and Papa and me. My seatbelt feels like a tether keeping me tied down to the inside of a coffin, and the tinted glass is like the walls of my pinewood box. Soon they’ll toss dirt over my face and forget all about me, and for what? The Cuevas family, Papa would say. The only thing that matters.
We don’t speak. What’s there left to say? I did all my screaming and crying already back in Mexico on my papa’s estate where the bitter sun beat down against my skin and Papa’s guards stood around talking about soccer and wondering when the argument would be over. Their shadows were long ago the tile mosaic set around the pool as Papa tried to explain how this was the right thing to do. I hated him then and I hate him now, and for all that I still can’t seem to bring myself to understand.
Papa’s breathing like a bear. He’s a hairy man with dark tan skin from spending so much time outside. He’s got on a short-sleeve polo shirt tucked into dark slacks and dark dress shoes and a watch that costs more than the car. His gold chain with the diamond-studded crucifix attached at the end is tucked into his shirt but he’ll take it out and touch it and kiss it when it’s time to do the deed. For good luck, he’ll say. He loves that cross more than he loves me. He wouldn’t sell that damn thing if someone put a gun to his head.
I wish Manuel was here to tell Papa off.
“When you see him, I expect you to behave.” Papa doesn’t look at me. He stares out the window as Phoenix, Arizona, flashes past: squat, gray, squalid buildings, faux-Southwest style structures with stucco and cacti and lots of little pebbles, not at all like I remembered. This place was massive, mythic. It’s been ten years since I was last in this city and back then I thought it was home. It was the only place I ever knew.
Now it feels foreign, like Mexico when we were forced to flee across the border in the middle of the night. Papa clutched me against his side then and promised we’d come back.
Now we’re back and I wish everything were different.
“I don’t even know who he is,” I say, keeping my back turned. Let Papa speak to the back of my head. It’ll annoy him and maybe earn me a slap, but what’s it matter now? One last parting strike for his lovely daughter. A gift worthy of a man like Gerardo Cuevas.
“Don’t start this again.” He sounds annoyed and I feel a childish spike of vindication.
“It’s the truth though, Papa. You plan on selling me to some American—”
“Not long ago, you called yourself American, let me remind you.”
I grimace but keep my eyes locked on the scenery. The sky’s like a painter’s blue and the sun’s like an oven coil. Everything’s so spread out and barren, a city stretched to its thinnest across an inhospitable desert: there’s a strange optimism about this place, like despite how badly the outside world wants to cook all the people living here, they keep on going like it’s nothing, like it isn’t some big toaster inhospitable to humanity.
“American, Mexican, you’re selling me to a stranger. That’s the point I’m trying to make.” I feel the argument roll through my shoulders. God, how I shouted at him yesterday, in a way I’ve never shouted at him before in my life: You bastard, you thief, you’re stealing my life from me, you’re treating me like a piece of property, like I’m a slave. I said all that and a lot more. I said things he would never have allowed from any man, and I said it in front of his soldiers. I humiliated him, and my papa took it, all because he knew how horrible it is to make me come here and marry a stranger. I knew it hurt him but what else could I do? When Papa came and said he found a husband for me and he didn’t plan on telling me who, I lost my mind.
How could I marry a man I didn’t know? How could he do this to me, the only flesh and blood he’s got left? This man, who has a shrine to every saint and every ancestor scattered across his home, little niches filled with candles, painted images of the Virgin Mary, burning incense, offerings of fruit and brightly colored flower blooms. This man who says family is everything. This man wants to sell all that he has left in the world.
“We aren’t having this argument again.” He sounds stern now. Papa is exhausted—he’s not as young as he used to be and the trip across the border steals something from him like crossing that invisible line from our country into this one draws away his energy and strength. He’s better in Mexico where he can speak his native language and move through his native culture like a seal cutting through water, but here he’s awkward and uncertain, in a language he never mastered and with people he doesn’t entirely understand. And yet he needs them as much as they need him.
“Convenient for you, but not so much for me. Have you thought about going home to your big house and how quiet it will be without me? Have you thought about me marrying this American man and having his children and becoming a stranger to you? My babies will be American, Papa. I’ll raise them on English and I won’t teach them a word of Spanish. I hope they’re as white as the snow.”
“Olivia,” he snaps, and that’s the Papa I know: his voice like a coal shoved down his throat. He wants to breathe flames on me. “I will not explain myself to you again. You know how our family works and what’s expected of you. With Manuel gone, you’re all I have right now to try to make alliances with the people that can ensure our family continues and thrives. You know I would not ask this of you if it weren’t important.”
I finally look at him. Papa, big papa, with his bushy black beard and dark eyes, so different and strong with his thick neck and shoulders. He glares at me and I smile in return.
“I know, Papa, and that’s why I haven’t hung myself yet.”
His anger dissipates somewhat as he shakes his head and mutters prayers to Virgin Mary begging her to keep watch over me. He touches his fingers to the cross at his chest beneath his shirt, the cross that’s always to close to his heart like nothing else in the world ever could be. Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like if Mama never died or if Manuel were still with me or if that war hadn’t ruined everything we had and more.
“We’re nearly there,” Papa says softly and his anger is gone. We’re in the middle of nothing: low-lying buildings, a strip mall, dozens and dozens of cars. I missed America so much for so long, the television shows, the food, the sounds, the sprawl of the city, and now it feels like an entirely different world than the one I left ten years before, much too big, much too empty, lifeless and sun-stained and riddled with palm trees.
We move away from the main city and out deeper into the desert. This is Apache and Yavapai and Maricopa territory. Rocky, bush-studded, green and brown striated by red. This is the land of my dreams and my nightmares. The land where I was last happy, and the land where I was most hurt. I hate being back and wanted to return so badly it was like an itch at the base of my spine that I could never, ever scratch, no matter how comfortable my life in Mexico was in Papa’s gated house with his guards and his swimming pool and his professional chefs and housekeepers and gold-glittering framed oil paintings and his machine guns. It’s fitting that I’m going to die here, of all places.
“Before you see him, I need you to know something.” Papa sounds almost frightened, and that sends a jolt into my spine. Papa is never frightened. “This was not my first choice, Olivia, but you’re twenty-five years old. It’s long past time for you to marry, and when I heard he was searching for a wife and a good match for his family, I knew this was our opp
“You marry him then. Whoever he is.” But a creeping uncertainty is lodged in my guts. An image from before: a smirking asshole with dark hair and dark eyes and rage etched in every fiber of his muscular body.
Papa stiffens. “Don’t be that way. I’m trying to be honest with you.”
“I don’t feel bad for you,” I say, which is partially true.
Papa grunts angrily. “You will, once you understand. Or perhaps you will be too blinded by your own self-pity to think about what it took to negotiate this marriage and make it all happen, but that’s you, isn’t it, Olivia? Spoiled little brat. Given everything in the world.”
I grimace and look at my hands, at my manicured nails painted black: a little rebellion. Black for my funeral. “I don’t feel spoiled.”
“And yet you are. You’ve lived in my house since we left this place ten years ago, and you’ve done what? Swim and read and take lessons from tutors and do nothing. You’ve had it easy, Olivia, don’t try to tell me different. Most girls your age are married with three or four children already where we come from. I love you, daughter, but it’s time for you to do something hard instead.”
I grit my teeth and don’t answer. What he’s saying isn’t wrong, but it isn’t fair either. As if I haven’t gone through enough.
The car pulls off the main road and hesitates outside of a large gate with a call box on the side. The driver pokes a button and speaks, but I can’t hear—the privacy screen is soundproof. The gate rolls aside and we wind our way down a long driveway toward a massive fountain set in the middle of a beautiful courtyard before a gorgeous home like something from a movie.
It resembles a Frank Lloyd Wright structure, made from glass and wood and slate, with turquoise studded throughout and cacti littered along the front, made to look as though it blends into the landscape, like it’s a natural feature of the rock and was always here and would always be here. It’s beautiful, stunningly so, even more beautiful than Papa’s sprawling grounds back home in Mexico, and that’s saying something.
“Try to behave,” Papa says as he opens the door. Those are his parting words for me: a plea to keep my mouth shut and be a good girl.
I’ve never been great at that.
I climb out after him. The sun’s beating on my back and I want to get inside, but the doors open and people step out front like a procession. Men with guns first, guards in black clothes and sunglasses arrayed to show the strength of—whoever these people are. They face Papa and our soldiers without smiling. Next comes an attractive girl around my age in big sunglasses with a little boy at her hip, no older than a year, a cute little thing with big eyes and a smile on his lips. She’s flanked by a massive tattoo-studded man, good-looking but scowling, and my heart does a strange double-beat. He looks familiar, so crazily familiar, he looks like someone I knew a long time ago, but no, that can’t be the same person. That can’t be who I think it is.
The girl beams at me and waves and takes her sunglasses off. I look closer and stop walking, because oh, god, I recognize her now, even though I knew her when she was only twelve or thirteen, still just a little girl and all gangly legs and rebellious glares, and yes, that must mean the guy beside her is definitely Nico, the angry young bastard I knew back when I was a kid. More tattoos, more muscles, a bit taller, but it’s him, it’s definitely him, and that girl, that nightmare of a girl, she’s Karah Bruno all grown up, pretty and petite, dark hair, dark eyes, grinning like we never hated each other with an ugly bitterness.
“Papa,” I say and it comes out like a squeak.
“Welcome to Villa Bruno,” Karah says, coming forward, Nico ghosting at her hip.
Papa goes forward with a big smile, his hands spread wide. “Ah, Karah, hello, how are you? Last I saw, you were so young. This must be your little boy, what is this name?”
“Antonio,” she says. “And this is my husband, Nico. I’m not sure if you’ve ever met.”
“We haven’t,” Nico says and shakes Papa’s hand and I want to scream at him not to touch them, to get away from him, to turn and run for his life. They’re snakes, they’re killers, they’re slithering swamp serpents and they’re starving and we’re their next meal.
“And where is your brother?” Papa asks Karah.
“He’s on his way out right now. He sent me to apologize for the delay, they were in a meeting.” She gives him another charming smile and the sunlight streams through her perfect hair and I want to run. “Please, let’s get out of this heat.”
“Papa,” I say, voice strangled, because this can’t be happening. Karah’s smile falters and she must see my face—I’m staring at them in horror and not trying to hide it—but Nico acts like he doesn’t notice. The only thing he’s paying any attention to is his wife and his child and Papa’s men with their guns.
“Olivia, please,” Papa says and takes my arm gently but firmly. He steers me to the steps as we follow Karah and Nico into the house, and I’m drawn along like I’m being dragged into the mouth of a massive whale.
The first thing I spot is a massive glittering chandelier hanging over the marble-drenched entry foyer like a symbol of this family’s wealth. It’s a mocking, horrible joke, a reminder of what they stole, and Papa walks beneath it as though the money means nothing and all that blood is dried and gone. When he knows damn well nothing ever stays completely dead.
Oil paintings, golden frames, like my father’s house but everything cleaner, sleeker, modern. Karah chatters about the stress of raising a little boy with Papa and he laughs, doing his charming gentleman act, even though Papa’s little boy is buried because of these people, and I notice that our soldiers were left outside. Meaning we’re trapped and at the mercy of this brood. How Papa can stand it, I have no clue. My skin’s crawling with anxiety, fear, rage.
“Right through here,” Karah says and we’re inside a library. Massive fireplace, rows and rows of books crammed onto wooden shelves, and a big mahogany desk in front of stained-glass windows that depict an idyllic Italian countryside: rolling green hills, bales of hay, olive trees. Nico stands near a drink cart while Karah sits with a huff and bounces her child on her knee. I stay close to Papa, too afraid to comment on the gorgeous rugs, the obscenely beautiful statues, the absurd class and wealth and power that shines from every surface. “He’ll be in soon,” Karah says.
“Which son are you selling me to?” I ask Papa, trying to ignore Nico’s intense glare and Karah’s awkward surprise. “Which one?”
“Olivia,” Papa says, trying to smile, but his tone is warning.
“Enough games. They’re aware of what’s happening.” I wave my hand at Nico and Karah. “You drag me here, into this house with these people, you don’t warn me ahead of time and you want me to hold my tongue? Which one am I supposed to marry, Papa?”
Karah clears her throat. “You don’t know?”
I turn on her. Karah Bruno, little spoiled Karah Bruno. She doesn’t know a damn thing about what my life’s been like these last ten years—no, longer than that, eleven years if you count the miserable war—and she dares talk to me right now. I hate her so much it hurts, like my insides are fire and it’s eating away my skin.
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t told which of your family was purchasing me. I was simply shoved in a car, informed I was going to meet my husband, and driven to this hellhole. So no, I don’t know, Karah.”
She grimaces and glances to the side. She shakes her head slightly and I notice Nico standing there with trembling hands. What’s he going to do—beat me to death with that cut crystal glass for daring to speak to his wife that way? I wouldn’t put it past him.
