DIEGO’S POINT OF VIEW
I can’t leave her in there, I just can’t but if I let her out without completing her one month sentence people would think that I have gone weak.
I have spent most of my life trying to convince everyone that I am a more ruthless mafia king than my father ever was, that I am nothing like that weak spineless kid that could not bear the sight of blood or the thought of someone getting hurt.
I have spent a long time building this mafia king persona, I have spent a long time trying to gain everybody’s fear and respect letting Valentina go will destroy that but yet again I just can not bear the thought of her being in pain.
It has been thirty six hours since she has been down there in that cell and I have spent every single second of those hours worrying about her, trying to find out from my people if she is okay. They told me she what’s refused to eat, I really don’t know what to do with Valentina, I want to release her so I can stop being this nervous wreck but I…I can’t, I am a powerful mafia king, I don’t want people to see Valentina as my weak point, a mafia king should never have a weak point, my father taught me that.
But I can’t anymore, I can’t keep her locked up anymore but I also can’t set her free, it would make me weak, it would make my enemies become bold enough to challenge my authority, to challenge my empire.
I don’t know what to do! Arrgh! Why does Valentina have to be so stubborn so strong willed! Why can’t she just obey me! It would be easier if she wasn’t so stubborn, so resistant to my rules
But yet again I am so certain that I would not like her the way I do now if she was easy… something about her stubbornness makes me want her more.
She reminds me of a girl I had once known, a girl from my childhood, I cannot remember her name, her face is so blurry and unrecognizable in my mind but there is this memory I have of her, it is one I cannot seem to forget.
In the memory we ran away from the mansion, in this memory my father had threatened to lock me up in the dungeon because I had refused to shoot the maid with his rifle.
My father had found out that our one of our maids (Stacy) was working as a spy for a rival cartel, he had tied her to the tree out there in the field and had given me his rifle to end her life but I couldn’t, as usual I was nothing but his weak excuse for a son, a child who he had always suspected to be a product of my mother’s illicit affair with the driver.
My father had looked at me with that disappointed scowl that I was so used to, he knocked me to the ground with the end of the rifle in his hand and left me there with blood oozing from my head, nobody around the house was supposed to help me, I was supposed to stay right there in the field until he got back so he could take me to the dungeon where I would be left to starve for days.
Nobody was supposed to help me (if they wanted to stay alive) but this girl did not care, she did not care that my father would end her life within a snap of the finger, she helped me clean my wounds.
“Let’s run away from here Dee, I can’t watch him hit every single time. ” She said crying.
She used to say that ‘let’s run away from here’ all the time but this time for the first time I agreed with her.
So we set off, she brought her things upstairs from the maid’s quarters and with my head still bandaged we waited for nightfalls before we headed out the door with Gabriel’s help, he is my uncle, the only relative I know who did not agree with my father’s violence.
We ran away only to be captured back by my father.
I think I love… loved this girl, for some reason Valentina reminds me of her, for some reason I can’t shake the feeling that Valentina might be this girl.
Nah, that would be crazy.
VALENTINA’S POINT OF VIEW
We ran away together. Once. Diego and I. I was fourteen while Diego was sixteen, we had to escape, his father was what you can only describe as a beast in a human form. He did not care that Diego was his child, or that Diego was just a boy. He was hard on him, constantly taunting and punishing him, always telling him that he was nothing but a huge mistake, that he could not believe that Diego was his own son with how weak and pitiful he was.
He lied, Raphael Fernandez, Diego’s father. He lied when he said Diego was weak and pitiful. Diego was not weak, he had never been, he was strong and determined and kind, he was my Diego and I was his girl.
“Release her right now!” I heard Diego say. Maybe his voice is just in my head, he does not care about me, he made that clear the other night.
I closed my eyes shaking his voice, his face, his image, forcing the memory of him out of my mind. He is a mafia king now, just like his father was, he is cold and ruthless and emotionless now.
Diego is exactly like Raphael Fernandez now, the Diego I had once known and loved is dead now replaced by this monster, this unrecognizable monster. It is high time I accept the fact that I cannot remind him of the kind hearted person he once was.
My Diego is gone.
“Valentina, I’m sorry.” He said his eyes looking sympathetic.
In his eyes I could see the Diego I had once known.