He dragged a barrel to the front of their motel room. It was a slow night at the motel, except for the hot couple next door who’ve been staying since the night before and couldn’t seem to get their hands off each other. They’ve been having sex all day and all night, and they were loud.
Diego put some woods into the barrel that was stacked near the porch of their room and lit a fire. He pulled a chair and sat next to the fire with a bottle of Vodka in his hand.
They haven’t spoken much to each other since that morning. She was still upset after he aimed shots at her. He was frustrated because he didn’t know what ‘s the point of finishing his job anymore. But most of all, the kiss that they tried to pretend didn’t mean anything.
She came out of the bedroom. The noise was getting too much to bear. “They’re really going at it …” she mumbled. She pulled a chair and sat next to him, she extended her arm asking to share the vodka. He gave it to her.
“Look … This hadn’t turned out the way I want it to …” she began.
He scoffed, “You think?”
“I know … you must think I’m stupid … maybe I am … I don’t know …” she looked down. “He’s the only constant thing in my life … he’s all I’ve got now.”
Diego glared at her, took the bottle off her hand and sucked hard on it.
“He’s terribly sick, you know? The way he was brought up … his parents … it wasn’t all his fault the way he turned out … even I have some contribution to it too … I always comply with his demands, everybody else did too … it made him worse.”
Diego raised his brows, took a deep breath and kept everything he wanted to say to himself. He sucked the bottle again.
“There’s this place he used to take me in Lancaster … a villa in the suburb that his family owns but they don’t use … he made it his own getaway whenever he wanted to have time alone … away from his parents and the life they chose for him … those are the best times … because he was just himself, he was not that monster they created him to be.”
He looked at her in disbelief, he shook his head. “That is absurd. Can you really separate ‘the real him’ from ‘the monster’? Are you even listening to yourself right now? You’re making excuses for all the rotten things he did … yeah you’re right, you are a huge contributor to your own mess.”
“It’s really not that simple, when you love someone … have you ever loved someone?”
He was taken aback by the question. They stared for a while then he drank his vodka. “Not the way you have … obviously … I don’t believe in love that makes you go back to do the same mistakes again and again … that’s just stupid.”
She pursed her lips, “It is … sometimes love makes you do stupid things, you can’t simply explain it, and it’s so hard to get out of that loop, I thought by staging my own kidnap … I could finally be free … who am I kidding? Running away from the problem would never solve it … he needs to get psychiatric help.”
Diego chuckled sarcastically, “Do you think he will do that now? In his position? With the kind of power he has, did he even acknowledge that he needed any help?”
She sat back on the chair looking at the flickering light from the fire, “He knows it … he just didn’t want to admit it, he’s too tough for that.”
Diego let out a long exhale, “I don’t think you paid me 20 million dollars to be your psychiatrist, he killed your parents,” he looked at her in the eyes, “If you’re not as sick as he is … that should mean something to you … this man is going to kill you eventually, maybe not now, not when you grovel at his feet and ask for his forgiveness … for not accepting being badly mistreated … he will hurt you again and again because he feeds from it … are you really going to let yourself be the fuel to his madness?”
He laughed in disbelief, “I really don’t understand it … do you take pleasure from it? Justify his actions just because you believe it when he says he loves you? Blaming everyone and everything else other than him … is he not obliged to take responsibility for his own actions?”
She sighed deeply, “I don’t … take any pleasure from this, but I feel like I have to help him because I know there’s something wrong with him … and he doesn’t have anyone else that can help him.”
Diego laughed out loud this time, he held his head with both hands, “Oh my God … is this that beauty and the beast kind of thing? You believe you can save him? Turn him into someone else that you imagined him to be? It would give you pleasure won’t it? Turning a man like Armand Lombardo into a good loving, caring man that lives in your fantasies?”
She didn’t respond.
“I’ve seen how these kinds of relationship ends, Ari … 90% at a time, it always end up with one or the other dead … the 10% they will live together in pain and misery until the day they die … there’s no fairy tale ending to these kinds of relationships … don’t fool yourself, get out while you still can … he’ll never change … not for you, not for his own good, never.”
She stayed quiet.
“Look … your new passport will be ready in two days, we should head to Goldstone tomorrow … I’m just … God I wish I can change your mind somehow … you were on the right track to escape from him, don’t go back to that, please … I’d like to think your 20 million and my future at stake is worth something … not just an impromptu plan you never really intended to see through … a twisted lovers quarrel of the mafia heirs or some shit like that,” he scoffed and drank his vodka.
He was at the end of his wit. She was a lost cause. Whatever she decides to do with her new identity and her life is out of his hands now. He should never have been involved in this mess in the first place. His only job now is to turn off that voice in his head that he could save her too. Whatever happens to her after Goldstone is not his problem anymore.