Out of sight.
At first, I felt something dangerously close to triumph.
I sat alone in my study, scotch burning down my throat, watching the fire crackle in the hearth.
Justice served, I told myself. Balance restored. I imagined Maria’s ghost finally at peace, my unborn child avenged.
But the satisfaction didn’t last.
It curdled.
From the moment the cell door slammed shut behind Elena, my world began to hollow out. The nightmares returned with a vengeance—but not the familiar ones. Not Al-Chapo’s dungeons. Not the starvation or the beatings or the psychological torture designed to erase my name.
Those memories had been bad enough.
Now they were worse.
Elena invaded them.
Her face emerged from the darkness—pale, hollow-eyed, staring at me with an accusation so sharp it split my chest open. She never screamed. Never begged. She just looked at me, disappointment and betrayal carved into every line of her expression.
I woke night after night drenched in sweat, heart hammering, hands grasping at empty sheets. Reaching for someone who wasn’t there. Someone I had put behind concrete and steel with my own hands.
I thought distance would cure me.
I was wrong.
She was still my wife—an irony bitter enough to choke on. Ending it would have been easy. Divorce papers drawn up in an afternoon. I could have gone to the prison myself, slid them across a metal table, watched her sign. Clean. Final.
Freedom for both of us.
The thought never once crossed my mind.
Instead, her absence became a constant ache, a phantom limb I couldn’t stop feeling.
She haunted my waking hours just as thoroughly as my sleep. I remembered the way she’d look at me when she thought I wasn’t watching—chin lifted in quiet defiance, eyes betraying vulnerability she refused to acknowledge.
The way she drank alone night after night in that club, drowning sorrow without a single soul to lean on.
No family.
No friends.
Only me.
And I had crushed her.
The realization seeped in slowly, then all at once: I hadn’t just imprisoned her body. I’d condemned her to isolation. To fear. To a hell she was never built to survive.
The depression followed.
At first, it was subtle—missed meetings, unanswered calls, decisions delayed. Then it became impossible to ignore. I drifted through my own empire like a ghost, present in name only.
Deals collapsed. Arms shipments vanished into rival hands. Longstanding alliances began to fray.
My lieutenants noticed.
They whispered behind closed doors, their concern edging dangerously close to doubt. But I ignored them, sinking deeper into a fog of self-inflicted misery, nursing drinks I no longer tasted, staring at security feeds I no longer cared to monitor.
