“Well tell something that my attention is already focused on other things.” He flicks his fingers in a lazy shooing motion like I’m some type of insect disrupting him.
Fucking asshole.
I lean down to meet his glare and grab the glass of liquor off the table, drinking it down. He watches me, his brow arching, and I slam the empty glass down.
“Your sister’s down there dancing with Adrian’s friend, and by the looks of it, he’s moments away from having her look like one of your lovely friends here.” My eyes shoot to the girl to the left running her tounge up his ear.
He stands abruptly, pushing the girl off him and buttoning his suit. He flies down the stairs so fast I can barely keep up. Before I make it out the door, Axel is already dragging Ariella off the dance floor.
Efren looks at me, his eyes turning cold, and my heart accelerates. I look away, but my eye catches on the pistol sticking out of Patricio Consuelo’s back waistband. A memory slips from my mind. It’s as if I can hear the shots fired and more of the memory unfolds. This time I watch the bullet hit Esteban in the chest. I drop to my knees and hold him into me and scream.
“You woke up, you heard a noise, and then you found him like this. Do you understand me?” Efren is standing over me cleaning a gun, and then he sticks it into his waistband.
Chapter 19
Alma
Iwas ready to confront Efren the moment reality returned to me, but he never came back to the penthouse. Three days have already passed, and the need to yell at him has turned into an anxious need to know if he’s okay.
Somewhere, tangled in the loathing, is a hunger I can’t shake. Efren has pulled things out of my body I can’t explain. It’s more than a need. It’s something darker, deeper. A craving that grips and pulls. Primal and unrelenting.
“Alma, I’m sending Ariella up to help you,” Enrique’s voice emerges from the intercom.
The hotel is extremely short staffed in the days following Vicente Consuelo’s birthday party. Over half the hotel staff have caught a stomach virus. I thought maybe Efren had caught it and was hiding in his room, so I barged in last night, but he wasn’t there.
It’s not until Ariella Reyes is in my office that I contemplate another theory about where Efren has been these last three nights. After I told Axel about Ariella, I felt a pang of guilt. Maybe I’d misjudged her, but the loathing reappears when I see her whole neck covered in hickies.
She glances up from where she’s smiling down at her phone. Suddenly, I’m hyper aware of her every perfect feature, and I can’t get the image of Efren and Naomi out of my mind. Only now it’s Ariella on all fours on the bed, and he’s thrusting inside her.
“I’m sorry, is everything okay?” Ariella asks.
“It’s fine. When you’re done with the rooms, you’ll need to clean the commons bathroom next to here. I take it you know where everything is?” I do my best to remain professional.
She technically owns this place. Her family does, and I don’t want to offend her, but she’s getting on my last nerve. I wait until she’s gone to do a good old fashion google search.
Typing Efren’s name into the computer, all I can see is his arrest information. I never really knew what happened. From what Mireya told me, he and Adrian had been set up by Adrian’s ex-girlfriend and her father.
I hadn’t had enough time to do a proper stalking of Efren before this. Maybe I didn’t care before, but I should know who I’m living with. Pulling up my Instagram, I go to Ricky’s page. There’s no Efren to be found in his list of friends.
Diving deeper I search Adrian, Mireya, and Thalia’s pages. All their accounts are fucking ghostlands when it comes to content. The last picture on Adrian’s page is of him and Mireya at the Calavera Christmas party. Her belly is big, and his hand is possessively placed on it with the caption:Diosa.
I spend the next hour looking up everyone I think might know Efren, going down a deep rabbit hole where I end up stalking Silas’s aunt’s friend’s cousin’s page. The woman had a whole ass quinceañera for her pet chihuahua. Eventually, I come back to square one and search Ariella’s page.
My mouth drops. Seventy thousand followers! Seventy thousand people who apparently love her daily vlogs and workout content. Her whole page is filled with videos thatmake me look at the box of donuts on my desk with disgust. Who has the time to work out this much? I look at her pictures, convinced I’ll see a glimpse of Efren’s hand or something in the background, but there’s nothing.
Her last picture is one of her and Vicente Consuelo with the caption, “La Consentida de Welo.” There are over 100,000 likes. I vaguely search to see Efren’s name. It’s not real stalking if you don’t go through every single comment. While I don’t find anything that might be Efren, I do see one that stands out.
Levithegoodwitch: Like this comment if you came here after watchingTonio has Tea.
There are over a hundred likes already on the comment. I pull up the YouTube channel on my desktop and findTonio has Tea’s page. The video’s titled“Guarda Espada or Amante?”Body guard or lover? There’s over ten thousand views.
In the video, Ariella is crying, and a large guy steps between everyone and picks her up. According to Tonio, the man picking her up is her bodyguard and her lover? I’ve never seen the guy. This has to be some kind of clickbait.
Before I can dive further, Shawny is at my office door.
“I just finished my last room. Is that all for the day?”
Shit. I’ve spent half the day looking for Efren on socials.
