A love like ours ✔️

♛36.The punishment

Soraya

I stand in front of my mahogany vanity, in the room I was asigned when I was brought here, trying to finish curling my hair and mentally going over the details of the role I have to play.

As of 16 days ago I am Soraya Eliana Cortéz, beloved daughter of Oscar Cortéz, leader of the biggest Cartel in Brazil. Supposedly, I was stolen from my family by our worst enemy, Damiano Morelli and held captive for years. I don't remeber my life before being saved by Salvador both because of severe head injury and my brain wanting to block out the trauma as a defense mecanism.

After my mother, Melody, died giving birth to me I was raised with love by my sperm donnor. I'm the obedient perfect daughter who is to marry to forge an alliance between his and Luis Navarro's Cartels. He thinks that if by some miracle I regain my lost memory, once I'm bound to the Colombian mafioso, it will be to late to do anything about it. I'm his pawn. Or so Oscar thinks.

I grind my teeth together trying to keep my temper under control. Yes, I usually have a short fuse but now my well deserved anger becomes a raging inferno when I think of the fact that he killed her. He ended Gloria, the woman who raised me as her own, as well. It was because of him too that her plane crashed. It was him who put Melody trough hell just so he can end her like she was nothing more than the dirt on the sole of his shoes when he tought she gave birth to a stillborn child.

All I want to do is to is go to his office, where he's undoubtely conducting business with our guest for the night and drag him to the Queens warehouse to torture him for weeks. He'd beg me for mercy but he wouldn't get any, just like the sisters didn't.

My dark mood has dragged me so deep under it's turbulent waters that I burn the nape of my neck with the hot curling wand. I hiss and switch it off before placing it down, welcoming the pain since it jolts me back to reality. I need to focus. The sooner I get my plans over with the better.

"Tsk." My aunt, Marta, clicks her tongue. "Be more careful, Soraya, we don't want more marks to mare that prety skin of yours. I told you to let me do your hair insted." she reprimands, her sage gaze full of disapproval.

"It won't scar." I finally say, fighting the urge to roll my eyes at her as I spray parfume behind my ear. It's not my trademark orange, cedar and honeysuckle fragrance that my husband is so obsessed with, but a roses one, to make me seem more delicate, more demure.

Marta was raised to believe that a woman should be a pretty accesorry and a baby machine for her husband. She needs to love and blindly obey him. My aunt thinks that scars diminishing your value, the same way a show dog doesn't get the prize if its fur isn't perfectly groomed.

If only she knew that even though I've got plenty of them, I've never faced trouble with being desired. A bullet scratch here or a stab in the chest there don't matter, nor will the redish marks on my arms left behing by the burns caused by the explosion, or the inevitable stretchmarks on my hips. When insecurities try to bring me down, I pretend I don't have them. Ignoring them until they're gone is the best strategy. So, whenever I look at myself in the mirror and I don't like what I see, I rember that. It's a continuos cycle.

I choose to focus on the fact that beauty can be hooned. It distracts the eye and the mind from the dangerous creature that hides beneath the surface. I wouldn't call myself vain, but I'm aware of my looks. I've learned to enhance and use them to bring my enemies to their knees. My soon to be 'fiancé', Luis, is no exception. Or so I hope.

"Just be more carereful about it." I watch her in the mirror.

Her dark brown hair streaked with grey is gathered like a halo braid around the crown of her head. Her face is adorned with fine wrinkles, but otherwise she still looks gorgeous at her 55 years. She didn't have an easy life, but she hasn't complained even once about it in the weeks I've known her. From what I've gathered from Sal, one of her boys died when he was little because of an unknown disease. The other one has lost his life on a mission.