An Insane Love

by Bianca

“Queen, your birthday is coming up. How will you be celebrating?” Emmanuel asked me.

  He’d never called me by my name. It had always been Beautiful or Queen, but made sure to call me ma’am, when Romero was around. In his rules, I was never supposed to be casual with ‘The Help’ but I couldn’t help it. I was always around them, everywhere I went.

  “I was hoping that I could celebrate with my best friend back home. I haven’t buttered Romero up enough to ask him just yet. Maybe I can tell him that you two will come with, and he will say yes.”

  “That’ll probably be a no. You know how Romero acts about you. You’ve been his…” he paused for a moment, “mistress for the… over a decade. He’s in love with you, whether he tells you that or not. He hates when you go back over there because he thinks you won’t come back. Why you think you have access to all of his money now,” Emmanuel said.

  Emmanuel hated calling me a sugar baby. He had always called me Romero’s mistress. Romero had never told me that he loved me, and hell, I’d never told him either. This had just been a long ass business arrangement.

  Turning to Miguel, I asked him, “You think that?”

  He nodded his head.

  “The few times that you have left him and terminated your contract, he’s been lost. He has pictures of you and him all around his office.”

  I sat back in my seat because I never knew that. The first time I terminated my contract was after the first six months of living over here. I had decided to move over here because this nigga would call me on Monday and tell me that he needed me in Italy. I would fly over there on Monday, come back on Wednesday, and this greedy ass dude would call me the next day and tell me that he needed me. After a month of doing that, I had decided to just move over here. I thought that was what he wanted anyway. Nevertheless, I had become home sick, and I was sick of being around people who could barely speak English. Miguel and Emmanuel were not allowed in my living area, so I couldn’t talk to them, because they were the only people who could speak English well. I was bored as hell with talking to Olena on the phone; I wanted to see her and lay up in the bed with her and eat a lot of snacks. I had missed us partying together every other weekend, so I left.

  When I had moved back home, my parents laid into me. They snapped on me so bad and then damn near put me out. My dad made me give all my money that I made to the church. I was heated. Romero didn’t hit me up until I had been gone for two months, and he was yelling at me about how one of his counterparts had a video of me playing with my pussy. My face wasn’t in it or anything, but he could tell it was my pussy. I had gotten back on the website, but I was mostly just going on dates with men and getting paid for shit like sending pictures of my feet or ass. The richest guys were the biggest weirdos. I promise.

  This one guy really had a foot fetish. My stomach was churning just thinking about it. I went over to his house one time, and I thought that we were going to fuck, but nope. He wanted me to slap him with my feet and even jack him off with my feet. Needless to say, I took my two thousand dollars and never saw him again. When I needed a quick buck, I would send him a picture of my feet, and he would send me five hundred dollars. The video that Romero was talking about was this guy I had met and went out to dinner with. He said that he just wanted to record me playing with myself. He promised me that my face wouldn’t be in the video, and it wasn’t. I didn’t know how it got back to Romero, and I didn’t ask. All I knew was that the next day, I got a call from Romero saying that he was waiting for me at the jet strip and that Emmanuel was waiting for me outside. I looked out my window, and he was standing outside of the truck, and he waved at me.

  My dad went outside to try and fight Emmanuel and got his ass beat. He told me that I would be dead to him if I got in that truck. At that moment, I didn’t care. We pulled up to the jet strip, and he was standing outside the jet, waiting. It was like he knew I was going to be in the truck with him. After we got back to Italy, I resumed my ‘mistress’ duties like I hadn’t been missing for months. That was the first time I left his ass.

  The second time I left was when I had to beat two of his cousins’ asses. They weren’t even supposed to be in my living corridors, but they were. They were so disrespectful. Esmerelda, his wife, demanded that he put me out, but he didn’t have to because I was already on my way out. I stayed with Olena and her parents the second time because my parents weren’t so welcoming. He came and got me from Olena’s house and brought me back to Italy. The third time I left was when Olena went missing a little over a year ago. He understood the situation and told me to come back when I was ready.

  “Queen,” Emmanuel called me.

  I noticed that we were back on the Santiago estate. This place was huge and definitely like a castle. I wish I could tell you the square footage. All I knew was there was a huge golf course in the back, and this house was like three blocks long. I really had my own living corridors. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms with a living room and a kitchen. It was not huge, but it wasn’t small either. If I had to guess, it was probably about fifteen hundred square feet. I loved it though.

  I picked up my phone to call him, and it picked up on the first ring. I could hear Esmerelda screaming like someone was killing her. Romero did have some good sex… good head especially, even though I only came from certain positions. His dick wasn’t big, and it wasn’t small. He did have a good amount of width. If only he was like Frank… long and wide… fuck Frank.

  “Right there, papi!” she whimpered into the phone.

  I immediately hung up the phone. I didn’t know why I felt a certain way, because he was married to her, and I was just the side chick, even though he told me that I was much more than just a side chick to him. Of course I was; I was his assistant. After I made it into my living corridors, I threw his suits down on the couch. I went in my room and waited until he came in here and apologized like he always did when Esmerelda did dumb shit.

  Romero Santiago

  As I was walking back into the bedroom from the shower, I heard Esmeralda, or Essie, moan into my cell phone.

  “Essie, what the hell are you doing?” I spat.

  “Your whore called,” she replied and threw my phone at me.

  “My whore? She’s not my whore.”

  “Papi, you have been dealing with this whore for over ten years. What is so different about her? I’m used to you having a mistress for a year or so and then they be gone, but her… it’s been her forever. You are fifty-three years old. There is no way that you should be running around with a girl that’s in her twenties,” she said.

  “Essie, you act like you don’t have your boy toy on the other side of the house, and besides, she’ll be thirty soon. Where is all of this coming from, and now?”

  “You ignore me for her. I’m your wife…”

  “Cut the theatrics, Essie. Get out and let me get dressed,” I ordered her.

  She shook her head and walked out of my room. Essie and I had been married since we were twenty-one years old. We didn’t marry because we loved each other. We got married because we were supposed to. Essie and I are good business partners. That was all it would ever be between us, and she knew that. She didn’t love me either. That was why I was confused on where all that shit was coming from.

  After I got dressed, I pulled on a pair of tan linen pants along with a white button down. I slid into my Ferragamo house shoes and headed toward Taiwan’s living corridors. Taiwan was special to me. Not because I had watched her grow from a young lady to a woman, but because she made me happy… truly happy. I tried to show my appreciation for her every day. I knew that I had struck gold the moment I laid eyes on her. Knowing Taiwan the way I did, I knew she’d be upset about that stunt that Essie pulled. No matter how much she tried to fight it, I knew that she loved and cared about me.

  The moment I made it to her door, it was locked, which meant that she was pissed. I didn’t even know why she locked the doors as if I didn’t have a key. Taking the key out of my pocke
t, I pushed it in the keyhole and opened the door. She wasn’t in the living room, so I walked to the bedroom where I heard the shower going. She didn’t even jump when I pulled back the glass.

  “Shut the door, Romero!” she snapped at me.

  In the beginning, she didn’t talk to me like this because I didn’t play that shit. After eleven years, shit had changed. She was basically my wife, but not on paper.

  “I’m not shutting anything, mami!”

  “Your suits are on the couch. Take them and get out!” she said.

  Although I had just gotten out of the shower, I stepped back from the door and got undressed. I opened the door again and got in with her. The water running down her curvy body made my dick stand up and pop her on her thick ass. This girl was the most beautiful woman I ever laid eyes on. When I first contacted her on that sugar baby website, I had looked up everything about her, but her pictures didn’t do her any justice. Her brown skin was free of any imperfections. Her teeth were so pretty and straight. It was like she had worn braces for years. Even her dark eyes were sexy, and especially when she was mad at me and they’d turn into slits. Her breasts weren’t big, but she had enough to grip, and her beautiful ass never wore bras, but when she did, they would push them up and had her looking like she had a rack on her. Her stomach was flat, and her ass was very petite. She was shaped like a skinny Coke bottle. I loved gripping on her ass when I was hitting her from the back. I loved when she wrapped her toned legs around my back. If I could have kids, she would have been pregnant. We would have a tribe of kids running around here. My heart ached for the day when she would tell me that she wanted to have a baby. We’d talked about marriage before and having a family, but very briefly.

  My eyes watered at the sight of the big ass bruise on her back. I was on some other shit the other night when I saw her taking a swim with her security guard and my young nephew, Miguel. Well, he wasn’t swimming; he was sitting on the edge, watching her. I saw from the room that I shared with Essie. The look in his eyes told me everything I needed to know regarding him. He looked at her… the same way I look at her. The way she butterfly-stroked up and down the pool had him trying to conceal his hard on. Shifting his shorts with no conscious. It didn’t help that she had on the smallest thong-bikini she could find. She had grabbed onto the side of the pool next to him and jumped out the water. He helped her out of the water by grabbing on the back of her thigh, too close to her damn butt cheek. She sat next to him, and they were talking and laughing. I had decided that I had enough when his hand went to her thigh.

  I stalked down the stairs like the mad man I was. I yanked her up by her neck and all but dragged her to her living corridors. I hadn’t slept good since that night. She swore that she forgave me, because out of the eleven years she’d been my lady, I had never hit her until that one time. I always shuddered at the thought.

  “You stupid bitch! You were going to fuck my fuckin’ nephew! Under my fucking roof!” I growled in her ear.

  She was fighting and clawing at my hands, but she was no match for me. I opened the door and pushed her inside. She fell to the floor, got up, and started hitting me everywhere her fists would land. I kept trying to block her, but I couldn’t block each one of them. I pushed her hard as fuck into the wall, and she hit her head and fell unconscious for moment. I rushed to her side and started trying to shake her awake, but she didn’t budge. I called for my medical team to come in the room.

  Five minutes later, they were rushing into the room and working on her. She woke up soon after they rubbed something under her nose. She went through concussion protocol, and thank God she didn’t have a concussion. I took her bathing suit off and put her wet body in the bed. She started crying and turned away from me. I got pissed at myself because I had always been able to control myself.

  “Mami, I’m sorry! Please forgive me, please!” I begged her.

  “Get out my damn room, Romero.” She sniffed.

  With my tail between my legs, I left her room but made a person from the medical staff stay with her to make sure that she would be okay. I hated myself for doing that to her.

  “Romero! You don’t see me handing you this loofah,” she said, bringing me back to this very moment.

  I took the loofah from her and started washing her back. She didn’t flinch at all when I rubbed over the bruise.

  “Mami, I’m sorry…”

  “Romero, you’ve been apologizing for the last two days. You’re sorry. I get it! You won’t put your hands on me again. The next time you do that, I’mma kill you with my bare hands, and I mean that,” she said.

  Hearing her say that made me smile because that was the spicy attitude that I fell in love with.

  Twenty minutes and one quick round of sex later, we were out of the shower, and I was now pissed again at what she had just said to me. She had me so pissed that I was pacing in front of her. She had told me that she wanted to spend her birthday with her best friend. I couldn’t even reply to her because of the fury that had built up inside of me.

  “What do you mean that you want to spend your birthday with your friend?” I questioned.

  “What you mean, what I mean? Olena is my best friend. I wanna spend my birthday around people I love.”

  “I don’t wanna sound… I mean… You just saw them—”

  “Six months ago. I saw them six months ago, but it doesn’t matter when I last saw them. I haven’t seen my nieces and nephew in six months. I want to see how big my nephew has gotten. He’s seven months old now. My nieces will be two soon. FaceTime is not enough!”

  “I was going to take you to Bora Bora,” I said.

  “We’ve been twice. I’m not missing anything. Look, I was only telling you out of courtesy; not like I was asking for your permission or anything. I’m only going to be gone for a week—”

  “A week! What am I supposed to do without you for a week!”

  “First of all, lower your fucking voice, Romero Santiago. You’ll manage without me.”

  “We are going to revisit this conversation. I have a meeting I have to get to. I’ll be back, and we are going to discuss this some more.”

  “There is nothing more to discuss,” she said to me.

  Not responding to her statement, I walked out of the room. I changed into one of the suits that she had picked up for me and walked out her door. My bodyguards and driver were waiting on me out front to take me to my meeting.

  One Hour Later…

  “Have you lost your goddamn mind!” my brother, Raphael Santiago, yelled at me. Looking around before lowering his voice, he said, “You told me that she was just your assistant and someone you fucked on from time to time. What the hell are you talking about, you want to marry her? Dad would never—”

  “Dad would never what?” My dad, Romano Santiago II, walked up and joined the conversation.

  My dad was the smoothest seventy-year-old man that you would ever meet. He was still in shape and still ran his organization with an ironclad fist. He was still the most respected man here. Everybody knew not to cross him. He’d have you knocked off… family included.

  “Nothing,” both Raphael and I said at the same time.

  I had told Raphael that I was thinking about divorcing Essie and marrying Taiwan. He cursed me out in English, Spanish, and Italian. My parents would never accept Taiwan as my wife. First, she was black. Second, she was young. Third, she knew nothing about our family business. I preferred her not to know about our family business. Like I told her all those years ago, some things were just not worth her knowing. She was a very smart girl, so I thought she kind of had an idea of my job but didn’t know the details.

  My dad was the head of the Santiago cartel. This man was everything you needed him to be when you needed him to be. Supplier of drugs, guns, and money. I was over the guns part of the cartel. Both me, my brother, and my uncle Ricardo, had been waiting for him to retire. Although he had more brothers and sons, we knew that we were in the top three to take
over the Santiago cartel.

  We followed my dad into the meeting room. The meeting started, and the whole time I should have been paying attention, but my mind was on Taiwan. I hated when she went to visit Olena. I know how Olena used to be. I had everyone that Taiwan was closed to researched before she stepped foot into my penthouse that first night. I got her fingerprints to continue my research. You never know what fingerprints pulled up.

  Once Olena started dating that Bailey boy, I kind of figured that her and Frank would be next, but she told me that she couldn’t stand Frank. I believed that because I had her phone and social media records scanned, and they hadn’t communicated once. The game plan changed when Olena went missing and Taiwan went back to be with the family. Every day, I was still checking up on her by scanning her phone records and stuff. Not one time did Frank’s information come up, but the day I went and picked her up and saw him kiss her on her neck… I wanted to shoot his ass right then.

  After that, I researched Franklin Wade, and nothing came up. When I said nothing, nothing… I barely found a birth certificate. How the hell did one have nothing in the system? The only thing I could find was when he got arrested a few years back on a bullshit charge by some corrupt judge. He was only in there for a few months though. Just the look in his eyes, I knew that he was trouble. So, after I brought her back, I continued to scan her phone and social media activity. She would kill me if she knew I was doing that. She had a voicemail that she had deleted from an unknown number. Unknown numbers didn’t leave voicemails… long ones at that. The voicemail was about two minutes long. Against my better judgement, I listened. I regret listening to that voicemail.

  Hey, Tai… It’s me, Franklin Wade. Um, I’m kinda glad that you didn’t answer the phone because it would have been even harder to do this. What happened between us was a mistake. I should have never come on to you like that. I love Alex, and I feel like a piece of shit for hurting her. I don’t know what made me do it. I think it was because of your ability to get me together or how much fun I had around you, even though we had come together over a dark moment in both of our lives. Tai… I’m calling you that because I know you hate it. Damn, I’m sitting here thinking about how good you tasted… how fat your lips are… fuck, man… how good you felt around me. Listen, I’m sorry for being a bitch ass nigga, but I can’t fuck with you like that no more… not even on a friend level. I have to respect Alex. Bye.