VERTIGO

V

• Serephina •

Six days, thirteen hours and twenty-seven minutes.

Exactly how long it had been since Silas and I had felt each other for the first time within the last one-hundred and eighty-one days.

Yes, I was aware of how incredibly pitiful it was that I had been counting down all the days I had gone without any intimacy from my husband.

My fingers drummed restlessly on the table as the regret consumed me; it consumed me because all it did was remind me of everything I had been fighting to have again for months on end.

But my husband was too invested in pursuing the brother of my dead rápist husband and the killer of his baby brother.

In times like these, I could practically hear my mother's voice taunting me in one of her drunken hazes I had become very much accustomed to from a young age.

"You're a worthless child roaming the slums of Mexico - you think you're going to be someone, do you? You think you're going to make it big, do you?" She slurred, collapsing on the heap of trash in the middle of the room.

Magdalena Cuevez De La Cruz was an ambitious power hungry woman who was ready to take on the world with her affluent family right beside her - but she made a mistake. She made the mistake of falling in love with Tamaulipas's very own Robin Hood, Leon Mendoza Romero, a man whom her family loathed.

So, of course, they did what any star crossed lovers would do - they ran away.

They ran to Paris, to Venice, to Rio, Santorini where they made love under the stars, where they would spend hours on end simply enjoying each others company, where they finally eloped.

I smiled as I recalled the number of times my mother and father would tell me the very same story, with the unmissable look of love between them.

After my birth, my mother had tried to reconcile with her family but my grandfather was a cruel, hard man who saw pure betrayal when he laid eyes on his only daughter. My mother felt she had been persistent enough so she accepted her father's wishes, but she used to laugh, telling me she had decided from the moment she met my father that he was all the family she needed.

I grew up in a small house near the coast and I remembered having a wonderful childhood. My father had begun earning an honest living to support us while my mother would stay at home and look after me.

There really was no such man like my father.

I will never love another man the way I love my Papa, I used to say, until I fell in love with Silas.

I laughed out loud as I imagined how my husband and father would have gotten along. I knew Papa would not have disapproved of Silas' position as the Patron of the most notorious cartel in Mexico given my father came from a similar place, but I knew he would bask in every opportunity intimidate my husband. I caught my reflection in the mirror ahead of me, my eyes almost identical to my father's.

He had the kindest hazel-brown eyes, eyes I inherited from him, they were just a little lighter than his.

"Mi dulce angel, mi Serephina, do you want to know a secret?" He would say from time to time.

"Sí, papa, sí," I would grin eagerly although I'd heard this secret a million times before.

"Do you know why your golden eyes shine like the light of heaven? Did you know the stars were so lost in your eyes that they never found their way out? They have always belonged in those beautiful eyes of yours my sweet, sweet girl."