Chapter Text
“Valentina?”
The girl in question turned her head towards the sound of her name being called. Smiling, she walked up to the counter and graciously took the iced coffee from the barista’s hands. She nodded them a thanks before stuffing a few notes into the tip jar.
Iced coffee in hand, Valentina turned around to survey the seating arrangements. To her disappointment, most of the seats in the café were already occupied. The only seats free were situated right next to strangers. She felt like if she sat in one of them, she would be awkwardly close to impeding into someone’s personal space. With a sigh, Valentina realised that she might not have any other option.
The small downtown coffee shop was surprisingly busy for a Friday morning after rush hour, but she couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to escape dreary office blocks for a coffee run or meet up with a friend for a chat. The weather that day was sunny and bright with not a cloud in the sky. Valentina was only at the café herself because she had noticed the good weather outside and decided to wander off-campus during her break between classes to find a caffeinated beverage rather than head directly to the university’s cafeteria like she usually did. At least, that was partly the reason.
A few weeks ago, Valentina had dumped her boyfriend Lucho. Since then, her ex and his pathetic band of friends had ignored her in lectures and blanked her in the hallways. Valentina tried not to care. In any case, she had never approved of the type of people her ex maintained friendships with. Lucho and his friends talked more about what bar or club they were going to go to after class than they did about what happened in class. However, making new friends since breaking up with Lucho had proven more difficult than she had anticipated. Despite everyone remaining polite and friendly during lectures and seminars, no one seemed to want to interact with Valentina outside of class. Valentina had come up with a number of reasons to explain this. The other students could be simply assuming she already had friends, people could be intimidated by the fact that she was Valentina Carvajal, or Lucho had told everyone not to talk to her. Any of those options could be true.
The only person who still had the decency to talk to her was Sergio, Lucho’s best friend and someone Valentina had known since childhood. When Sergio wasn’t sitting with his Lucho and Lucho’s friends, he was sitting with Valentina, and Valentina was thankful to still have one friend, even if that one friend was also friends with her ex. But annoyingly, Sergio’s timetable didn’t match up with hers. He wasn’t always on campus when she was. Consequently, she had begun to feel like a bit of a loner when wandering around campus on her own.
And so, Valentina’s coffee run was necessary both to kill time between classes and help her feel a little less lonely. New friends would come, Valentina told herself, so would a new lover, eventually. She just had to be patient. In any case, university kept her busy. She was already thinking about how to complete the assignment they had been set during her 9 am lecture, when the rest of her classmates looked like they were still half-asleep, even when the class finished an hour later.
Glancing at her phone, Valentina realised that not being able to find a seat in the coffee shop didn’t have to matter. It was already 10:26 am. Soon enough she would need to start heading back to campus anyway to make it in time for her next class at 11. If she dawdled, she could easily turn the ten-minute walk back to campus into twenty and in any case, she wouldn’t mind arriving early for her investigative journalism class.
Valentina was about to give up hope of grabbing a seat when, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted movement. A dark-haired girl rose from her seat and then hurried out the door, leaving a booth by the window unoccupied. Spying her opportunity, Valentina quickly strode over and sat down in the girl’s place, thankful for a spot in a prime position with plenty of space around her all to herself.
As she took off her backpack and rested it on the padded seat next to her, Valentina noticed that in their haste to get away, the girl had left a newspaper behind. Wanting to return the newspaper to its owner, she glanced up at the door they had exited through. But it was too late, the girl was already out of sight. The newspaper they had paid for laid forgotten about on the table, discarded alongside their half-finished cup of black coffee and a plate full of crumbs. Valentina piled their dirty crockery onto a tray, pushed the tray to the other side of the table and then, intrigued, picked up the broadsheet in front of her.
Sipping on her drink, Valentina smiled to herself when she realised it was a copy of El Centro. What was more, today was the day that El Centro’s big exposé on one of Mexico City’s biggest drug cartels had been published. The words of the front page headline beamed up at her with pride.
REVEALED: THE FACES AND NAMES BEHIND THE SIERRA CARTEL
The city is close to collapse. Citizens are fearful. Murders, kidnappings and extortion cases are rife. Needless violence is widespread. A recent spike in criminal activity has not gone unnoticed. The perpetrators? Rival drug cartels battling childish turf wars.
The crimes of one cartel are common knowledge. Its name sparks fear in many. This cartel does little to disguise its nefarious activities or even deflect blame, yet nothing has been done by the authorities to investigate this criminal organisation and bring it to justice.
Today, El Centro reveals the faces and names of the individuals behind the Sierra Cartel. After months of investigation, we disclose details of the wide-ranging and numerous crimes these individuals have committed while carrying out cartel business. Most importantly, we call on the authorities to take action immediately and arrest these culpable individuals before more innocent victims are unnecessarily harmed.
Valentina flicked her gaze across the crinkled paper. The faces of a dozen cartel members stared back at her, alongside their names, their aliases and a horrifying estimate of the number of people each individual had murdered. On the second page, the article continued, describing in detail the crimes the cartel members were responsible for.
The article interested Valentina, but she didn’t need to read on. She already knew all the gory details, the article had long since been a topic of discussion at the dinner table in Valentina’s household.
Her privileged position was owed to the fact that the El Centro newspaper belonged to Grupo Carvajal. The same Carvajal as her surname. Valentina’s father León Carvajal was a millionaire media mogul and the founder and largest shareholder in Grupo Carvajal. The company operated a range of media assets including television networks, television programmes, a production office, a publishing house, several magazines, all in addition to the El Centro newspaper. The whole of Valentina’s family worked at the Grupo Carvajal offices in various roles and departments, including her stepmom Lucía and her older siblings Eva and Guille.
Not everyone in the Carvajal family worked at El Centro, and none of them showed as much interest in the article or the newspaper as the youngest Carvajal did, but the article had been on everyone’s minds. For security reasons, no names had been attributed to the article, but Valentina knew the article had been written by a small team of journalists fronted by Mateo Luna. A budding journalist at El Centro and well regarded throughout Grupo Carvajal, Mateo was married to Valentina’s older sister, Eva. Thanks to her connections to the article’s author, Valentina was well aware of how the article was the result of months of hard work. However, she also knew that the article held more significance than existing as a challenging piece of work for her hardworking brother-in-law.
The article represented a new approach for Grupo Carvajal. Over the years, León Carvajal had insisted his media empire remain largely apolitical, even when reporting on the crimes committed by cartels became more and more commonplace. But in recent years, Valentina's father had begun to think about his legacy. He wanted to make a difference and leave a mark on the world. There was no better way to do it than through the company he had founded, living up to Grupo Carvajal's intentions to give values, attention, and progress to all Mexicans. The influence of drug cartels on the city was growing and León Carvajal was tired of standing by while corruption and criminals ruled riot. And so, to reflect Grupo Carvajal’s changing approach, with this article, El Centro was about to set a new precedent – to not let the cartels get away with the things they used to.
The article's publication caused nervousness and conflict amongst many, not least within Valentina’s family. Unlike others, her sister, Eva, hadn’t vouched for the article at all. She hadn’t wanted it to go ahead. In her opinion, it was reckless and needless to shine the spotlight on her husband, El Centro and the wider Grupo Carvajal. Sadly, the callous murder of Mateo’s friend and colleague had caused Eva’s opinion to change.
During recent weeks, Valentina had witnessed how the article had started to take its toll on her family. Stress levels had risen, everyone was busy all the time, and she had hardly seen members of her own family. The Carvajal mansion was cold and deadly quiet. At mealtimes, Valentina ate alone, with only the family's housekeeper, Silvina, to keep her company.
Since she was a child, the youngest Carvajal sibling had grown familiar with the times she was able to see her father – at breakfasts and at weekends. Work kept the man busy. But recently, he wasn’t even present for those moments. León Carvajal would leave the house before his youngest daughter woke up and he would return past midnight. His weekends were now occupied with meetings with investors, intrigued to learn more about the new ‘no tolerance’ approach being introduced at Grupo Carvajal. It was the same with Valentina’s stepmom, Lucía. And because Eva lived with Mateo and everyone was too busy to get together for family dinners, Valentina hadn’t seen much of her sister recently either. The only person in the family Valentina had seen regularly over the last few weeks was her older brother, Guille.
The moment her brother walked through the door every evening, Valentina leapt at him, noting how he was looking more and more exhausted each day. The dark circles under his eyes wouldn’t go away, he yawned frequently, and he sat with his shoulders hunched. But Guille would always be happy to indulge in his little sister’s questioning nature as he tucked into whatever food Silvina had prepared for him. Through her brother, Valentina heard about the extra security measures at the Grupo Carvajal offices and she also learnt that their father was discussing potential arrangements for bodyguards. Their older sister Eva was already subject to increased security at home and at work, and pending the article’s fallout, it remained to be seen whether this would need to be implemented for the other two Carvajal siblings as well.
The thought of being accompanied by bodyguards everywhere she went wasn’t one Valentina liked to consider. At university, she largely avoided standing out from the crowd. That was until her recent break up with Lucho. Now she felt a little ostracised walking around campus and she feared bodyguards would not help her cause. The act of being shepherded between classes by two men wearing dark suits and sunglasses would give Lucho’s friends more reasons to dislike her as well as draw more attention to herself from the wider student body.
Valentina hated the possibility of her freedoms being curtailed simply because of who her father was and what her surname represented. As the youngest child, she was shielded from most of the furore that accompanied being a Carvajal, and compared to her siblings, whose exciting lives were often the subject of online gossip and news articles, Valentina’s name was rarely mentioned by the media.
Eva Carvajal had developed a reputation as a businesswoman both feared and revered by her colleagues as well as by Grupo Carvajal’s competitors. And even without dating León Carvajal's eldest daughter, Eva’s husband Mateo warranted his own headlines as El Centro’s star journalist.
As León Carvajal’s only son, Guillermo Carvajal was known as Mexico’s most eligible bachelor. Frequently described as attractive, mysterious, and intelligent, much to his dismay, Guille invited attention without even trying. Every week social media speculated over which girl he was dating or hooking up with, the gossip spreading rumours far and wide about his alleged relationships with other employees at Grupo Carvajal, Hollywood actresses and members of European royal families.
In contrast, Valentina’s life was significantly less interesting. At 21 years old, she was still relatively young, she wasn’t employed at the family company and her occupation read ‘student’. She was yet to make a name for herself. Her partner, Lucho was unexciting. He came from a good family of lawyers, but apart from that, Lucho was average and boring; there was nothing to write home about.
For that reason, the youngest Carvajal was mostly unknown to wider society. In some ways, Valentina was thankful for the protection she got from press vultures, who wouldn’t always portray their subjects in the way they wanted to be portrayed. Like her brother and sister, Valentina had been graced with good looks. She was frequently invited to attend events with the rest of her family and often appeased photographers by posing at galas and on red carpets alongside her older siblings. The complete Carvajal set were adored by the paparazzi and the public alike. Occasionally, if she wore a particular glitzy dress at an event, Valentina would get a mention in the tabloids without her name being preceded by the names of her siblings or other family members. But even so, the press didn’t care about anything else other than her surname and how the youngest Carvajal had also inherited her parents’ beautiful genes. The article would focus on Valentina’s looks or perhaps which fashion designer had designed her dress, but nothing more. There would be no talk about her personality, her interests or her life; no one seemed interested in knowing who Valentina was as an individual.
Valentina’s status as a Carvajal had automatically earned her nearly one hundred thousand followers on her social media profiles to date, but it wasn’t the number of followers on Instagram that she cared about. It was the fact that staying out of her family’s business wasn’t her choice. Rather, Valentina was never offered a way in. That didn’t bother her when she was younger, but now that she had turned 21 and was officially an adult, Valentina mourned the chance to get involved at Grupo Carvajal and be given the respect and responsibility she deserved.
León Carvajal seemed uninterested in involving or welcoming his youngest child to the family business. Ironic, seeing as Valentina’s older siblings had to be heavily persuaded into joining Grupo Carvajal. To put it bluntly, their father refused to let them do anything else.
Eva dreamt of travelling to Europe to pursue her interests and study Art History. Instead, León Carvajal had forced his eldest child to join Grupo Carvajal as soon as she had graduated from high school. Then, Eva had worked her way up the ranks, exactly as their father intended, reflecting León’s journey from an intern at a small publishing house to the media mogul he was today.
As the second youngest, Guille had been granted slightly more freedoms than Eva. León had loosened the reins a little and Guille spent his late teens and early twenties studying abroad as a law student. However, Mexico’s patriarchal society viewed him as the natural heir to inherit the family business, simply because he was León Carvajal’s only son. And so, the moment Guille earned his doctorate and his feet were back on home soil, he had reluctantly joined Grupo Carvajal too.
Significantly younger than her older siblings, arguably Valentina had been afforded more freedom, less pressure. She knew Eva and Guille envied her position but at times Valentina felt like a spare part. An afterthought. The forgotten piece of the Carvajal family jigsaw puzzle. Valentina’s early childhood was one filled with happy memories, but it was her mother’s death when she was seven years old that had changed everything. As she was so young, Valentina was protected from most of the sadness, mourning and grief that had surrounded her mother’s passing and she knew she never experienced the event quite like the rest of her family did. However, Valentina identified her mother’s death as the point at which she had begun to feel more and more alone. Her father turned his grief into hard work and began to adopt a more distanced parenting style without his wife by his side. And with her siblings already teenagers and not wanting to hang out with their kid sister, Valentina turned to family friends like Lucho to keep her company.
Valentina had known Lucho since they were children, from long before her mother had passed away. Their families knew each other, their parents were old friends. Along with Sergio, Lucho and Valentina hung out together at parties and gatherings attended by their families. The trio were far from the rebellious children they could have been, but Valentina and her best friends didn’t stay out of trouble either. And so, just like her siblings, she hadn’t escaped the wrath of their father. Aged 16, after Valentina had become too lenient with her schoolwork and regularly snuck out of the house to attend parties, León Carvajal put his foot down and sent his youngest child off to boarding school in Canada to complete her high school education. Though Valentina hated Canada at first, she now missed her life there. She worked hard and played hard too. Canada offered escapism. The type of escapism she could only dream of when she returned home at 18 with good grades and tons of extracurriculars to her name.
On her return to Mexico, Valentina was admitted to university. Shortly afterwards, she started going out with Lucho. They had flirted with the idea of being boyfriend and girlfriend since they were old enough to know what those words meant, but during their teen years, their on-off relationship had been blighted by Valentina’s move to Canada and then her subsequent relationship with a boy in Canada called Charles. But as soon as she was back home, no longer dating Charles, and was studying at the same university as Lucho was, Valentina felt like it was a logical decision to make her relationship with her childhood friend official.
The decision Valentina made back then was one she was determined not to regret but learn from instead. In recent months Valentina would be the first to admit that her relationship with Lucho was dysfunctional. He was a different person from the one she had thought she had known. As a friend, Lucho was loyal. As a boyfriend, he was overly protective. He never allowed Valentina to have her own friends. Lucho’s only friends were losers who liked to party, she nicknamed them his ‘party buddies’.
Valentina didn’t like Lucho’s friends, nor did she like how Lucho was with them, nor did she like how she behaved with them. Their bad influence led her down dark paths of drinking and using drugs. Whenever she hung out with them, Valentina found herself partying often, letting her grades slip, and resorting to old destructive habits that would cause her to feel depressed and anxious. Even though she was now an adult, Valentina knew she would get punished for not toeing the line. It wasn’t just her father she needed to worry about. If Valentina slipped up or failed the year, she knew her older sister wouldn’t hesitate to step in and ship her off to another school in a foreign country, this time somewhere much further away than Canada. Eva had grown up to become as stern as their father and Valentina often joked to herself that her sister had the number for an international school in Switzerland on speed dial just in case that scenario ever arose.
And so, Valentina’s reasons for breaking up with Lucho were justified. But external factors weren’t her only motivation to change her behaviour. She wanted to do right for herself. She was in her second year at university and although graduation was more than a year away, she didn’t want anything like a boyfriend to distract her from her studies.
No one except Guille knew of her grand plans to start changing her life. In fact, Guille was the only one who knew about Valentina’s recent break up with Lucho. Not even her father knew yet, though Valentina knew she needed to tell him. León knew Lucho’s parents. Seeing as their families frequented the same social circles; if she didn’t tell her father soon, there was a chance he would hear about his daughter’s recent break up through the grapevine. The news that she wouldn’t end up marrying the son of family friends who were respected lawyers would surprise León Carvajal as well as potentially come as a slight disappointment to the man. The thought of marrying Lucho made Valentina want to puke, so she was glad to have escaped his clutches before any serious talks of marriage between them were ever brought up by their respective parents.
León Carvajal had been made a widow when Elena Carvajal passed away. In the years since her tragic death, he had slowly fallen in love with his new secretary at the Grupo Carvajal offices. A year ago, he had married her in a beautiful ceremony. Now León’s ex-secretary was Valentina’s adored stepmom, Lucía. Being more than twenty years León’s junior, Lucía was only a few months older than her husband’s eldest child, Eva, which meant Valentina knew her father wasn’t a complete traditionalist. She knew he wasn’t about to make her a debutante and marry her off to the next eligible suitor that came knocking at the door, but she did want to tell him about her breakup with Lucho.
Valentina half thought about sending her father an email, but she wanted to break the news to him in person, as a normal person would. She hadn’t seen her father at all during the past few weeks, and although it felt stupid to long for something as simple as that, she was looking forward to having a heart to heart with her father and telling him face to face.
Now that the article was finally published, Valentina hoped the pressure would ease off and she would be able to spend more time with her family. It wasn’t just the news about her breakup with Lucho that she wanted to talk to her father about. She wanted time to talk to him about her studies and her desires to join the family company.
Journalism was Valentina’s subject of choice at university, which was also her father’s vocation. While it was true that she had started studying journalism for her father, two years into her course, Valentina had developed a genuine passion and interest in the topic. As the daughter of a media mogul, she had a distinct advantage over her coursemates with connections in the industry, but Valentina doubted anyone knew just how much she wanted to become a journalist. And unlike her siblings, Valentina desired to get involved at Grupo Carvajal as soon as possible. However, so far, she had been unable to get her foot in the door.
As she grew older, Valentina realised that at times her father still saw her as the child she was when her mother passed away. León never said as much, but she began to become aware of how her father viewed her interest in journalism in very similar ways to how he viewed her numerous, everchanging hobbies as a child. For Valentina, journalism was a passing phase, a recreational activity she wasn’t serious about, and an interest that would go away in a few months when Valentina would get bored. He would often cite his daughter’s failed hobbies as a child. The ones she never stuck to. Horse riding, debate club, gymnastics, lacrosse, photography, drama club, swimming, the list of recreational activities Valentina had enjoyed at some point in her childhood was never-ending. But she was a child back then, she was allowed to try things out and explore everything until she found her true passion. And Valentina had found her true passion in journalism, but her father seemed unable to understand her interest in the matter wasn’t fleeting.
This hurt Valentina. She felt like one would only have to watch her to see how much she loved journalism. That’s something that her father was never very good at, watching. Despite his frequent business trips, she always loved how her dad was great at attending her swimming competitions, equestrian events and gym meets. But she hated how he was never good at actually watching her perform. He could never leave work at the door. Valentina remembered always looking up at the stands, searching for support during nervy moments just to find her father staring down at his phone replying to an email or midway through a work call. On the rare occasions León Carvajal wasn’t on his phone, he was charming the people around him, cracking jokes with the other parents, making bored little siblings laugh, rousing the crowd, doing anything but watching his daughter like he was supposed to.
León always seemed to miss Valentina’s moment. When she set a new school record for the 100m butterfly, despite the noise of the cheering crowd around him, León Carvajal had been sitting in the stands with an earpiece on, listening to a work meeting. He hadn’t even realised his daughter had won until another father congratulated him. Or the time Valentina finally perfected her floor routine in gymnastics, receiving perfect 10s from the judges, she had caught him frowning as he frantically tapped into his BlackBerry, instead of watching her. Later that day when she confronted him about it, he had explained he was finalising the details of Eva’s first work placement at Grupo Carvajal and that she should be happy for her older sister. Valentina’s worst memory was the time she came first in her age group at a dressage event, beating hundreds of other girls. After the adjudicator pinned the rosette onto her jacket lapel and then handed her a bunch of red roses, Valentina had searched the crowd, hoping to spot her proud father beaming back at her. But instead, she saw an empty seat. León Carvajal was in the parking lot outside, on the phone to investors in Europe, sealing a deal worth millions.
Maybe that was the reason Valentina always quit the numerous hobbies she took up. Her father was never around to watch her excel.
It was no wonder that León Carvajal had failed to notice how his daughter’s keen interest in journalism went beyond her studies. If only he was around to see how Valentina always wanted to watch the evening news, read the papers every day and spend hours on social media. And whenever she got a chance to speak to a Grupo Carvajal employee who didn’t live in the same household as her, Valentina pounced. Any time he was at the Carvajal mansion, Valentina happily talked to Mateo about work and her discussions with him weren’t simply to fulfil her sisterly duties to make polite conversation with her brother-in-law. She was genuinely interested in Mateo’s line of work.
This trend was extended to her brother’s connections too. Valentina loved it when Guille’s colleague Mayela visited. The poor woman was always hounded by friendly questions from the girl but Mayela never seemed to mind. Once, Guille complained and said his little sister asked his colleague questions like she was four years old and Mayela was the only person in the room who could answer her questions about why the sky was blue. Valentina had flushed bright red and Guille had immediately been reprimanded by Mayela. Now, that memory was one of Valentina’s fondest. Since that day, she loved to tease her brother about how his rude comment had ruined all chances of anything romantic happening between him and Mayela.
Valentina was sure that Mayela, Mateo and Guille all knew of her true passion, and her ambitions. Anyone who bothered to pay attention to her would know that. If she had any say in the matter, she desired to do an internship at the Grupo Carvajal offices that summer. Valentina felt like she had squandered her previous summer. With no responsibilities, she hopped on a plane to the coast of Quintana Roo and stayed at her family’s villa in Playa del Carmen. She had spent most of her on the beach, lazing about in the sun all day and partying all night. But Valentina wanted this summer to be different. She wanted to make a difference. She wanted to do an internship at the family company. Doing what, she didn’t mind. Her only responsibility could be refilling cups of coffee and Valentina would be happy. As long as she was in the room where it happened.
The irony was not lost to Valentina that her father was oblivious to her wishes when her passion was his specialism, especially as she was his only child who was genuinely interested in joining the family company, not just working there for duty’s sake. She just needed to corner her father during his busy work schedule and convince him she wanted it and that she was ready.
Valentina needed a plan of action, and she was beginning to form one in her head, figuring that the article sitting in front of her could help argue her case to her father. When she next saw her father, whenever that may be, Valentina was hoping she could convince him she was intelligent and mature enough to deserve a seat at the table at the company like the rest of her family. Not that anyone had actually asked her for her opinion, but Valentina had lots to say about the article, good and bad, and she was itching to share them.
Valentina’s prevailing emotion was pride, but there were several other feelings at play too. Publishing the article and with it, revealing the identities and aliases of members of a major drug cartel, was dangerous, arrogant, bold, ingenious and risky, all those things at once. And no one knew what the reaction would be, from the general public, from the cartel themselves or from Grupo Carvajal’s competitors and its investors. That was one of the reasons everyone in Valentina’s extended household bubble was so tense; going forward, everything would be uncertain and unknown.
She could sense her father’s ambitions. León Carvajal never voiced his desires, but Valentina was beginning to realise that her father was considering launching his own political career. The charming silver haired man was already loved and adored by the public, but León Carvajal wanted more. A thought that caused Valentina to sigh heavily. It frustrated her. Sometimes she felt like the rest of Mexico viewed him as their father while he neglected his true parental duties.
And so, Valentina felt a little wary as she thought about his plans to allow Grupo Carvajal to make controversial statements and take a political standpoint. They were a little too egotistical for her liking. She respected her father’s determination to take on a new approach, but she was more nervous than excited at the prospect of everything the article could bring his way, especially when she knew the reaction could be both good and bad.
The youngest Carvajal had a more muted view of seeing things. She tried to have an optimistic outlook in life, but she didn’t want to get her hopes up and assume everything would go swimmingly from now on. Of course Valentina wanted justice. Of course Valentina wanted to see guilty criminals locked up for their crimes. She just felt like everyone was expecting too much from one article.
Valentina suspected that both Mateo and her father were hoping the cartel would announce a ceasefire to avoid facing arrest by the authorities. But she was a little more cautious in her approach. No matter how much pride she felt about the article being published, Valentina’s theory was that El Centro’s message would be politely ignored by both the cartel and the police while having little influence on the general public.
Through listening to Mateo talking about the article, Valentina knew that a drug cartel was a complicated network of criminals, most of whom used aliases and so were known by different names to different people. The larger a cartel, the larger its resources, bringing about opportunities for members to create fake identification and forged documentation, meaning that the authorities often didn’t know who exactly they were dealing with. Mateo and his team had spent several months of research to collect information on just one cartel. In the end, they identified a dozen key players in the Sierra Cartel amongst a backdrop of hundreds more individuals who are in some way connected to the criminal organisation.
And so, Valentina knew that publishing the names and faces of the kingpin figures would only go so far. Even if every one of the twelve men mentioned in the article was arrested immediately, she assumed many others would quickly and willingly slip into their positions. There would be no pause to the total amount of narcotics being ferried across the country, or the number of murders, or kidnappings or extortions or the various other horrors these cartels carried out on a daily basis. Worse still, Valentina was picturing the possibility that a change to the status quo and the cartel’s leadership could easily bring about a dogfight between individual members vying for a top spot or even other cartels trying to capitalise on their rival’s moment of weakness.
In addition, she knew that a sizable number of politicians and police officers were corrupt. They would be paid off to stay silent on these matters. For Valentina, tackling corruption amongst the country’s authorities was as important as exposing key members of a drug cartel. Otherwise, they would be trapped in this endless cycle forever, where victims of the cartel never saw justice because their cases were never solved, or the charges were dropped, no matter what criminals were in charge of the cartel at the time.
And finally, even if the cartel did react or respond in any way, Valentina couldn’t imagine anyone would still be talking about the article or what it signified in a week’s time. Looking around the busy coffee shop, it was clear the article wasn’t exactly turning heads or sparking conversations. Valentina doubted that most of the other customers knew anything about the historic article El Centro had published that day. She spied only two other people brandishing newspapers, and neither of them were reading El Centro. An elderly gentleman on the other side of the room was reading the sports pages at the back of his newspaper, while nearer to her, a woman appeared to be completing the crossword. There were dozens of people in the room who were engrossed in their phones, and although potentially they could all be reading the article on El Centro’s website, Valentina suspected it was more likely they were scrolling through Twitter or playing Subway Surfers.
The article claimed that the city was close to collapse. Valentina would beg to differ. Despite the increase in violence causing heightened anxiety amongst the public and especially the country’s politicians, for the majority of people, life continued as normal. To most, this Friday was like any other Friday. Even if you had heard about the gruesome murder that had happened at the weekend two blocks away from this coffee shop, Valentina was starting to realise that life had a way of carrying on regardless. It wasn’t that people were purposefully shutting out the violence and the fear, it was just that most people, including Valentina, were not willing to let it affect their mood on this gloriously sunny day.
And so, all in all, Valentina couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed by the article. Time would tell whether it had made the impact both León Carvajal and Mateo Luna were hoping it would. But mostly, Valentina hoped its publication would mean she would get to see her family more often than she had done during the past three months. But the opposite could be true too, Valentina realised it might cause everyone’s work schedules to simply get busier.
With a deflated huff, she checked the time on her phone.
10:50 am.
Valentina baulked at what she saw. She had become too engrossed in the newspaper to keep an eye on the time, and if she didn’t get moving, she would be late for class. Her past truancies had scarred her attendance record enough, and now she was trying to be a changed woman. If she could help it, she didn’t want to harm her chances of a top grade any more than she had done already.
Deciding to keep the newspaper as a memento, Valentina stuffed it into the top of her bag before rising from her seat and swinging her backpack over one shoulder. She checked she had all her belongings before plucking her phone off the table with one hand and picking up the cup containing the dregs of her iced coffee in the other.
The sunshine hit Valentina’s face the second she exited the coffee shop. An instant mood booster, the weather caused Valentina’s face to erupt into a smile as she began striding down the street towards campus. She swept past a small parade of shops, pace quickening, not through remembering she was running late, but with the realisation that she was excited for the rest of her classes that day. Valentina felt like if she wasn’t given an opportunity to shine at her family’s company, then she was going to devote herself to doing well at university.
As she made her first turn off the main thoroughfare, cutting down a side street, Valentina checked the time again.
10:52 am.
She slowed her pace a little as she neared campus, knowing she was going to make it on time to class after all. She sipped on the last of her coffee, enjoying the feel of the caffeine running through her body, amplifying how alive she felt.
Crossing the road and then making her final right turn, Valentina’s smile turned into a grin. Though it neighboured a bustling university campus, the last street before she reached her destination offered Valentina a moment of serenity in the heart of the city. Flanked with colonial style buildings on one side and backing onto a small park on the other, the residential street featured trees that towered over a row of parked cars. The trees were some of the prettiest Valentina knew, with their twisting branches and blossoming flowers, meaning the street was one of Valentina’s favourite streets in Mexico City.
It was late March and the best time of year to admire the trees at their best. The start of spring had caused the flowers to blossom. The blossom season had only just started, but flowers were already starting to fall, painting everything below in pink and purple tones. Petals lined the gutters and the windscreens of cars and the ground was covered in a snow of blossom. The sound of the birds singing, the children playing in the adjacent park, and the sight of campus two minutes away made Valentina even happier.
The pretty street scene was one that she wanted to capture with her camera. She knew her Instagram followers would admire the blossom trees just like she did. And so, halfway down the road, Valentina stopped, tucked her coffee into the crook off her elbow and pulled out her phone.
Valentina took a few photos of the tree-lined street before pointing her phone’s camera at the sky. Every few seconds, she adjusted her position and the angle of her phone, determined to capture the perfect shot of the pink blossom framed against the deep blue sky. The effects caused by the sunlight and the shadows provided room for creativity, and it was a few minutes before Valentina decided she had taken enough photos.
She lowered her phone and opened the Instagram app. Her favourite photo immediately jumped out at her and ten seconds later, Valentina had uploaded the photo onto her Instagram story straight away. Then, Valentina paused for a moment longer, deliberating over whether she had time to write a short caption for a post or whether she should wait until later.
Suddenly, Valentina felt something collide with her shoulder.
She stumbled forward, wincing as her knees hit the ground at the same time as her iced coffee. The cup’s lid spilt open, quickly splashing Valentina’s jeans with sticky brown liquid and ice cubes.
“Sorry!”
The belated apology from the person who had bumped into her on their way past did nothing to lighten Valentina’s soured mood. Sensing they weren’t even going to check if she was ok, Valentina didn’t bother looking up to see who had ruined her day. Instead, she frantically searched the ground for her phone, which hand slipped from her grasp during her fall.
Valentina spotted her iPhone lying face down a few meters away on the sidewalk strewn with petals. The force of the shove had flung the phone out of harm’s way to avoid the puddle of brown liquid that was covering her jeans. To Valentina’s horror, she realised the remains of her iced coffee was now dripping onto her favourite pair of Nike sneakers, threatening to ruin them. But she knew she would have bigger things to worry about if she had ruined her phone too. Her father had only given her the phone two weeks ago, and she had promised she would look after it.
Hands shaking, Valentina reached forward, hoping and praying the shatterproof phone case she had invested in had done its job. As she picked off the petals clinging to the screen, Valentina quickly established that the phone was completely unharmed and let out a sigh of relief. The only problem now was that her photography session and subsequent misfortunate meeting with a stranger’s shoulder had now definitely made her late to class. Cursing under her breath but safely clutching her phone, Valentina pushed herself off of the ground.
Her body felt heavy as she stood up and Valentina stretched out before adjusting the straps of her backpack, wiping down her rumpled clothing and then tucking her now dishevelled hair behind her ears. But before she could take another step, Valentina was greeted with a powerful fist to the face. Her phone fumbled from her hand once more as she stumbled backwards in shock, unable to stop herself from hitting the stone wall behind her with a thud. Valentina collapsed onto her knees and groaned out in pain. Vision blurry, she tentatively looked up, trying to work out who and what had attacked her.
A small figure wearing a black balaclava was standing over her. Even under the black mask, Valentina could see her attacker’s snarl. And suddenly, they were approaching her again.
Glancing left and then right, Valentina cursed at the sight of a deserted street as she felt her assailant's hands at her back and the straps of her backpack being peeled off her shoulders. Cowering against the wall, Valentina didn’t voice any protest as her mugger stripped her bag away with little effort.
Valentina hated how she had been so careless. She had momentarily dropped her guard, not paid any attention to what was happening around her, and now she was paying for it. With her shiny iPhone, Nike sneakers and Pandora jewellery, Valentina was a walking target for any mugger and Valentina knew that her attacker would be able to easily flog her valuable possessions on the black market. They would be celebrating their victory before the sun had reached the highest point in the sky.
Once the bag was free from her clutches, Valentina was expecting her assailant to pluck her phone off of the ground and flee the scene of the crime, but they didn’t. To Valentina's horror, they threw the bag aside without care and stepped back towards her.
Valentina braced herself for another punch, assuming they were wanting to maim her enough to continue stripping her of any and all valuable possessions. But the punch never came. Instead, strong arms wrapped around Valentina’s small waist.
Her attacker had grabbed hold of her and was now pulling her away from the wall.
“Help!” Valentina cried out. “Someone help!”
A hand clamped over her mouth, immediately preventing any more screams from getting out. Valentina tried with all her might, but the only sound she could make was a pathetic, muted squeal.
In her panic, Valentina started flailing her limbs about, hoping her movements would release herself from her attacker's hold, still struggling to process what the hell was going on. She frantically looked around, searching for a way out, an escape route, but she had been ambushed. She was hidden underneath the shade of the blossom tree. Trapped on the sidewalk between the parked cars and the wall. There was nowhere to run or hide.
Valentina prayed desperately for someone, anyone, to appear out of thin air and save her. But there was no one. The street was completely dead. No one was around. No one could see her. No one had noticed her perilous situation.
There was nothing else around her, just a masked assailant and… fuck. The nearest parking space was occupied by a large van with blacked out windows. Its engine was running. Its side door was flung open. Its dark interior beckoned.
And that’s when Valentina realised. She wasn’t being mugged. Her phone wasn’t the target, nor was her designer backpack, or her jewellery, or her expensive sneakers. She was the target.
She was being kidnapped.