The Cuban Heiress by Chanel Cleeton

Author:Chanel Cleeton [Cleeton, Chanel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

ELENA

She rides in a cab to her aunt’s house in Havana, the satchel of money she received from the bank sitting beside her on the seat.

It was easier than she had expected to withdraw her funds, the identity documents Miguel procured for her in New York to replace the ones she lost after she fled the fire doing the trick. The whole time, she feared Raymond would appear and spoil the whole thing, but he never did.

Elena can only imagine the scene that must have ensued after he arrived at the bank and realized the money was gone.

She glances behind her several times throughout the cab ride, asking the driver to take a long, circuitous route to her aunt’s house, hoping the precautions are enough to keep her whereabouts from Raymond.

Perhaps it’s overkill—likely it is—but she gave him so many chances before, believed that the first few attempts on her life were accidents, that now she’d rather be cautious than risk it.

She doubts he remembers where her aunt lives in Havana, and had he realized Elena was alive sooner, he might have been able to hire a private detective to track Aunt Marta down. But now time is not on his side, and considering his days are numbered, she prays her aunt will be safe.

Marta is the only family she has left and one of the few people she trusts.

The taxi turns down the street, Marta’s house coming into view. Elena hasn’t been here since she left Havana for New York City when she was eighteen, but seeing it again transports her back to the two years when she lived with her aunt after her parents died.

Marta and Elena’s mother were never particularly close—their personalities too different, the six-year age gap between them setting them on different courses in distinct phases of their lives, but she’ll never forget the kindness her aunt showed her when she became an orphan, Marta’s willingness to take in her older sister’s daughter an extraordinary thing.

After the fire, Elena wrote Marta a letter so that she would know that she was alive. Without the funds Marta sent her, the contact with Miguel in New York, Elena never would have been able to survive in the city, would not have been able to afford the passage on the Morro Castle, the documents she needed to start over, or the funding for the other parts of her plan.

Elena pays the driver and exits the cab, the satchel filled with her inheritance clutched in her hand. There’s something about coming back here again that feels like she’s crossing a finish line of sorts, as though she survived the worst Raymond threw at her and is almost home free.

She approaches her aunt’s front door, tears filling her eyes. She did the same walk nearly six years earlier, her suitcase in hand, when she moved in with Marta after her parents passed away. Marta never had children of her own, and Elena always got the impression that she didn’t want them.

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