Emilio was a boy, but Héctor was a man. Emilio was playful, Héctor was serious, about business and about her. Emilio had been puppy love—her first and therefore beautiful in that way—but with Héctor it was different, two adults building a life together in an adult world.

Héctor was very traditional—after Cabo he went to Magda’s father to ask permission to marry his daughter. They were planning the wedding when another narco who was also very serious about business put four bullets into Héctor’s chest.

Technically Magda wasn’t a widow, but in a way she was, and expected to play the part. She was heartbroken, she knew that, but she also knew that somewhere, in a secret part of her mind, she was at least a little relieved at not having to take the role of wife and presumably mother so early in her life.

She also learned that black became her.

Jorge Estrada, a Colombian who had been one of Héctor’s cocaine suppliers, was at his funeral and noticed her. A respectful man, he waited what he considered a decent interval before approaching her.

Jorge took her off to Cartagena, to the Sofitel Santa Clara resort, and while, at thirty-seven, he was older than Emilio or Héctor, he was just as good-looking, and in a manly rather than a boyish way. And where Héctor had money, Jorge had money—generational wealth, as they say—and he took her to his finca in the countryside and his beach house in Costa Rica. He took her to Paris and Rome and Geneva, introduced her to directors, artists, important people.

Magda wasn’t a gold-digger.

The fact that Jorge was rich was just a bonus. Her mother—as generations of mothers have—said, “It is just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.” Jorge did give her things—trips, clothes, jewelry (a lot of jewelry)—but what he didn’t give her was a ring.

She didn’t ask, didn’t demand or nag or even hint, but after three years with the man she had to wonder why. What was she not doing? What was she doing wrong? Was she not pretty enough? Sophisticated enough? Not good enough in bed?

Finally she asked him that question. In bed one night in a suite on the beach in Panama, she asked him where this was headed. She wanted marriage, she wanted children, and if he didn’t, she would have to get on with her life. No hard feelings, this has been wonderful, but she would have to move on.

Jorge smiled. “Move on where, cariño?”

“I’ll go back to Culiacán, find myself a nice Mexican man.”

“Are there such creatures?”

“I can have any man I want,” she answered. “The trouble is, I want you.”

He wanted her, too, he said. Wanted to give her a ring, a wedding, babies. It was just…business had been bad lately…a couple of shipments seized…debts unpaid…but after these small reversals were ironed out…he was hoping to pop the question.

There was just one small thing.

He needed a little help.

There was some money, cash, in Mexico City. He’d go himself, but things were…difficult…there at the moment. But if she would go, perhaps visit her family, see friends, and then pick up the money and fly it back…

Magda did it.

She knew what she was doing. Knew that she was crossing the line from “association” to “participation,” from dating a drug trafficker to money laundering. She did it anyway. Part of her knew, deep down, that he was using her, but another part wanted to believe him, and there was yet another part that…

…wanted in.

Why not?

Magda grew up around la pista secreta, learned about the trade from Emilio, learned much more about it, and on a much higher level, just being with Jorge. She had the experience, the brains—why did she always have to just be eye candy on the arm of some male narco?

Why couldn’t she be a narca?

A chingona, a powerful woman on her own?

Other women—admittedly few—had done it.

Why not her?

So when Magda packed two suitcases with $5 million in American cash and headed for Mexico City International Airport, she couldn’t really say, then or later, if she was going to deliver the money to Jorge or steal it from him to start her own business. She had a ticket to Cartagena and a ticket to Culiacán, and she didn’t know which she was going to use. Go to Colombia and see if Jorge was really going to marry her, or go back to Sinaloa and fade into the protective cradle of the mountains, where Jorge would never dare come to demand his money back. (Really, what was he going to do? She would simply say that the police seized the money, and what was he going to do?)

She never had the chance to decide.

The federales arrested her as she was walking into the terminal.

So she could truthfully tell Jorge that the police seized his money. They made a big show in front of the news cameras over the seizure of $1.5 million and the arrest of a “major money launderer for the Colombian cartels.”

The media loved it.

They plastered Magda’s mug shots all over the front pages and television with split-screen images of her under arrest and her standing on the stage in her tiara. News announcers shook their heads and tcch’d cautionary, let-this-be-a-lesson tales for other young women tempted by the narco-world of “glitz and glamour.”

Even some American papers picked it up, with headlines reading BEAUTY AND THE BUST. Or, in the tabloid version, THE BUST AND THE BUST.

Magda was less amused, although her police interrogations were ridiculous. The focus of the federales’ questions was not so much on what she was doing taking $5 million in cash through Benito Juárez Airport, but what she was doing taking $5 million in cash through Benito Juárez Airport without paying them first.

She admitted that it was a naïve mistake, that she should have known better, and if she had it to do over again—that is, if they gave her the chance to do it over again—she would certainly do so.

That led directly to the next round of questions—did she, in fact, have any more money?

She didn’t.

Magda had a few thousand in the bank, some jewelry on her fingers and around her neck and a little more in a safe-deposit box in Culiacán, but that was about it. But hadn’t they made enough from her already, stealing three and a half million dollars?

As it turned out—no.

They did let her try to call Jorge to see if something could be arranged, but he didn’t answer his phone and appeared to have gone on an extended trip to Southeast Asia.

That was bad luck, the federales commiserated.

Bad luck for them, worse luck for her, and she ended up getting charged, and convicted, of multiple counts of money laundering, advising and abetting a drug kingpin, and narcotics trafficking.

The magistrate sentenced her to fifteen years in maximum security.

As an example to other young women.

Her processing into CEFERESO II was brutal.

Of the five hundred inmates of the prison block, three of them are women, so Magda was a novelty to begin with, never mind being a (former) beauty queen. She was stripped, “internally searched” numerous times for contraband, scrubbed with disinfectant, and then hosed down. She was poked, prodded, felt up, patted down, hit on, and told over and over again about the multiple gang rapes that awaited her inside, both from guards and from inmates. By the time they carted her to COC, clad in male sweat clothes, she was almost catatonic with shock and terror.

The other convicts hooted “compliments” and threats as the guards walked her to COC.

This is when Adán sees her.

—

“Who is she?” Adán asks Francisco, the head of Los Bateadores and his personal bodyguard.

“The dedo was Miss Culiacán,” Francisco says. “A few years back.”

She certainly doesn’t look like a beauty queen at the moment. No makeup, her hair dirty and stringy, her body disguised in the oversized sweatsuit, shuffling along the corridor with her ankles bound.