by S. Massery
His words come back to me now. We all make choices to better our families. At the time, I thought he was talking about ours. But mine was never his. He was the consigliere—a nice name for an outsider. An advisor to the family, but not of the family.
Big difference.
“You okay?”
I flinch, jerking the glass of water in my hands. It spills across the table.
“Did I startle you?” She chuckles, but it dies on her lips too quickly. “We all startle easy these days,” she mumbles.
“Sorry,” I groan, jumping up to grab the roll of paper towels.
“This may be forward of me,” she says after I’ve cleaned up the mess and refilled my water, “but… where were you? You were gone for three weeks.”
“It’s not too forward, Alex.” I laugh. “I don’t mind sharing.”
She stares at me. “God, how I wish I could truly laugh. Tell me how you’ve accomplished that, too.”
My shrug is less sure, even though I know the answer: Jackson Skye.
“The first two weeks were chaos. I only had the possessions that I could fit in my bag, and I ditched my phone after a close call with—” I bite my lip. “I guess it was the Castillos behind it.”
She nods. “Go on.”
“I went north. My mother’s parents still own the house I grew up in, and I’d heard rumors that it was empty and untouched—and by rumors I mean I eavesdropped on Father speaking to my grandparents about it a few months ago. No one wanted to sell it.”
“Wyoming?”
I nod. “It was a bitch getting there.”
The fear of those two weeks is visceral. I was helpless, grieving, lost. I grappled with my decisions of that day for almost a week and then I buried it. That’s why Jackson didn’t find the shell of a girl my family still expects me to be.
“That took up most of the two weeks,” I explain. “And then… I couldn’t stay in Wyoming forever.”
“We found you in Salt Lake City,” she says, “which is halfway between Casper and Vegas. Were you coming back?”
I pick at my nails. Here’s where things get tricky: I either lie to her or I tell the truth. I hurt our friendship or I expose myself.
One is repairable.
“No,” I lie. “I wasn’t going to come back.”
She stands from the table. I get it, I’d be incensed, too. I basically admitted to abandoning her and everyone else.
“What will you do?” she demands. “We found you. You came back. What now?”
“Now I am facing my fate, Alexa,” I snap. “I have an enemy to deal with before war breaks out. Let me do that.”
“James is dealing with it,” Oliver says from the doorway. He’s home early from work—it’s the middle of the afternoon—and he gives me a tight-lipped smile. “He was here in your absence—he’s already declared war.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “He’s declared war? On Jorge?”
Oliver shifts. “Maybe not to his face,” he amends. “But he’s definitely said that the situation is going to escalate.”
“Haven’t enough people been murdered?” I ask him.
Oliver is like a new person: angrier, with hard lines on his face that betray the mask he’s trying so hard to keep in place. I scowl at him. Even if he’s angry and tall—built like Zach—I can’t show him fear.
“Not enough Castillo blood has been shed to pay for our loss,” he answers.
“That’s a coward’s answer.”
Alexa shakes her head. “Oliver, leave us. Delia has been through a lot these past few weeks.”
“So have you, darling.” He presses a kiss to the top of Alexa’s head and gives me one last frown before he turns and disappears down the hallway.
“Okay,” she says in his absence, “you didn’t survive alone, did you? Who did you go to for help?”
I blush, and she grins. She has me. So I break down and tell her all about Jackson—well, maybe not all about Jackson.
She sighs. “Do you remember when we were kids and we’d pretend that knights were going to ride up to our doorstep and sweep us away?”
I frown at the dreamy look on her face.
She continues, “That actually happened for you.” Her voice lowers as she adds, “Oliver and I don’t agree on everything, but he was my knight when I needed him. I trust him.”
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
“I do,” she says “But where is my loyalty supposed to lie? If you were me—who would you side with?”
I lean back. “Are you saying you agree that James was right to declare war?”
She picks up my hand. “Someone needs to pay. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t agree with your way of doing it, but...”
James needs to pay. And my god, he’s fooled them all.
“I get it,” I say, putting a smile on my face when I really want to cry. “Why’d you come back for me if you’re just going to follow James anyway?”
Her grip tightens. “I’m sorry.” She exhales and shakes her head. “I thought you getting back was going to be different.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Different? Like, I’d ride in and declare war and, what?”
“I don’t know,” she murmurs.
“Oh, and, Alexa? There’s one thing wrong with your knight theory.”
“What’s that?”
“He didn’t come back for me.” I slide my hand out of hers and stand. “I’m going to go lie down.”
I lock the door to my room, saying a quiet prayer of thanks that it has a lock, and flop onto the double bed. I’d imagine that Alexa and Oliver will turn this into a baby room in the near future.
When I was about five years old, wild with too much energy, my mother made me practice meditation. Meditation to a five-year-old is sitting cross-legged in front of your mother and counting breaths in and out. There was no deep philosophical thinking going on. While I didn’t care for them at five, I appreciated the memories after I no longer had my mother. Those moments were sharp in my mind, even at six, seven, eight. I could smell her lavender shampoo. Hear her soft inhales and exhales across from me. Later in life, I closed my eyes, cross-legged on the floor, and pretended that my mother was beside me.
Meditation didn’t yield results at first. Slowly, that changed.
I lower myself to the floor and close my eyes.
There’s a solution to my problems. I just need to find it.
Oliver is with James, which means I can’t count on Alexa. Lauren was acting a bit off, but what did I expect? Her dad and uncles were murdered, and her cousin disappeared for three weeks. The other cousins, even Rachel and Sorella, my two remaining aunts, have been distant.
Jorge and James conspired to bring down the Moretti family. From James’s empty bank account, I would guess that James paid off the Castillos. Maybe the Castillos promised a truce if James took over. That would be a brilliant coup. A feud that, up until a month ago, had no end in sight, suddenly brought to heel?
But then I survived, and James declared war.
I grimace and squeeze my eyes shut tighter. Finally, an idea blooms. I run it through once, twice, three times; I try to find flaws, cracks, things that can go wrong. Truthfully, there are too many things that can go wrong. The worst-case scenario is that I’m caught and murdered for my trouble. The best is that I put my family back together.
Satisfied and thoroughly exhausted, I climb into bed. Can’t do anything until it’s fully dark anyway.
This is a bad idea.
I chant that in my head as I walk down the street. This is a terrible idea, half-thought out, rushed—
“Hey, honey,” a guy sitting on his porch calls.
His friends laugh.
Awful idea.
The gun against my ribs makes me feel slightly better, but in a close fight, a gun wouldn’t help. Hell, I wouldn’t get a chance to pull it out if someone grabbed me from behind or rushed me…
Finally, the right house is in front of me. I take a second to look
at it—really look, like my dad taught me. It’s a home as big as my family’s, minus the fence and gate. Their security is less, but that’s probably because no one would dare to steal from them.
I’m not here to steal. Not anything physical anyway.
Like my home, this one has a guest house in the back. There’s no pool, just a grassy area set with picnic tables and extra chairs. It seems like the family is used to hosting parties. My father had notes on his computer in his home office about this house. Before I caught a cab across town, I snuck out of Alexa’s house and into mine, read what information I could, and off I went. Oh, and I took my gun from the shed in the back of the house—just in case.
The main home and guest house are completely dark. I open the door to the guest house and search around the small living room. White furniture with stainless steel accents. It doesn’t seem like the home of a bachelor.
It is cold, though. I shiver after the Vegas heat.
The bedroom has no personal effects. There’s a single toothbrush in a glass cup in the bathroom. A half-used tube of toothpaste next to it. The shower curtain is white with gray horizontal stripes, but there isn’t so much as a used towel on the rack.
Boring.
I take a seat on the kitchen counter, which gives me a good vantage point and is mostly hidden from the windows. I unbuckle my light jacket, which I chose solely to hide the holster and weapon, and take the gun out. I set it next to my thigh.
After that, there’s nothing left to do but wait.
Eons later, when Edgar Castillo walks through his front door, the memory of his face through the car window surfaces. I touch the cool metal of the gun, reassurance enough, and I wait as he sheds his sports coat, kicks off his shoes, and turns on a single lamp.
He doesn’t notice me at first. There’s a lot of peace in his routine. He loosens his tie, undoes the top button of his dress shirt. He exhales words under his breath. When he does notice me, his whole body locks up.
“You’ve grown up,” he says without looking at me.
“You, too,” I say, remembering the last time we’d spoken at age sixteen. His voice is deeper. He’s taller. He’s a bit more put together, whereas I’ve come undone. I’d say any girl would be lucky to have him—but he’s still the son of an infamous cartel boss.
“What are you doing here, Delia?” He finally turns toward me.
I tap my nails along the gun barrel, bringing his eyes away from my face and down to the mouth of the gun, pointed in his direction.
“Did you know what your father was planning?”
He snorts. “Do not be so foolish as to assume—”
“That it was only him?” I interrupt. “I don’t think that. Let me ask a different question: Did you know your father was planning something against my father when he met with James?”
He swallows.
I jump off the counter, dragging the gun with me. It shrieks against the marble countertop. Edgar is now taller than me by a foot. He’s certainly taller than Jackson. Thinner, too. He reminds me of Griffin in a way—they have the same look. They pretend there aren’t ghosts in the room, when in reality, the house is full of them.
“You thought I didn’t know.”
“I don’t know what happened,” he says. Whether he’s telling the truth is another story. “My father and his men came out. The job was done. We waited for Margaret, but…”
“By the time you realized she wasn’t coming out, I was gone,” I guess.
I wonder if Griffin first said that I would be good at this because I have the same darkness as Edgar and him. My ghosts press against me, but I ignore them. There are too many secrets and too much blood between Edgar and me.
He shrugs.
“You once said that our families didn’t have to be enemies,” I say softly. I lean toward him and offer the gun. “Do you still believe that?”
His attention switches from my face to the gun, up and down. Back and forth. My heart nearly bursts out of my chest while I wait for him to make up his mind. Light or dark. Good or evil. Right or wrong. Who would blame him if he took the gun and shot me?
He lifts the gun from my palm. I can’t help but close my eyes. I haven’t been shot, but the feeling of waiting for the bullet is familiar. It doesn’t lessen the fear ricocheting through me. I wonder if it will hurt, or if the pain will be too extraordinary and I’ll slide straight into shock.
“Delia,” he says.
I open my eyes. The gun is on the table beside us, pointed away.
“I think our fathers led us down a dark path,” he says. “We can reverse it.”
A tentative smile rises to my lips. “Good.”
“One question,” he says. “You tell me what happened in your house.”
I shake my head. “I once promised the man I love that I’d only tell the story once. I can’t tell it when he isn’t around to hear it. I will say that James didn’t act alone.”
He exhales. “What sort of plan are you concocting?” He gestures for me to take a seat. Once I do, he goes to the refrigerator and grabs two beers. He pops the tops off the bottles and slides one to me.
I take a gulp before I answer. “James was my father’s advisor. I can’t figure out if James and your father were conspiring to combine into one, if James was going to have a truce with your family once he was in charge, or…” I rub at my eyes. “Maybe James was pulling a long con. I don’t know.”
His full lips turn into a frown. “My father keeps me involved in nearly all things. James came to the house twice. The first time, he showed up, and my father’s men took him straight up to the office. I wasn’t invited. The second time, he brought money and his sister. That was the day my father and his men went to your house.”
I hold up my hand. “Wait a second. Sister?”
He eyes me. “Is that surprising?”
“James doesn’t have a sister.”
Edgar shakes his head. “You seriously playing dumb?”
I’m tempted to smack his chest. “Dumb? Jesus, Edgar, James doesn’t have a fucking sister.”
“Margaret is his sister,” he finally says.
And all the pieces I didn’t know I needed to connect slam into place. I needed to uncover Margaret’s motivation, but it’s been sitting in front of me this whole time. Margaret and James? Siblings.
“I’ll need to verify that,” I say, but my mind is already going to the funeral documents Lauren told me were in my father’s study. That will have her maiden name on it, I’d bet. I clear that from my thoughts, shoving it away until I can deal with it fully, and say, “So James paid your father.”
His frown deepens. “I’ve long been opposed to my father’s moral choices. Your father was no better.”
“James is worse.”
“You think your father brought you into the fold,” he says. “You think you’re ready to lead a family. We’re both naive enough to think our fathers would’ve loosened their grips so easily. No. There are things you don’t know about your family—and if you do know, then you’re not the person I thought you were.”
My mind races, trying to uncover the secrets that I might’ve been ignoring for the sake of loving my father. “Just tell me.”
He shakes his head. “Not here. You’d never believe me.”
“Where? When?”
He takes out his phone. “Tomorrow night. Nine o’clock. Meet me at the diner on West Charleston Boulevard. The twenty-four-hour one.”
He looks toward the main house. “You better go. I’ll walk you out.”
“Tomorrow,” I say at the top of the street. The coast is clear, and I head away from him.
I hope I can trust him. I hope I haven’t just made a giant mistake.
22
JACKSON
Griffin keeps a close watch on me. He sits in the backseat of Spike’s SUV, checking the surgical site, my temperature, and my pulse every twenty minutes. Dalton and Zach stayed behind in Salt Lake City. When we parted, Dalton said he h
ad some business to take care of before he went back to Miami, and Zach was going to help him do it.
The drive from Salt Lake to Vegas is tense, but the pain medication that Griffin keeps giving me by IV is helping me not give a shit. For most of the six hours, I doze. My head bobs as I nod off and jerk awake. Being back in the car, when I’m lucid, gives me cold sweats. I’m just on the edge of unconsciousness, but I lurch back into awareness at the memory of crunching metal.
Finally, Griffin takes me off the medication. It takes an hour or so for the pain to come roaring back, but I’d rather be awake and panting from pain than in that foggy semi-conscious state.
“So,” Spike says from the driver’s seat. “How’s the fire management going?”
I snort. “You’re joking?”
“No,” he says, his eyebrows drawing together. He meets my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Mason told them about the accident,” I say.
Spike glances at his partner, then back to the road.
“And then I called them up and quit.”
“You did what?”
Even Griffin looks surprised. Mason had taken me to the bathroom before we left, and I used his phone to call my boss. He didn’t handle it very well, but he understood that my accident would have a long recovery time. “I’m reorganizing my priorities,” I’d told him.
“I have enough money,” I mumble. I picture Delia’s face as I tell her the news: that I’m choosing her. Not her lifestyle, not her family—just her. I don’t know how that will work. I haven’t sorted it out yet. The thing is: I want to sort it out. I want to steal her away and be with her, even if I only get her for a handful of seconds each day.
Let’s not get carried away. I’m too greedy to be satisfied with a handful of seconds per day.
“Scorpion paid us well,” Mason agrees.
“Add that to the fact that I didn’t spend any of it,” I say.
Griffin’s eyebrows shoot up. “None?”
“It’s been in a savings account,” I say. “I had my Forest Service job, so…”
Griffin laughs. “I kind of want to punch you right now.”
