“That won’t be necessary. The best thing you can do is put her safety above all else and release her.”
I didn’t have to be explicitly told to stay away from her—that had always been implied. But it was the closest Costa had come to acknowledging my relationship with her. I wasn’t going to get his blessing. Which turned the question from how to get his approval . . . to whether I needed it.
“So I ask you again,” Costa said. “Are things going to get worse for Natalia?”
I shook my head, looking into my glass. “No, señor.”
“Good. As for your brother,” he said. “He wants to help.”
“And you don’t wonder why?” I asked.
Costa sucked his teeth, charting Cristiano from across the restaurant as he made a call on the patio. “No. Because he is grateful I have welcomed him back to his home,” he said. “Finish your drink. Then go and express your gratitude for your brother’s offer to help.”
Cristiano wasn’t here to help. He was here to hurt. Or worse . . .
No doubt he thought I’d turned my back on him eleven years ago and blamed me for everything he’d lost. It occurred to me that I hadn’t even considered the worst Cristiano could do.
It was true that by saving my Maldonado deal, he’d get credit for it, win back Costa’s favor, and potentially replace me. I’d assumed that was the fastest way for him to get everything he wanted.
But perhaps I’d been looking at the wrong side of the coin.
He could sabotage the deal instead.
If it failed . . . the Maldonados would see to my demise quickly and swiftly. Cristiano wouldn’t even have to get his hands dirty.
And I’d be removed from the picture entirely.
10
Natalia
Art belonged to my mother. Trying to read brushstrokes or create my own wasn’t something I understood. I learned about the world from books or travel, found nature by cantering a horse, and studied history by passing on legends through corridos—Mexican ballads.
Art, to me, was living in the world, not observing it. Floating on my back in the ocean on a hot day, finding shapes in the clouds. My aunt’s laugh when my nephew took a bite straight out of his birthday cake and came up with a face full of icing. Art lived in people.
It was the way one look from Diego could warm me to my core.
My mom’s studio spanned the top floor of the house. With a glass dome in the center and large corner windows facing southwest, it had the best light.
When I was younger, I’d hide in here to see how long it would take Diego to find me. We’d dip our hands in paint and make colorful prints on the tarp Mamá had put down. But most commonly, we’d look at the constellations with a telescope, our own private planetarium.
All the paint and easels had been removed, but the telescope sat on the deck. Tonight, I opened the doors and windows and watched the sun set while I waited for Diego.
When tires crunched dirt, I jumped up and leaned over the rail. A convoy of three cars kicked up dust as they wound up the driveway and parked out front. Cristiano and Diego got out, moving almost lethargically up the walk until my father stepped out to meet them. It was strange, after all this time, to see Cristiano and Diego casually standing next to each other. I leaned out farther to try to piece together their conversation.
“. . . forty-eight hours.”
“No word . . . Maldonado.”
“Antes de que salgas . . .”
Before you leave? My heart dropped at the thought of Diego disappearing again when I hadn’t seen him in three days. As if sensing my anguish, he looked up, met my eyes, and winked discreetly. I watched until they moved inside. As tempted as I was to run downstairs, I waited where I was, knowing Diego would come to me.
Paciencia should’ve been my second name—it was all I seemed to do. Wait. Bide my time. Bite my tongue. A sitting duck, as Americans said.
I killed time by peering through the telescope, but it wasn’t dark enough to see much yet. Eventually, the door to the studio opened. I sprang to my feet, hurrying across the wood floors to meet Diego. He caught me in his arms and lifted me for a kiss.
“Why have you stayed away so long?” I rushed out in a whisper, even though we were alone. “I’m set to fly home in a week.”
“I’m sorry, Talia. I haven’t had such a bad week in recent history. I shouldn’t be up here, but I texted because I needed to see you, even for a moment, to get me through.” He set me on my feet and gripped my waist. “But if your father catches me here, he’ll put you on the next flight out of México.”
“He wouldn’t. Easter is Sunday.”
“Believe me, he would.”
Papá wouldn’t ruin our holiday for that reason. I touched the brown, coarse stubble on Diego’s face. He stank of alcohol, sweat, and cigars, but I was comforted just to be in his presence. “Where have you been? Have you even slept?”
“No.” He loosened his already sagging tie. “We went to the city for dinner last night, then flew back and worked through to just now.”
To hear about cartel life over the phone was one thing, but the evidence of its non-stop demands stood in front of me. I hated to think of Diego overworking himself. “You need rest. Come. Sit and tell me everything.”
“I can’t stay, Tali. If Costa finds me here after dark—”
“He won’t.” I pulled him to the deck by his hand. Even his palm seemed rougher. “He never comes up here.”
“Your father’s serious about keeping us apart.” Diego sat in an Adirondack chair, following me with his eyes as I went to the linen closet. “It wasn’t an idle threat,” he said. “At dinner, Costa said he’s thinking of sending you back early.”
I stopped short, clutching a blanket. “But I’ve barely spent any time with you! I see you for a few hours, and then you disappear for a few days.”
He stood to take the wool throw from me. “Sit down,” he said.
I fell into the chair next to his. “He didn’t mention anything today, and we had lunch.”
“Does he ever? He keeps you in the dark to protect you. If he wants you gone, he’ll put you on a plane. He wouldn’t ask your permission first.” He unfurled the blanket over me. “I’m starting to think Costa will never come around to the idea of us. And then what?” He swallowed as he focused on tucking me in. “Would you still want me?”
I reached up to grab his cheeks. “Yes,” I said, forcing him to hold my gaze. “I’ll never give up on us. We’ll find a way.”
He searched my eyes. Though his were alight, the dark circles under them betrayed his lack of sleep. What had brought on his sudden doubts, and why did my father want me gone so soon?
“I have to ask, Tali . . .” Diego went as still and quiet as the sprawling night around us. “Could you be happy without your father in your life?”
To choose between my dad and Diego? It would be impossible. “He’s already lost too much,” I said. “If it came down to it, he’d be forced to accept us. I don’t think he’d ever make me choose.”
“But if he did?” Diego pressed his lips to my forehead before pulling his chair closer to mine to sit. “I just want you to start considering that possibility.”
I couldn’t imagine not calling Papá whenever I had a question, missed my mom, or simply had the urge. He always spent Christmas with me at school. And just because I only visited once a year didn’t mean I wanted to give up the possibility of coming home one day. Having one parent taken from me, I would never willingly give up the other. At the same time, I’d chosen to leave this life as much as I had been sent away.
But not once did I ever choose to be separated from Diego.
“And his approval is only half of the issue,” Diego added.
Diego didn’t want to be separated from me, either. It just wasn’t necessarily up to him. I opened the blanket to him, and he pulled part of it over himself, checking to make sure I was still covered. “You mean leaving the cartel,” I said.
My father raised the White Monarch, put it to the sicario’s head, and bang!
It was an image I doubted I’d ever be able to scrub from my mind.
What would it take for him to “handle” Diego? He’d leveled a threat in the kitchen days earlier, but I hadn’t taken it seriously. Diego was practically family to him.
“He wouldn’t hurt you,” I said. “He has to know what that would do to me.” I believed that, but there was another truth I couldn’t ignore. Papá hadn’t gotten to where he was by letting offenses slide, no matter how sentimental he might feel.
“As long as he doesn’t take us seriously, he’ll go out of his way to put up a wall between us,” Diego said. “He has to realize this isn’t a game to us, princesa. That we’re in this for life.”
Diego spoke with such conviction that for life inspired a thrill in me. I was his princess, but I was also that to my father—and in his eyes, Diego was just a ward of the cartel, forbidden from entering the proverbial castle walls he guarded.
“Then we’ll have to make sure my father understands that if he doesn’t let you go so we can start a life together, he will lose me.”
“You’ve told him how you feel. I’ve tried to broach the subject, but he won’t hear me. What else can we do to get him to see?”
It would have to be something that couldn’t be ignored, dismissed, or stopped. I thought back to my conversation with Papá in the kitchen about loving one person and being willing to risk everything for them. About the ties my mother had cut for my father. About how marriage was sacred and should only happen once. With the person you were willing to die for.
“If we can’t tell him, then we’ll have to show him,” I said. “Even if it means something drastic.”
“Such as?”
My heart raced as I looked out toward bruise-colored mountains as dusk swallowed the day. I was too shy to say it directly to Diego in case it wasn’t anything close to what he was thinking. “We could always elope.”
When he didn’t respond, I finally chanced a look at him.
He stared at me with a tenderness that melted my insides, leaving me a puddle of need and longing. This was the art of life—the art of Diego—and what I would risk my father’s wrath for. Diego possessed a potential he would never reach here. He’d supported my decision to go away knowing he’d be left behind. And he wanted the best for me, even if it meant the worst for him. He would never make me choose between the two of them.
“Marriage, Tali?” he asked softly, almost reverently.
“It’s a lot, I know—”
“It’s everything.” He took my hand under the blanket. “You’re the only one who believes in me enough to trust me with your love. With the world. I have tried and tried to show your father the man I can be. I have no one else—my parents gone and a brother I no longer recognize. You and Costa are my family, but he continues to deny me. And you have never once failed to accept me.”
Moved by his openness, my throat thickened. “He won’t be able to deny you once he sees how devoted we are.”
Diego slid his hand up my arm and massaged my shoulder. “I don’t understand how Costa freely respects Cristiano but continues to hold me at arm’s length. Last night, we were three grown men drinking and talking business, and yet, it’s like I was a teenager at the ranch again.”
I hated that Diego had grown up feeling second best to Cristiano, who’d been treated like a prodigy just because of his size and capacity for brutality. “There’s no way my father can just switch his trust for Cristiano back on.”
“It feels that way—like I’m being replaced.”
“Never, mi amor.” I stretched over the arm of the chair to kiss him for all the times we’d had this conversation and I hadn’t been able to physically comfort him. “I’ll show you so much love and respect that you don’t need it from anyone else.”
He held the back of my head for another peck. “We will be married,” he said, “but I can already declare that I intend to love you until death do us part.”
And death would do us part.
The soothsayer’s unwelcome warnings shivered through me. Damn her and her bullshit fortune. I forced her voice from my head and replaced it with a glowing vision of myself in all white, facing a suited Diego. We stood before an altar, hands intertwined as we committed our lives and love to each other. I’d dreamed of it many times at school, but for the first time, calling him my husband felt within grasp. “I wish the day were tomorrow,” I said.
“Don’t tempt me.” He released me to recline back. “I may steal you away and officially make you mine.”
“Stealing implies I wouldn’t go willingly.” Under the blanket, I folded my hands in my lap and squinted up, hoping for a shooting star. We needed all the help we could get. “I’ll be on a plane soon, Diego.”
He nodded slowly. “What’re you suggesting?”
“I don’t know. Just pointing out that we don’t know when we’ll be together next, so if we were going to do something drastic . . .” It would have to be now. I absentmindedly picked at my fingernails as I thought. “If the Maldonados gave you twenty-one days, then you only have less than two weeks left until you’re out of that. Then it’s over, right? But I’ll be gone.”
He fell quiet as he stared at the night sky, but he didn’t seem to be marveling over its wonders. He was working through something in his head, and the longer it took him to figure out his response, the more concerned I became. “What is it?” I asked.
“You know what this reminds me of?” he asked.
I studied his profile. “Catching insects in the rose garden?”
“I don’t know why I’m still surprised when you read my mind,” he said with a sad smile.
“Up here and out there were the two places you could sneak to for a little bit to keep me company.”
“Your mom would always find us and send me immediately back to the ranch.”
“She had to. My dad would’ve been upset. You were supposed to be working, and I wasn’t supposed to be around you guys.”
“I got to have a childhood through you, hearing about your adventures while I was off doing unimaginable shit to my own people. I never told you this because you were so young, but once, Cristiano used me as bait to kidnap a friend we grew up with.”
“What?” I asked, lifting my head. “How come? What happened to him?”
“What do you think?” Diego asked. “He ended up at the bottom of a wash.”
“But why?”
“Cristiano found out the kid was paying for his drugs by pimping out his underage sister. To Cristiano, that was enough reason to make our friend disappear.”
Good, I thought, and immediately covered my mouth. Who was I to say who lived or died? Who was Cristiano to play God? But who was anyone to pimp out a young girl? Around here, justice wasn’t always served through the channels it was supposed to be. Most of the police were corrupt, and the ones who weren’t were overwhelmed by either trying to prevent or clean up near daily murders.
“I’m sorry,” Diego said, removing his hand from under the blanket to take mine from my face. He intertwined our fingers. “That was too much.”
“No,” I said. “I just didn’t realize . . . I didn’t think the cartel would handle something like that. Did your friend work in the cartel?”
“No, just a customer. I mean, your dad would never stand for underage prostitution,” Diego said. “He might’ve ordered it done or cut off his dick or something. But Cristiano didn’t even go to him. He just popped the kid on his own time.”
I rested my head back against the chair with a mental image I could’ve done without. Had Diego’s friend automatically broken some imaginary law my dad held that Cristiano had enforced? Or had Cristiano done it out of compassion toward the girl? Considering the k
ind of cartel Cristiano ran now, I wondered if any of that benevolence remained. “Do you think the kid deserved it?” I asked.
Diego ran a hand over his stubble and scratched his chin. “Yeah, it had to be done. But I was a kid too, like thirteen or fourteen. I’d known him my whole life.”
“That’s messed up,” I agreed, grateful my dad had moved on from that kind of business.
“You were my break from all of it.” Diego kept my hand in his but put his other arm behind his head. “You’d tell me about your adventures of the day. Your mom would take you to the outdoor mercado and you’d sneak fruit right from the stands. You’d come home with an orange-stained tongue or dirty fingers from picking wildflowers on the way back. Bianca loved to be outdoors.”
“My mom grew up helping my grandparents on their farm.” It was strange to call two people I didn’t know grandparents. They’d wanted no affiliation with anything illegal, and my mom had respected their decision in order to keep them out of danger.
Diego and I had nice memories, but the past couldn’t distract me from the fact that he was clearly avoiding the subject of his very dangerous arrangement. “Is something wrong with the Maldonados?” I asked, taking my hand back. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I wouldn’t lie. I just don’t want to worry you.” He removed his arm from behind his head and shifted to face me. “It’s just that—I . . . it looks like someone’s sabotaging the deal.”
My heart dropped. After what Diego had told me about the Maldonados, even the threat of a problem would worry me. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “And what does ‘sabotaging’ mean?”
“Just how it sounds. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have been able to deliver what I promised the Maldonados, but a lot of their product has been compromised. And it’s no accident.” He rubbed his eyebrow. “The majority hasn’t even crossed the border yet, which is usually where it gets confiscated or stolen. Someone has to be messing with us, but not many would on our own turf.”
Violent Delights (White Monarch Book 1) Page 12
