I fumbled for the fob to make sure I had the right set of keys, then quietly opened the car door. I ducked behind the side panel, listening as my eyes adjusted. The area seemed clear, so I tiptoed toward the back door, where I deftly tried each key until the lock finally gave.
The door opened to a wide, dark hallway with a light at the end of it. I tugged down the hem of my dress and felt my way along one wall, stepping carefully over boxes. I almost rolled my heel on some screws but managed to steady myself against a crate. As I got closer, men’s voices and the clink of what sounded like metal tools carried through the doorway. I listened for yelling, threats, or arguing but heard nothing of the sort.
When I’d reached the end of the hall, I inhaled a deep breath and peeked in. It was a garage with two eighteen-wheeler trucks parked side by side. The one closest to me had its hood popped. Diego worked underneath it, standing on a stepladder with a tool belt around his waist and his sleeves rolled.
I scanned the room for the men I’d seen. I recognized my father’s soldiers as they unloaded cartons from an armored vehicle, but others didn’t look familiar at all. Hadn’t Diego said only their most trusted men were here?
When I returned my eyes to the semi, Diego had his phone out. After reading the screen, he looked toward the doorway, and his eyes widened when he saw me. Wiping his hands on a rag, he nodded for me to get back in the hall. I hid as he said something about the engine to the other men. Moments later, he came around the corner and nearly knocked me over.
He grasped my shoulders. “You okay?” he whispered.
“I saw men in Calavera clothing outside,” I rushed out. “I think they were sneaking in the back door.”
“Yeah, I know. They’re with us.”
I blinked twice as my mouth fell open. “What?”
“This is Cristiano’s warehouse.” Diego took his suit jacket from over his elbow, put it around my shoulders, and moved me farther from the doorway. “We decided to store everything here after our locations were compromised.”
I leaned in and spoke softly. “But what if Cristiano is behind the attacks?”
“It wasn’t my decision, believe me, but we’re in a crunch.” Diego frowned. “I had no other option. I just hope Cristiano has enough of a reason not to sabotage us.”
I eased back. “You mean because he might be planning to take it all over.”
“Right.” Diego glanced over his shoulder. “Jojo says everything’s been quiet. They’re even getting along with Cristiano’s guys. But you still shouldn’t be in here.”
“I don’t want to go back to the car,” I said. “The dark . . . it just takes me back to being down there.”
“I get it.” He pulled the jacket closed and kissed my forehead. “I actually feel safer with you inside. The engine isn’t fixed yet, but I see the problem. Tomás can probably take it from here.”
“I have two hours before I have to be home. I’d feel better if you guys just fixed the problem,” I said. “Because if you can’t get the truck to start . . . then what?”
“Then I can’t make half the delivery tomorrow,” he said. “And all our plans go to shit.”
“Then you should handle it. I’ll just stay hidden.”
“Not here. People are coming and going.” He glanced toward the ceiling. “We take breaks on the roof. You could go up there, because I assure you, no one’s taking a fucking break tonight. There are lights too. You still have those keys?”
I held up the set. He picked through them until he found the one he was looking for, then walked by me to open the door to the expansive warehouse. He flipped some switches and fluorescent lights flickered on as I entered.
My heels echoed through the building that stored stacks of massive wooden crates and heavy-duty machinery. Attached to one wall was an office with storage lockers. “What is all this?” I asked.
“Calavera contraband. Artillery. Semi-automatics, grenades, drones, IEDs—that kind of thing.”
I turned in a circle. No wonder this place was so dangerous. “Where’s it all going?”
“Most of it is coming. Smuggled from up north so criminals like us can organize and protect our product. From each other and from law enforcement.” He pointed across the warehouse to a staircase. “Just take that up to the access door on the roof. Up there, you’ll see lounge chairs and stuff.”
“What if someone comes up?”
“Nobody else has keys to this side of the warehouse except me and Cristiano’s right-hand man, who’s not here tonight. But the door locks automatically behind you, so just in case, take the keys.” He kissed me quickly. “I’ll be up shortly.”
I held Diego’s jacket closed as I crossed the room, climbed the stairs to the second level, and continued up a short access hall. At the end stood a single door with a long glass window big enough for me to glimpse the sky.
I stepped out onto the roof. Outdoor LED lights guided me through rows of solar panels and across a helipad.
I found an area of loungers and camping chairs where the men must’ve taken their breaks, picked up a sarape blanket, and sat underneath it near a portable grill. Clusters of stars were the only light in the black, horizonless desert. Behind me, the town twinkled. In that direction, light and life thrived in the dark while the desert had killed the most resilient of men. Why had I chosen to face the direction that was nothing but desert? Why confront Cristiano when being on his radar could only lead to trouble?
Darkness called to me.
That didn’t mean I had to answer.
It’d been too easy to enmesh myself in Cristiano’s game. Too natural to succumb to the shadows that swarmed my nightmares. Cristiano had said this life lived in me like a heart. Maybe that was true, but hearts could be replaced. A brain couldn’t. I wasn’t going to walk toward darkness like my mother had.
I leaned my head back. As adrenaline from my emotional and mental warfare with Cristiano wore off, I drifted in and out of consciousness until my phone dinged with a text from Diego that he was on his way up.
I went to meet him at the door. He slipped his arms inside my jacket and scooped me up by my waist, walking us backward. “Nice up here, isn’t it? You wouldn’t expect it to be.”
“I can count every star.”
“Funny, I’m seeing stars too . . .” He captured my mouth for a kiss. “Put your legs around me.”
He lifted me by my ass, and I locked my ankles at his lower back. “Did you fix the engine?” I asked.
“It’s all good.” He pecked me. “Everything’s on schedule to leave late-morning.” His lips brushed the underside of my jaw. “Border patrol is expecting us. Law enforcement is standing by to escort us.” He moved his mouth down my neck, warming me with his breath. “We’re closer and closer to freedom.”
That explained his sudden good mood. I raised my eyes to the sky as he sucked and nibbled the tender skin along my throat. “We’re so close,” I said, nearly moaning.
“We are.”
“And we’ve been so good.”
I felt his smile against my skin. “We have.”
“Almost saintly.”
He laughed hotly into the curve of my neck. “I didn’t know saints kissed this way.”
My dress inched up the backs of my thighs. He helped it along until my thong was almost exposed. I lifted up to readjust, and the length of him pressed solid between my legs, eliciting my gasp and his pained groan. He wanted me. He was ready for me.
Maybe it was being out in the open, but I was hit with the uneasy question of what my mother would think if she was looking down now. Would she understand Diego and I were meant to be as she and my father had been? They were younger than me when they married. And Diego’s optimism was contagious. Finally, I felt as if he wanted to start over in California more than he needed the constant threat of danger that made cartel life both treacherous and exhilarating.
He lowered me onto the cushion of a chaise lounge and kneeled at my feet to remove my shoes. H
e kissed the inside of my ankle, and I shivered as he grazed his five o’clock shadow up the inside of my leg. He climbed over me, and fixed his mouth on mine, his kiss becoming hungry as our tongues met fast and slippery. “I want you so bad, Tali,” he said, panting. “I can’t wait any longer to bury myself inside you.”
His bold words thrilled me, and as he kissed his way down my collarbone and chest, I doubted my decision to wait. Diego and I were destined. Tomorrow would go well, and he’d come to California.
If it didn’t, then I’d have bigger worries than my virginity.
If anything went wrong, wouldn’t I wish I’d had this night with him?
We were as good as committed to each other. Why wait for a ceremony?
Diego paused, lifting his head. “Where’d you go, princesa?”
“I’m here. I was just trying to remember why we’re waiting.”
“How much of that vodka did you drink?” he asked with a haphazard smile.
“It’s not that. I feel fine. I’m just . . .”
“Horny?”
I laughed. “That goes without saying.”
“You have no idea how much it turns me on to know that you’re turned on.” He sat back on his calves. “But if you have to think about whether you’re ready, then we shouldn’t go any further.”
I sat up on my elbows, awed by his restraint. By his gallantry. “Really?” I asked.
“Our first time isn’t going to be on top of a warehouse. Or any piece of property that belongs to my fucking brother.” He stretched out next to me, and I lifted my head to settle into the crook of his arm. “Damn,” he said. “It feels good to lie down.”
“Do you have to come back here after you drop me off?”
“Yeah I will, even though Jojo told me to go home and sleep since I need to be alert during the delivery.”
I glanced up at him. “You’re going with them tomorrow?”
“I have to.” With his eyes on the sky, his jaw squared as he swallowed. “It’s too important for me not to be there.”
My heart sank. The last shipment to attempt to cross the border had been blown up, killing two men. “Aren’t you more valuable here?” I asked. “Like those people in the movies who stay in the control center during a shuttle launch?”
Diego kissed my temple when I shuddered. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry. I’m more resilient than you think, and I’m not planning to meet God any time soon.”
I let his resolve soothe me. Because it was that same determination in his voice that told me I wouldn’t be able to talk him out of going. A sense of duty ran almost as deeply as loyalty within the cartel. Diego would see this through to the end.
I wanted to be content to sit in peace with Diego and take in these rare moments we had alone, but because the past had crept up on me in the car, my mind kept flashing there. The nebulous shape of my mother’s blood on the cold tile. The black, cold-as-steel Glock engulfed by Cristiano’s hand. I smelled gunpowder and expensive perfume and heard my father’s sobs, as subdued as thunder, the night he’d returned home from his trip. My mother had struggled to warn me about Cristiano. If he hadn’t shot her, why had she looked so scared as she’d pleaded with him for my life?
I’d locked these memories away, but Cristiano’s presence dredged up more each day. His cryptic words earlier had wormed their way into my consciousness. I’d gotten good at pushing the darkness away, but tonight, it pushed back.
Were there other things about that day I hadn’t noticed? Could someone else have gotten into the house somehow? I’d spent almost half of my life seeing Cristiano as a protector—but I’d spent more of it thinking of him as my mother’s murderer. Diego, too, had believed the worst in his brother for a long time.
Diego squeezed me closer. “You got quiet. You all right?”
“Are you?” I asked.
His eyebrows drew together. “Why?”
“We’ve talked a lot about how I’m dealing with everything, but I haven’t really asked what it’s like for you to have Cristiano back—and to consider he might not have done this.”
He scratched the bridge of his nose. “I . . . I’m not sure it matters. Whether Cristiano murdered Bianca or not, too much damage has been done.” His chest expanded with a deep inhale. “There’s no chance Cristiano and I could repair our relationship.”
“Even if he’s proven innocent?” I asked. “I’ve spent a long time blaming him for this too, but as much as I don’t trust him, I do trust my father.”
“Cristiano’s not innocent,” Diego said without an ounce of doubt. “But neither am I.”
I cocked my head into the nook of his shoulder. “What?”
“It’s beginning to hit me that Cristiano and I . . .” He shifted in the chair. “We’re more similar than I’d like to admit.”
Diego and Cristiano—similar? Aside from sharing some physical attributes, they were night and day to me. “You’re not like him,” I said, tracing my index finger over the stubble shading his chin. “Not in a million years.”
I lifted my head when Diego repositioned his arm under me, as if he couldn’t get comfortable. “He betrayed our family,” Diego said, “and I betrayed him.”
“You mean Cristiano betrayed my father . . .?”
“No. Mine.” He paused, lowering his eyes from the sky to the desert. “When Costa killed my parents, I didn’t fully grasp the business they were in. I do now. I understand why they couldn’t continue down that path.” His face screwed up as if he’d bitten into something sour. “But they didn’t need to die for it.”
Diego didn’t talk about his parents much, but when he did, he got pensive. Still, I’d never questioned that he understood why their death had to happen.
“Our families had a pact not to get into human trafficking. Your parents broke it,” I reminded him, flattening my hand over his chest. His heart beat strong against my palm. “But the real reason Papá did what he did was because they plotted against him.”
“I know. I get it. But they’re my blood, Natalia.”
“That doesn’t excuse everything under the sun. It can’t.”
“I thought it did. Cristiano went against my parents because he didn’t agree with how they ran their business. At the time, I thought him a traitor—and I still do.” He wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve and blew out a breath. “I didn’t think anything should ever break the bonds of family. But then I did that exact thing to Cristiano.”
“It takes courage to resist blind loyalty,” I said soothingly, trying to comfort him.
“Or does it take courage to stick by family no matter what?” he asked. I heard the struggle in his voice and wondered how long he’d been thinking all this. “As Cristiano couldn’t excuse my parents for getting involved in things like forced labor or sex slavery, I couldn’t excuse him for taking your mother’s life—and I turned on him. My own blood.”
“You had no other choice, Diego.” When he didn’t respond, I added, “There has to be a line somewhere, even for family.”
“I’m not sure I agree. Sometimes, I get overwhelmed by helplessness wondering if I betrayed my family by joining yours. I hate Cristiano for what he did to Bianca, but perhaps doing nothing was just as bad.”
Doing something would’ve meant retaliation. “Did you ever think of taking vengeance for their death?”
He didn’t answer right away. As seconds ticked by, I grew uneasy. There was only one person Diego would take revenge on. My father.
“In my darkest moments, yes,” he admitted.
My heart thumped once. I’d never heard Diego mention a desire for retribution, but I supposed that was human nature. It wasn’t as if I’d never wondered how things might’ve turned out differently if I’d actually known how to operate the gun I’d pulled on Cristiano all those years ago.
“But that’s how you and Cristiano are different,” I said, balling his shirt in my fist. “You are good. You never would’ve acted on those feelings.”
“At the core of it, though, Tali—we’ve each committed the highest sin in this world. We turned against family, and that’s how we’re alike.” His body depressed into the chair with a long exhale. “It’s why we can never repair what’s left between us. Even if we’re forced to do business together as Costa wants, even if we find a way to make things right again—the distrust between us will never go away.”
“You keep saying Cristiano turned against family,” I said, trying to decipher what exactly he meant. Did he mean because Cristiano had joined our cartel? “When he hurt my mom, he was close enough to my parents to be like family, but they weren’t blood as you continue to point out.”
“I’m not talking about what he did to your family. I’m talking about what he did to mine.”
What? I furrowed my eyebrows. I didn’t understand what he meant, but as Cristiano had warned me hours earlier—I was starting to believe there was more to my mother’s murder than I knew.
I sat up on one elbow to look down at him. “What are you saying?” I asked.
“You asked if I ever think of vengeance,” he said slowly. “I do. But not against your father. He may have pulled the trigger, but Cristiano is the one who told Costa what my parents were doing, and what they were planning.”
It took a moment for his words to sink in. I’d never questioned how my father had learned that the de la Rosas were conspiring against him. I wouldn’t have guessed the information that would get them killed would come from within their own family. “Cristiano had your parents killed?”
“Yes. That’s the betrayal I mean.” Diego glanced away. “My brother has no loyalty. He never has. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell Costa. I can’t trust him . . . but I can trust a man’s motivations.”
“What are his motivations?” I asked. My mind raced as this new door opened. Could this help reconcile any holes in my past? “Why is he back? I thought it was to avenge his parents’ death, but if he caused it, then Papá was right. He’s not here for revenge. So what does he want?”
Falling for the Forbidden: 10 Full-Length Novels Page 70
