by Karina Halle
My father was visibly upset after Diego died—he was one of his most trusted friends and certainly the one who stuck around to the bitter end. But even then, I remember my father put his hand on my shoulder and told me it was better to live like a king and die young than to die at an old age without having lived.
I always thought that was an odd thing to say, especially as my father also taught me how important family was, and how without it, a man truly had nothing.
Just another thing I’ll never understand about him. Family, blood, was everything, and yet he sometimes acted like it would only get you killed in the end.
In my dream, a bare lightbulb hangs in a dark room, swinging, casting harsh light on our faces. We all sit with our backs against the wall, hands tied. Normally the safe houses are nice places, but this one has no furniture, no windows. It barely seems to be a room—it stretches into black infinity.
We are waiting for something horrible. We are no longer hiding. We are no longer protected.
Diego starts murmuring a prayer to Santa Muerte, the Saint of Death. When I look over at him he starts crying blood, shaking his head so it flies everywhere. It lands on my cheek with a hiss.
Then the shape of a door slowly appears, a glowing white outline, like someone shining a spotlight from the other side.
The light turns red.
Violet.
The brightest purple.
The door opens and I have to shield my eyes.
A figure walks in, taking careful steps. The light blinds everything except the silhouette. Tall, in a long robe that drags as the figure walks.
It stops right in front of us. Diego’s prayer fades into nothing.
This is Santa Muerte.
I stare at her feet in black combat boots before I slowly gaze upward to where bone-white skeleton legs disappear under a purple gown.
I blink into the light until I see Santa Muerte’s face.
I wish I hadn’t.
Though her face is just a skull, blackened with ash, with long thick black braids that hang down on both sides, her eyes glow within their dark pits.
I can feel them on me, burning through.
These are Violet’s eyes.
She has become the Saint of Death.
Tonight, she has come for my family.
With revenge from her family.
“You caused this, Vicente,” my mother hisses to me, and when I look at her, she’s nothing but skeleton too. “You caused this.”
“You caused this,” says the skull of Marisol.
“You,” says Diego. “For what purpose?”
“For love,” I say, looking back at Death. “I did this for love.”
Santa Muerte leans over, her heavy braids swinging forward until her ghoulish face is right in front of me. My eyes are locked on to her sockets, where I know Violet is, where I can feel her radiating outward like damaging rays.
Ultraviolet.
“Didn’t your father ever teach you,” Violet’s voice, rough and demonized enters my brain, taking over my head, “that love is what gets you killed?”
Then she kisses me with cold bones.
And I am swept away into the black.
The sound of flapping wings takes over.
Then fades.
When I wake up, I’m shaking and covered in cold sweat. I can’t remember the last time I had a fright like that and it takes me a moment to figure out how to breathe.
I’m in bed, in my hotel room. It smells like sex from earlier and I breathe it in deep.
Violet, Violet, Violet.
My hands can still feel her skin yielding to me, the breathless gasps from her mouth. The way she writhed underneath my tongue, her eternal sweetness filling my mouth.
The tight, wet slide as I pushed myself into her. Over and over again.
I move my hands over my cock, hard and thick already, slowly stroking up and down.
What are you doing? a voice whispers in my head. It’s loud, commanding, swirling up from the deep.
I ignore it. I keep stroking myself, desperate for thoughts of her.
It persists.
Why are you even here?
What good will this do when your fun is over?
What do you really want?
Her. I want her. For now, I just want her.
I tell myself I’ll figure the rest out later.
Even though I know there is no later.
Not for us.
Not ever.
Violet is the means to an end. She’s a pawn in a game I’m not sure how to win.
Why are you here?
To win the respect of my father.
Why are you here?
To understand my father.
Why are you here?
To distance myself from my father.
Why are you here?
To find out how to beat my father.
And then what?
To take over the cartel. With no interference.
To become king.
To rule my way.
Then you know what you must do.
You must plan.
You must execute the plan.
Use Violet to get to her mother.
Befriend the McQueens.
Learn from them.
Then kill them all, except for her.
The reason you thought you came here.
Then take her to your father.
She’s collateral.
She’s a bargaining chip.
She’s an offering.
And if it all falls through?
Then you’re no better than he is.
I wake up again. A dream within a dream. Motherfucking inception.
I blink at the grey dawn slowly coming into focus through the open curtains and dig my nails into my arm until they bleed.
It hurts. It’s enough to tell me I’m awake this time.
The voice still resonates in my head.
Reminding me of why I came here to begin with.
It was never about Violet.
And yet here I am.
I slowly get out of bed and head into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. While it percolates, I flip through the room service menu for breakfast options. The dishes from last night are laid out on the coffee table, and the memory of us eating it, naked, stirs something inside me that I don’t wish to wake up.
We made rough plans last night to meet today after her class. Part of me wants to cancel and take the time to get my head on straight, to think about the plan and what to do next.
But the other part of me realizes that this is what I have to do next. Get to know Violet better. Earn her trust. Fuck her pretty little brains out.
It’s not my fault that I want this, that I enjoy this.
I wonder if this is how my father felt?
Or was it Ellie that played him?
I’ll find out soon enough.
Violet is lost in her own world.
I should just let her be.
Respect her space.
Don’t get involved.
Not now. Not ever.
I have a feeling that whatever she’s stewing over and the way it’s translating into her stabbing her maraschino cherry with her straw repeatedly as the two of us sit side by side at an outdoor patio, along a high-top table overlooking the bay, has got nothing to do with me.
But the more information about her life she gives me, the more I can use it.
“What’s on your mind?” I ask her.
It takes her a few moments to look up. “Huh?”
“You’re stabbing that cherry like it’s wronged you. Has someone wronged you, mirlo?”
“Mirlo?” she repeats. It sounds so cute coming from her mouth.
I run my hand over her dark hair that’s shining in the sun. “You have blackbird hair. Mirlo, in Spanish.”
“Oh.” She attempts a smile but fails. Her lower lip pouts slightly and I take the opportunity to kiss it, licking the cherry juice from the inside rim.
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Her eyes are closed when I pull back and she slowly flutters them open. Every time she looks at me like that, right after I fuck her, right after I kiss her, it undoes something inside me. Something that should never be unraveled and yet I’m helping her pull the strings.
“As I was asking,” I remind her, running my thumb over that sweet lip.
She squints at me and then pulls her sunglasses over her eyes, a barricade. It could also be that this is the first truly sunny day since I’ve been here, so the sun is extra impactful, and everyone around us is dressed in summer gear. I guess that’s the thing about San Francisco, all their seasons are ass-backwards.
“Wronged is a strong word,” she says slowly, her attention back to the ferries darting across the bay. She’s back to stabbing the cherry again. “Or maybe it’s the right word, I don’t know.” She sighs. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Anything,” I tell her, displaying my palms.
“Do you have a good relationship with your parents?”
I nearly laugh. “Do I?”
“Yeah.” She’s totally serious.
“Well,” I begin, not sure how much to share. Then I decide, fuck it, I’m all in if she gives me her truth. “Not really. No.”
“Why not?”
I open my mouth then close it, thinking, because they aren’t good people. “It’s just always been that way,” I finally say. “My childhood was very…unusual. Because of my father’s business.”
“Selling avocados?”
I give her a half-smile. “Si. The avocados. My father was very busy and the job is very stressful, so I rarely saw him.”
“He was away on business a lot?”
“Hmmm. Not that often. The business came to him. We lived in a big property. He was always in his office or one of the secondary houses. My sister and I were always elsewhere. We were kept very separate from what he did.”
“You have a sister? How old?”
“Three years younger than me.”
“And how old are you anyway?”
“Young enough to get away with everything and old enough to know better.”
She frowns but I continue. “Anyway, my sister, Marisol, she was babied a lot by my mother but I wasn’t so much. She got most of the love, I got the tough version of it. I guess because I was the boy. Was your brother treated differently?”
“Not really, no.”
“It doesn’t matter. It is what it is. My father is a man who…well, honestly, at times seems incapable of love. Which is an odd thing to say because I know he loves my mother and he loves his children. I just think it’s different for him.”
Just as it’s different for me.
“And your mother?”
“My mother did her best with me, but as I got older I could see…things were changing. She became more distant, like she wasn’t sure how to be a mother to me.” I pause. “She began to fear me.”
Violet stops stabbing and gives me one hell of a look. “Why would your mother fear you?”
“Because she thought I would grow up to be like my father.”
“And did you?”
“I don’t know yet. Time will tell, I guess.”
“And…that’s a bad thing?”
I shrug with one shoulder, palming my beer. “It depends who you talk to. My father is one of the most respected men in the whole country. He is also the most feared. Some might call him good because he has done a lot of good for the communities. Avocados are a popular business, and that business keeps a lot of people employed, and a lot of excess money goes toward funding villages and towns. Those people see him as a savior. Without him, many would suffer. Ironically, with him, many suffer as well.”
“And the other people?”
“The other people want him dead.”
She blinks at me. Whispers, “Dead?”
“If he’s dead, they can take over the business and get all the power. Right now he doesn’t have all the power. At one time, he used to. But since then he’s lost a lot of it. It’s been fractioned and we need to figure out a way to unite the, uh, businesses. But many still consider him el jeffe of el jeffe. He certainly does.”
“Your father isn’t a farmer. Is he?”
I look her dead in the eyes. “Is your mother really a photographer? Is your father really a tattoo artist?”
She swallows hard, her gaze caught in mine, eyes flecked with fear, but manages to nod. “Yes. They are.”
I believe her. She knows nothing at all.
“At least…that’s what they do now,” she says slowly, cautiously, like she’s uncertain that once the words leave her mouth, they become truth. “Sometimes I wonder…who they used to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t really explain it.”
“Try.”
Her brows knit together. “I don’t know…”
“You can trust me,” I tell her. “You know this.”
Trust me.
She nods. “Okay. I trust you.”
I supress a victorious smile.
She takes a deep breath. “This will all sound weird.”
“It can’t possibly after what I just told you.”
“I don’t know about that. My brother and I were always told that my grandfather, my dad’s father, died a long time ago. He never talked much about him but we knew that much. My grandmother, of course, apparently died long ago too.”
“Apparently…”
“Yeah. Well, now I don’t know. Because a few weeks ago I found a letter addressed to my father. There was no return address, but it was stamped in California. Mailed locally. Inside was a newspaper clipping.” She takes her phone out of her jacket pocket and quickly scrolls through it before placing it next to my drink.
I pick it up, shielding the glare from the sun, and eye the photo on the screen.
A picture of a newspaper article.
I quickly read it.
I’m surprised.
I glance at her. “Do you know what Mexican drug cartel it was?”
“No,” she says softly. “I don’t know any of this. Why? Do you think…do you think you could help find out? Because my brother Ben has been looking into it and…”
“What did he find?” I ask a little too sharply.
She doesn’t seem to notice. “He wouldn’t tell me everything. Says he needs to talk to me this weekend. But he said that he doesn’t think it was a Mexican cartel. He thinks it was the mafia.”
This is new. “The Italian mafia?”
“I guess. He said he found a news report from 2014 that mentioned our father in conjunction with a kidnapping attempt.”
“Kidnapping?” Jesus. That wasn’t in the files I found. Then again, most of the information my father had was about Ellie, not Camden.
“But my brother said it was cleared, like a mistake or something, and it was actually two brothers who had ties to the mafia that kidnapped a woman and her son.”
“Violet.” I put my hand on her thigh, squeezing it lightly. “When did you find all this out?”
“Like I said, I had the article for a while but Ben called me last night to tell me the rest.”
“So you have to confront your parents…”
She shakes her head. “No, I need to know more. Ben can find it out. You can find it out.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re Mexican.”
I let out a sharp laugh. “Just because I’m Mexican doesn’t mean I know anything about drug cartels.”
Wry disbelief is etched on her face. “Oh, please. You can’t tell me all about your father and his so-called business and not have me thinking a few things.”
“But the article your brother found—”
“I know. But the article I read, the one here,” she picks up her phone, “mentioned a Mexican cartel. I just want to know something, anything.”
“And then what happens? What if you find out it’s the Sinaloa cartel? Or the Zetas? Or who knows what fu
cking cartels existed way back when. Then what? You going to stroll down to Mexico and go knocking on their doors?”
And then, as I’m saying those words, it dawns on me.
Shit. Has Violet been playing me? Has she let all of this, all of us, happen, because she thinks I might lead her to the truth?
If only she knew how close she was.
I can never let her know.
She sighs, shaking her head, eyes getting watery.
Fuck.
I rub my hand up and down her thigh. “Hey. Look. I’ll…ask my father. How about that?”
Oh, if only you fucking knew.
“No, no,” she says. “You just said you don’t get along. I’ll just…it doesn’t matter. I’m just scared.”
“It’s natural to be scared when you’re presented with a lie. Especially when it turns your world upside down.”
She sucks in her lower lip, staring across the bay. “Someone was following me last night.”
“What?” I jerk to attention, my fingers digging into her leg. “When?”
She frowns at the pressure and I ease off. My heart is starting to pound.
Following her? Could it be one of my father’s men already?
“Last night,” she says. “When I was on the phone with Ben.”
“I dropped you off at home,” I tell her roughly, angry she didn’t go straight in.
“I know, but I was too…excited. To sleep. So I walked up and down Haight to burn off the energy.”
“You should never walk there alone.”
Her withering stare cuts into me. “Oh, come on. Sorry, Vicente, but I’ve been taking care of myself just fine before you came along. You don’t even know the city. I do. It’s my home.”
“Two bodies were found shot in the head in the park close to your house,” I tell her. “The person who killed them is still out there. You just said you were scared.”
She rolls her eyes. “People always die in that park. Drug overdoses or drug deals gone wrong, there’s no difference. And those people, they were just passing through…” She trails off. “They were Mexican, weren’t they?”
“I don’t know, the news never identified them.”