Falling For The Forbidden

by Hawkins, Jessica

  The affair lived up to its tales of opulence and extravagance. I could hardly believe all this had been happening a hundred meters from my bedroom.

  Glancing up, I spotted Diego in a long-sleeved denim shirt, a brown suede vest, and a cowboy hat. He surveyed the room from behind a second-floor railing. When our eyes met, he narrowed his. I bit my bottom lip as recognition crossed his features. He shook his head at me to signal his disapproval but tipped his hat with a small smile. After a quick scan of the room, he started down to the ground floor, but a security guard stopped him to speak in his ear. Diego looked at me, checked his watch, then turned back up the stairs.

  I walked toward a pair of fire dancers twirling on the patio, their flames making shapes against the backdrop of night, but my attention snagged on a scribbled Fortune Teller sign. One corner of the room had been sectioned off with hung purple fabric. How strange. My father became more devout in his faith the older he got and held nothing but contempt for the occult.

  I heard Papá’s booming voice before I saw him. I craned my neck, but he was a head taller than most and easy to find. He shook hands with a governor. If Diego recognized me, my father probably would too, and I’d be banished back to the house.

  I ducked behind the fortune teller’s curtains to watch through a sliver. Papá carried an ornamental staff and wore a heavy looking jeweled crown that flattened out his black and gray hair. A ruby-red velvet cape with ermine trim weighed on his big frame.

  “All these riches will be yours one day,” said a craggy female voice.

  Startled, I turned around. The partitioned area was shrouded in crimson light, but a glowing purple crystal ball illuminated the deep-set wrinkles and dark eyes of a woman at a small table. On the exotic tapestry, a stack of tarot cards sat by her slender, veiny hand. A convincing actress, she certainly looked the part. “I’m sorry?”

  “You will inherit all of this. Not just material things.”

  “I don’t want my fortune read,” I said, peeking back through the curtains.

  “You don’t believe in it?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the harm?”

  Damn. I’d lost sight of my father.

  “It’s no use hiding. He’ll find you.” She spoke unevenly, her words jagged.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “Who?”

  She stared at me from under thick black lashes and a shimmering gold headdress. “I see a man . . .” She tapped one nail on the table, squinting. “The man of the rose.”

  De la Rosa. It wasn’t unusual that she’d have heard Diego’s name somewhere—he was well-known around here. “You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m not hiding from him.”

  “I’m rarely wrong, muñeca.” She gestured for me, calling me a doll and treating me as one, too. “Come. Siéntate. The monarch wills it.”

  I turned to face her completely as chills covered my shoulders. It occurred to me that up until my mother’s death, she’d planned every detail of these parties. Maybe she’d known this woman. “What?”

  She said nothing more, waiting. Father would never have a true oracle here, if such a thing existed. As she’d said, what harm could it do? I took the cushioned folding chair across from her. In the light, her eyes were as ultraviolet as they appeared shrewd. One look told me she had seen things, knew things, but that didn’t scare me. The past was the past. It was impossible to tell the future.

  “Did you know Bianca King Cruz?” I asked.

  “Only from afar.” The woman lifted up and fixed the pillow on her chair. “Perdón. My achy back.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, unsure of the appropriate response. Her musky, floral perfume wafted across the table. When she didn’t offer anything else, I held out my palm. “Well? Are you going to read it?”

  “You’re a young girl,” she said.

  “That’s obvious to anyone with eyes.” My gaze drifted to the deck of cards. “Aren’t you going to tell my fortune?”

  “I don’t need to. It’s clear as day.” She reached out, her bracelets jangling as she took my hand in hers. She wore rings upon rings on each finger—amethyst gemstones set in gold, a silver snake coiled to the knuckle of her right thumb, a pearl cradled by a tiny pair of intricately carved, pewter hands. “With so few years behind you, you’ve already met your true love.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “You know who he is?” she asked. “He’s close by.”

  I nodded. “He’s here tonight.”

  “I see great love for you.”

  Diego had taken a bullet for me all those years ago, and he’d saved my life many times since as he’d seen me through brutal pre-teen years without a mom. We already possessed a deep devotion to each other, and we hadn’t even been intimate yet. I nodded. “It is a great love.”

  “I see pain,” she said in the same flat tone.

  I shifted in my seat. That was a given considering the circles my father moved in. He and I had already gone through tragedy—that was, if there was such a thing as going through it. Grief ebbed and flowed, but it never truly receded. Now, he ran a more respectable operation, but for those who dealt in vice and contraband, risk would always be present. The fortune teller saw pain? She could’ve been speaking to anyone in the room.

  “I see betrayal and violence,” she continued. “And much death.”

  The grandfather clock in the main ballroom chimed. How long had I been sitting there? “I’ve already experienced all of those.”

  “And at such a young age,” she said, clucking. “There’s more to come, I’m afraid.”

  Whether I believed in her powers or not, that wasn’t what I’d hoped to hear. I took my hand back to put it in my lap. “Whose death?” I asked, touching the diamond on my finger.

  Her rings clinked against the glass ball as she palmed it, but she didn’t bother to look, as if that was just the most convenient place to rest her hands. “You will die for him, your love,” she said.

  “I would, yes.”

  “No. You will die for him.”

  Goose bumps pebbled my skin. I thought of the barrel of Cristiano’s gun pressed to my forehead. “Bang. You’re dead.”

  The dark came next. The pitch black, my cries, and the scurrying rodents, the smell and feel of blood that didn’t leave me for weeks. A shadow, the same one that often haunted my dreams, rose in me.

  My heart raced. In the warm glow of the red and purple light, I couldn’t tell if the woman looked on with sympathy or delight. Either way, I didn’t like her face just then, or any of this. It was silly. Child’s play. She was wrong to hide behind a costume for a night and play with people’s lives.

  “This is stupid,” I said and stood to return to my post at the curtains. I willed my heart rate to slow so I could focus on finding Diego. I spotted him standing in the entrance hall. He looked like he belonged in an old Western in his cowboy getup, yet blended perfectly amongst Mexico’s upper echelon. At the same time, he was utterly out of place. I could give him an escape. I could give him everything.

  Was I going to die for him?

  I slipped out from the make-believe lair, and like a hawk to a mouse, his eyes set on me. The worry in them eased, replaced with the same longing surely reflected in my eyes. The soothsayer’s dark words lifted, and I saw them for what they were—generic, baseless, fearmongering sentiments, a one-size-fits-all likelihood that more than the majority of this room would encounter death, pain, violence—and riches. That was the point of all of this, anyway.

  As if plotting his route to me, Diego rubbed his jaw. He’d be blamed if we were caught together. That didn’t stop my craving to feel his lips on mine. He started toward me, but after only a few steps, my father appeared, slapped him on the back, and pulled him away to introduce him to a couple.

  I moved through the crowd, catching and losing Diego’s gaze as people passed between us. He shook the hand of an Elvis impersonator as I ducked by a man in a toga. He kissed Catwoman’s cheek but winked at me. I
touched my neck in mock-offense and stopped short of face-planting into a wall of a security guard.

  “Perdón,” I said as I went to go around the man.

  The guard moved to block me, and in an instant, the energy around me shifted. I tilted my head back until I was looking straight up at a monster of a man and into the face of a ghoulish black-and-white skull. The blackened eye sockets, rimmed in deep red, didn’t hide the menacing way his eyes focused on me. Nor did the drawn-on teeth, shaped in a sinister grin, disguise his frown—or the flawless bone structure beneath his veneer. Raven-black hair had been slicked back, as stark against the chalky face paint as his tie cutting down the center of a pressed white dress shirt.

  Standing as still and straight-backed as a mannequin, and looking as polished as one too, he inclined his head toward me. “May I have this dance?”

  Natalia

  It wasn’t a request.

  The stranger costumed as a brooding calavera sugar skull wasn’t asking for a dance. There was more than simple bass and gravel weighing down his words—he spoke the way a lion growled, with a snarl and a gaze as powerful as the muscles rippling under what appeared to be an expensive custom suit.

  May I have this dance?

  No. Neither my gut nor my brain left any room for argument, but my body drew toward his, as if he were the sun pulling me into its orbit. I forced myself to step back. He wasn’t security; he wasn’t here to protect me, but the opposite. He was the danger my father had warned me of. This was a man who walked into a room and left with what he wanted—revenge, money, women . . .

  Me.

  No one in the room matched his obvious strength. It would take a bullet to stop him.

  He’d asked my permission, and though I declined in a whisper, he put a large hand on my waist anyway, drawing me in, towering over me like a threat.

  The dancers gave him a wide berth, staying just outside the span of his long arms—as if he might reach out and snatch one of them. He placed my hand on his solid bicep and engulfed my other with a gentleness that contradicted his hold on my side and the severity of his costume.

  “I don’t know how to tango,” I said as a Gotan Project song started.

  “You’ve been away from Latin men too long,” he said. “Follow my lead, mariposa.”

  What made him think I’d been away at all? I’d lived in North America eight years, but the Latina in me would never fade. I did, in fact, have some basic knowledge of the dance and fell into step with him.

  “We’re a match,” he said, his eyes drifting over the butterflies in my hair.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Our costumes.”

  There was no obvious correlation between a sugar skull and a butterfly, but I didn’t dare contradict him.

  “Why the monarch?” he asked.

  I turned my cheek. Beside us, a minotaur and a French maid danced a beat faster. I wasn’t going to tell this calavera what monarchs meant to me, so I resorted to facts. “It feeds on poison.”

  “Milkweed—to render itself unpalatable to predators,” he said, sliding his hand to the center of my back where my leotard dipped. I stiffened as he dug his fingertips under the straps of my wings, into my exposed flesh. “One bitter taste, and the hunter backs off.”

  His skin touched mine and stole my focus, just like that. It had taken Diego years to make his first move. Against my will, my nipples hardened between us. “I—I think it’s clever that they do that.”

  “It’s just nature,” he said. “Monarchs also represent the souls of the departed. Like me.”

  I looked up at him, unnerved at the way his black eyes drank me in. “You’re very much alive.”

  Leaning in, he lowered his voice. “It’s said if you whisper your desire to one, it can deliver your wish to the gods on quick and soundless wings.”

  I realized he was dancing me farther from the other partygoers. “I should get back,” I said.

  “To?”

  “My . . . fiancé,” I said, hoping it would fizzle his interest in me.

  He stopped dancing. “Your fiancé? What about California?”

  My mouth fell open, but I quickly closed it. I should’ve known better than to look caught off guard, having been raised by masters of schooling their emotions. “Do I know you?”

  He hesitated before resuming our tango. He danced with precision and a peculiar grace, like a hunting lion. “I detect an American accent.”

  Somehow, that didn’t give me any relief. “I have to go,” I said, trying to pull away.

  He tightened his grip on me, and with what I suspected was hardly any effort on his part, kept me where I was. “But I haven’t whispered my wish in your ear yet.”

  I swallowed dryly, wondering where Diego had gone. Surely, he wouldn’t like to find me pressed against another man. “People are waiting for me.”

  His roughened hand constricted around mine. I followed his gaze to the diamond ring on my finger. “Which people?” he asked.

  Would my father’s wrath be safer than where I stood now? The mystery around this man stopped me from telling him who I was. “People who would not like me to go missing.”

  “Then perhaps they shouldn’t have left you all alone, mariposita.”

  “Don’t call me that.” Sometimes, my parents had called me their little butterfly. Even my father knew better than to use that nickname anymore. I looked around the man, panic rising the more tightly he held me.

  He drew me flush to him, the warmth of his body contradicting his cold stare. “Then what should I call you?”

  My gaze locked onto Diego as he separated from my father and scanned the room.

  “And nobody left me alone,” I said, ignoring the man’s question. “I can take care of myself.”

  “Is that so?” he asked. “Regardless, I wouldn’t take the chance if you were mine.”

  If I was his. My chest rose and fell a little faster, but this time, it wasn’t in fear. His tight, possessive hold made it feel as if he already thought I belonged to him. For a split second, the thought of being at his mercy both scared and excited me. “But I’m not yours,” I said to gauge his reaction.

  “Are you suggesting I remedy that?”

  How bold. Nobody in this world had ever come on to me like this. “You could try,” I said, “but I can promise it wouldn’t go well for you.”

  “I like a challenge. Because it doesn’t sound to me as if your fiancé deserves you. He’d be wise to recognize that someone else might come along and show you that.”

  I didn’t know many men around here who would speak so shamelessly about another man’s fiancée. “You’re worse than that hag of a fortune teller,” I bit out.

  One dark eyebrow rose, his interest obviously piqued. “What’d she tell you?”

  I looked around his shoulder and saw Diego wipe his temple as he started toward the dancefloor. He still hadn’t spotted me, but his movements became agitated. I tried frantically to make eye contact. “She told me not to dance with masked strangers.”

  The man moved so I could see nothing but him. He had tangoed us into a dark corner, away from anyone else, and my heart started to thump. He lowered his mouth to my ear. “What if I’m not a stranger?”

  He was playing games. As he isolated me from the crowd, all I heard was Cristiano de la Rosa’s threats to my nine-year-old self. You don’t know true fear.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, trying to see around him.

  “Tell me. Are you willing to die for your fiancé?”

  The eerie echo of the soothsayer’s words made my face heat with anger. “Are you willing to die for me?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you don’t let me go,” I said, searching for the most menacing threat I could, “I’ll scream.”

  “I thought you could take care of yourself.”

  “I’m no match for your size. I wouldn’t scream to be rescued, but as the fastest means to get a gun in your face.”

  “
I see. Do you think they’ll hear you over the music?” he asked, sounding amused.

  “I’ll scream as loud as I can, for as long as I can, until my vocal cords give out or I can no longer keep my mouth open.”

  A disarmingly slow smile moved over his face, the teeth of his disguise spreading ear to ear. “I admit, I am curious to see how long you can keep your mouth open.”

  I shivered at the insinuation and pulled back, this time unable to hide my shock. “You’ve threatened the wrong person. I can have you killed in seconds without lifting a finger.”

  “Then I’d like to change my order. Please tell the heavens it is my dying wish to hear you scream.”

  He spoke with a rumble so deep, I felt his voice between my legs. And I was sure, by the way his eyes bore into mine, he’d meant me to. He wanted my screams, and to scare me, but it didn’t come from a place of menace. I couldn’t put my finger on his intention, but it was something much more carnal.

  We were no longer dancing, but his hand still clenched mine as his fingers buried into the skin of my back. He held me like I was an instrument to be played, one he would snap in half before he gave it up. Not even Diego held me so greedily.

  “Then I’ll grant you your wish,” I threatened.

  “Your loyalty to him is admirable if not baffling.” He checked over his shoulder, then released me with a bow. “We’ve been discovered anyway. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to take you with me.”

  I’ll have to take you with me.

  I’d heard those words in my nightmares and any place I was alone in the dark too long. “What?” I asked, my throat suddenly dry as I was transported back to the tunnel.

  “I said, I’ll have to take my leave. Excuse me.”