Blurred Red Lines: A Carrera Cartel Novel

by Kenborn, Cora

I remained silent, refusing to confirm her suspicion.

  Rushing my desk, she bent her forearm, swiping everything to the floor that was left from my earlier tirade with a primal scream. “Answer me, goddamn it!”

  “And then what, Cereza? Another one? And another? There are men who will always take his place and come after you. It’ll never end.”

  She shook her head defiantly. “You won’t let that happen.”

  “Won’t I? I’m just like them.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  Having had enough, I charged into the room and shoved the chair out of my way, satisfied as it crashed into the wall. Rounding the desk, I grabbed her hands, holding both in her face. “Yes, I am! I’m a killer. I sold the drugs that got your father hooked on cocaine, and my family began the war that got your brother murdered. Do you think we care about casualties like him? It happens every day in our world. In America, murder is just bad for business. In Mexico, it is business, Cereza. I can’t be responsible for your life and mine.”

  Stubbornly, she held her ground, steeling her chin against my hold. “Val, if you won’t bring me into this cartel, I’m sure I can find someone who will.”

  I flinched so quickly, if she hadn’t been staring right at me, I’d have covered it. Facing her, she held in a gasp as my laugh echoed around the empty room. “I’m sure the minute you walked out of this door, the Muñoz men would whisk you off your bound feet into the back of a van and ride away to parts unknown.”

  “Good.” She egged me on, apparently tired of being on the outskirts of conversations. The rhythmic tick in my jaw told her she’d succeeded in pissing me off.

  Convinced she’d won the argument, she allowed a small smile to slip across her lips. In seconds, I stood over her—the familiar scent of citrus and vanilla igniting and calming me in a twisted way. My hand found its way inside her hair and wound strong fingers around a bunch of candy colored strands until my knuckles hit the base of her skull.

  “Would you like to know what they’d do next, Cereza?”

  She bowed her chin and violently shook it side to side. She had an idea what they’d do, and I’m sure she didn’t need to hear me speak the words out loud—especially after what happened last night. I’d explored every inch of her body with determined, but careful intent. Right now, the electricity vibrating off me was an exposed fuse, waiting to be lit with sparks of fury dancing around it.

  She let out a pained yelp as I jerked her hair backward to force her eyes on me. “They’d rip your clothes off before you even got out of the van. They’d take turns fucking you until you passed out. Then, they’d torture you until you died a horribly painful death.”

  The corners of her eyes pooled both from the horror of my words and the extreme angle of her head. The images I fed her detonated, shattering everything the safe world she had left.

  “Why?”

  My eyebrows rose in question. “Why? You ask, why?” She nodded as much as she could with her head immobilized. “Because they’re immoral sons of bitches who think women are nothing but available holes for them to fuck on command.” Sweat rolled down my temple as it pulsed wildly beneath it. “And knowing you’d witnessed their hit, and you’d been here with me…well that’d make destroying you a hundred times sweeter.”

  My fingers tightened again, and she lightly touched my arm with her free hand. “Val, you’re hurting me.”

  I lowered us both to our knees and pulled her hair back again until she’d completed a full backbend. With her shoulders and head resting on my forearm, I brushed my lips against hers without kissing her. “And none of that will happen, Eden. Do you know why?”

  She barely listened. Her instincts feared me and the vulnerable position I had her in, but our basic animalistic connection had her breathless with anticipation.

  Eden opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off by palming the back of her head. “Because,” I growled, my voice full of unreleased fury. “Nobody touches what’s mine.”

  “What do you care?”

  I dropped lower, our lips barely skimming. “I care, because they’ve wiped out my entire family, Eden. I care, because I’m tired of losing. I care, because once a man has had you, he doesn’t share.”

  “Val…” Her body twisted at an unnatural angle, but her breathing had become so erratic, she seemed to hardly notice. Every inhale molded our chests perfectly and every exhale pushed logic further from our minds.

  I moved a knee in between hers as my eyes roamed her body. The moment they locked with her half-lidded stare, I watched the blue in her eyes darken to the blackest night of a soulless sky. “I won’t share, Cereza. Not until I get my fill.” Skimming her throat, I licked skin at the base of her neck. “And getting my fill might take a while.”

  “Fuck you. Just fuck you, Danger.” With receding strength, she attempted to push me away. “Fuck you.”

  “I don’t think we have time for three, but I’ll see what I can do.” Picking her up, I fused my mouth against hers and dropped her on top of my cleared desk.

  With an open hand that I didn’t see coming, Eden slapped me hard across the face. Reacting quickly, I captured her wrists in a strong hold.

  “I’m not your fuck toy, Carrera,” she seethed between clenched teeth. “You don’t command me and take what you want.”

  “No?”

  Shoving her fists into my chest, she climbed off the desk, offering one last punch to the center. “No. The only thing you’ll get your fill of tonight is your own hand, asshole.”

  Stunned, I watched as she flipped me off on her way out.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  EDEN

  I’d barely slept. Not that the paper-thin mattress and jail-cell sized bedroom enticed any form of restful sleep anyway, but somewhere in the past few days, I’d grown accustomed to sleeping next to an asshole.

  Rolling over for the hundredth time, I threw my arms above me, wincing as the healing skin on my wrist pulled with the sudden move. From an outsider’s point of view, I’d lost my mind. Hell, from my own point of view, what I’d been doing was not only counterproductive, it was damn near suicide.

  I’d been kidnapped by the most feared drug cartel in the United States. Once I’d come to terms with my captivity, I’d vowed to use it to my advantage, promising to an empty room to take every one of them down who’d had a hand in my brother’s death.

  Then Val barreled into my room and my world, screwing up everything.

  What have I gotten myself into?

  My behavior wasn’t normal. Normal women didn’t consider crossing the border with a known murderer just because of some stupid crush.

  It was just a crush…wasn’t it?

  Logic told me no future existed for Val and me. There couldn’t be. Morality couldn’t allow me to stand by the side of a man who remotely had a hand in what happened to Nash. The idea of doing so would be beyond disrespectful to his memory. It’d be unforgivable.

  A hollow burn spread through my chest as my mind catalogued the failed relationships in my life. Every man I’d ever trusted or loved had hurt me or deserted me. Davis left me, my father turned his back on all of us long before this mess ever started, and Nash was literally ripped out of my arms.

  Maybe Mateo and Emilio were right. Maybe I was a black widow. For all Val’s faults and reprehensible acts, the thought of harm coming to him tore a hole in my heart. Everything inside me warned me to back out now and save both of us mutual destruction. But as I asked myself the silent questions, one answer rang louder in my head than any doubt.

  I’d fallen hard for Valentin Carrera, and I was more conflicted now than ever. My conscience knew he’d given the order to torture Nash, even though it wasn’t my brother he’d targeted; he admitted it himself. However, there had to be some humanity in a man who held a part of me so strongly tied to him that I couldn’t walk away. Surely, I hadn’t fallen so far off the line between right and wrong that I couldn’t recognize an irredeemable person from one w
hose soul seeped with evil?

  Weaving my fingers through the metal bars in the headboard, I tilted my chin toward the ceiling, letting out a frustrated breath. “Damn you, Danger.”

  “If you’re going to damn me before I get to hell, at least break down the list.”

  I jumped at the sound of his voice, quickly releasing the metal bars and pushing up on my elbows. He stood in the doorway, his left arm and hip bent as they both rested against the frame. A half-smile played on his lips as his body shifted forward. An unstable surge of lust and emotion brewed inside me as I ran a heated stare from his messy hair to his bare toes. Clad only in a pair of draw string black sweatpants, the casual attire and bare chest threw me off.

  Mesmerized, I mentally counted the defined rows of abs as they trailed down to the well-defined V that disappeared behind the low-slung waistband. “I thought I locked the door.”

  “You did.” He opened his mouth to argue further, then paused as his eyes lingered on my bare legs, exposed by my long t-shirt. “That’s mine.”

  I glanced down at the oversized, green shirt and smirked. “The shirt or me?”

  “Yes,” he answered quickly. Moments of silence passed between us before Val sighed and pushed off the frame, folding his arms across his bronzed skin. “I don’t like the way things ended last night.”

  I lowered my eyes, playing with a rogue thread on the pillow. “Me either.”

  “Then let’s fix it.”

  “Tell me about your mother.”

  Cursing in Spanish, he rolled his forehead against the door. “Can we not—”

  “Go back to your own room, Val.” Hugging the pillow to my chest, I curled into a ball, facing away from him. For some reason, I needed to know the human side of him. Before cartel life changed him. When he had a mother and a somewhat recognizable father.

  A house. A family. Maybe a dog and friends who’d knock on the door and ask if he could come out to play.

  To allow him completely into my life, I had to know if that version of Val Carrera existed. If he couldn’t, or worse, wouldn’t give me that, I’d walk out of his front door today and turn my back on him to save the last piece of myself from being lost forever.

  Tears burned my eyes, and I closed them, willing the impending breakdown to stay forced behind closed lids. One rogue tear refused to obey and slipped through the cracks, trailing a telltale sign down the bridge of my nose. Before I could get rid of the evidence, the mattress dipped with his weight and Val’s hand gently wiped it away. Placing my hand in his, he shifted on the bed and pressed my palm between his shoulder blades. Swallowing hard, I slowly rolled over to face him. I had no idea what he was about to do, but the lull in the cadence of his voice demanded my full attention.

  “Every word, every symbol, every color is for them.”

  “’Them’?”

  “My family, Cereza.” He traced my fingers over each symbol as he described them. “The number three on my left shoulder represents my family the day everything changed.” Trailing the pad of my index finger horizontally across his upper back, he rested it against his right shoulder. “The number two is what was left when a young boy doesn’t realize the difference between death and sleep.” Moving my finger once more, he dropped it to the middle of his upper back, equal diagonal distance from the other two. “The number one represents me—what was left after the last one had been taken away.”

  Tears rolled harder as the block of Spanish in the middle of the inverted number triangle blurred. “Val, you don’t have to—”

  Moving my finger down the left side of his ribcage, he ran it around the petals of a wilted white lily. “This is for my mother. Her name was Liliana.” Shifting my hand, it trailed horizontally over the sword which pierced through the petals and through another lily, smaller in size and shaded black on his right ribcage. “This is for my sister. Her name means dark little one.”

  A long pause followed his last explanation, and I watched his back rise rapidly as his breathing escalated. “Val, please stop. I don’t need to hear anymore.” I didn’t. The personal pain etched in each work of art painted on his skin ripped a new hole in my already destroyed heart.

  “The bird with its talons on the sword is a phoenix,” he explained as if I hadn’t spoken. His eyes glazed over, transported to another time and place. “The phoenix rises from the ashes and rebuilds what was destroyed.” The muscle in Val’s jaw twitched as he ground his teeth together with repressed anger.

  “And the Spanish at the bottom?” I heard myself ask, unaware I’d even formed the words.

  “La venganza es mía. Yo pagaré.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Val hesitated a moment before finally turning his chin over his shoulder and pinning me with a pained stare. “Vengeance is mine. I will repay.”

  “I shouldn’t have pried into your personal life.” Touching him suddenly felt disrespectful, and I quickly removed my hand from his skin.

  Staring through me, Val gripped a handful of the blanket and squeezed until his knuckles turned white. “My mother was a saint, Eden. She tried harder than any woman I’ve ever known to combat the evil she saw around her with the goodness inside of her.”

  “Was?”

  “She’s dead.” His hand moved to my hair as he ran his hand down the length of it. “Close your eyes, Cereza. I’m going to tell you a story, and it isn’t one of your American fairy tales that ends with a happily ever after.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  AUGUST 1993

  VAL

  MONTERREY, MEXICO

  I lined all my toy soldiers up on the windowsill. My small fingers pointed a pretend gun at them and I made the pashew sound as my finger gun knocked them down one by one.

  “Valentin! Put those plastic men away. You need to come set the table for dinner.”

  Glancing over my shoulder, I watched her balance the baby on one hip and shuffle white breakable plates on the other. I was a good boy. I liked to help. It made me feel important.

  “Coming, Mamá.” Sweeping the soldiers into my toy basket with one arm, I scrambled into the kitchen and took the plates from my mother. She rewarded me with a smile and ruffled my hair with her nails.

  “You’re such a big help, Valentin. Thank you.”

  “Of course, Mamá.” I carefully placed the dishes on the table, counting them to myself as I centered them on the red woven placemats. I hesitated, not sure whether I should make her angry by asking about him, but my curiosity got the best of my manners. “Mamá, why are there only three plates?”

  She buckled the baby in the high chair, and the smile dropped from her face. I didn’t like it when she stopped smiling. She’d been doing that too much lately.

  “Tonight, it will be just you, me, and your Tía Pilar, son. Now, go wash up before we eat.”

  Mamá taught me manners. I knew I should go wash my hands and stop asking questions, but I needed to know why he hadn’t been home lately.

  “Where is Papá? He hasn’t been home in weeks. Is it because I’ve been a bad boy? Have I asked too many questions?” I should’ve run. I should’ve gone to wash my hands before she could get mad at me too, but I stood rooted in my spot, just staring at her. I missed my papá.

  She sighed slowly and fell to her knees. I backed up, scared of what she might do. When Papá fell to his knees, usually it was to belt me. I didn’t like the belt. It hurt.

  “Valentin,” she said, gently holding my hands. Mamá was always gentle. “Your father had to go away for a while.”

  Her words scared me. “But…but…who will be our papá?”

  A small smile pulled at her lips, warmness radiating from her hands as they held mine. “He’s still your papá. That will never change. He just got called away for a bit.”

  I could feel my lip quiver. I wanted to be brave for Mamá. I tried to hide it. “When will he be back?”

  “I don’t know. But until he comes back, I need you to be a brave soldier. Can you
do that for me, Valentin? Can you be my brave soldier?”

  I thought about my toy soldiers from the window. I made them battle and win wars. They were brave because I made them that way. I missed Papá, but I could be brave for Mamá—just like my soldiers.

  “Yes, Mamá. I’ll be brave,” I said, shaking my head. “Until Papá comes back, I’ll protect you and Ana.”

  After dinner, I helped clean up the dishes for Mamá and Tía Pilar like the brave solider I promised to be. I even cleaned up all my toy soldiers and got a bath all by myself. Curled up in my big boy bed, I’d almost drifted off to sleep when I heard it.

  Pashew Pashew Pashew.

  Excitement rushed through me. Had my toy soldiers started fighting without me?

  Climbing out of bed, I rushed to my toy chest, and ripped off the lid. Confused, I stared down at perfectly placed soldiers, still in the box where I left them before bed.

  Pashew Pashew Pashew.

  My fingers tightened around my toy box as screams tore through the house, followed by men yelling words I didn’t understand. I started crying because the noise scared me, then I cried harder because I knew I wasn’t being a brave soldier.

  Mamá needed a brave solider.

  Reaching into my toy box, I grabbed the general and held him tight. He would protect me. The general protected all the army in battle. He would protect Mamá.

  Opening my door, I rubbed my eyes as I walked down the hall. Men still shouted and I thought I heard Tía Pilar scream, but I couldn’t be sure.

  That was, until I walked into the living room.

  At least five men in black held guns just like my army men, only their guns lit up my house. Tía Pilar lay sleeping on the floor in a puddle of red Jell-O.

  I liked Jell-O.

  I took two steps forward when Mamá screamed.

  “Valentin! Be a fireman, Valentin! Do as I say! Five alarm fire! Be a fireman now!”

  I didn’t want to move. The man had Mamá pinned down on her back. They looked like they were wrestling. I liked wrestling.