The Hustle (Irreparable #4)

by KJ Bell

  “Then Javier will be an orphan.”

  “No,” I protest. “It’s you they want. Not me. Not Javier.”

  His sinister laugh sends a shiver down my spine. “So naïve. Do you think when Guerra’s men get here they’ll spare anyone? Don’t you know better by now? When they come, Maria, they’ll execute everyone in this house, including you.”

  “Then you have to let me go. Do the right thing for once in your life. You can’t do this to our son.” Pleading for Javier is my only option, but his face remains angry and I know our son is not a strong enough bargaining chip.

  “I’m not doing this to Javier. The choice is yours. Our son or your father?” He holds out a cell phone. I shake my head unable to take it.

  How foolish I am to believe for a second Eduardo loves Javier enough to let me go. His ego won’t allow him to release a procession. One thing’s for sure; I have a choice, and I choose both my father and my son. I won’t let my father pay for Eduardo’s mistakes and I won’t allow Eduardo to turn my son into a miniature version of himself. He thinks I’m desperate enough to kill my own father, but he’s wrong. My father is a changed man and devoted father and grandfather. I love him and I can’t be the one to betray him.

  Eduardo lifts the gun and points it directly at my head. I’m not afraid. I’ve been ready to die since the moment I met him. “You make the call or so help me, Maria, I’ll kill you. Don’t make me do this. Our son needs his mother.”

  There’s the little flaw in his threats I had been waiting for. His losing his mother young nags at him as he tries to pretend he’ll do anything to save his skin.

  “No my son needs his freedom to grow up in a world other than this one, even if it’s without me.” While the pain in my chest is heavy, I will do what I should have done when Eduardo confronted me in the lobby at Tug’s. “You’re going to have to kill me because, I won’t murder my father to save you. You did this the day you raped me all those years ago. You deserve whatever Guerra has planned.”

  Rage flashes in his eyes as his skin turns a blistering shade of red. “You would die to protect a man who left your mother? Who abandoned you?”

  Fate has caught up to me, but also to Eduardo. There is no escape. I close my eyes as the cold steel presses into my forehead.

  The first time I met Eduardo, he swept me off my feet, but it was only days later that I knew he’d eventually kill me.

  Maybe this is God’s plan. While my prediction is coming to fruition later than expected, there’s nowhere left to run or hide from the inevitable.

  Dying is the only way to protect the people I love. It always has been. I’d been delusional to believe there was another way. That I could forget where I came from. Or was I? The thing with the hustle that Tug missed and I’d forgotten, is when it fails you have to be quick with another one.

  I tried Javier and failed. I played on Eduardo’s conscience and failed, but I have one more hand to play. His true weakness. Me.

  “Wait!” Vulnerably creeps across his brow as he lowers the gun. “Do you remember the vow I swore to you in Mazatlán?” He nods faintly, his forehead creasing tight as he struggles to maintain my gaze. “I meant it when I told you I would be yours forever. That I’d love you all the days of my life. Every word was true.” He lowers his gaze, but I see the pain sweeping across his features first. “Do you remember what you said to me?”

  He lifts his head, his nostrils flaring with irritation. “Yes, but that was before you betrayed me.”

  “That wasn’t betrayal. I was trying to fix a mistake and save our family.” I’m pleading with a man who feels nothing more than deception, but the softness of his expression shows me he wants to believe the lie. “I thought Guerra would understand.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does, Cariño. It does, because what you said that day made me realize what kind of man you are in your heart.”

  “Maria.”

  “You said you would die to protect me. That you’d give your last breath to keep me safe. I believed you. I know you love me that much. Please tell me you meant it. Please help me find a way out of here and back to our son. Don’t allow him to suffer the fate you suffered as a boy. Look what it did to you.”

  “I do love you that much, Querido. I do.” We exchange small smiles. Through a moment of complete silence, I wonder if Eduardo’s father had loved his mother as much if he would have taken a different path. His father allowed the cartel to take his mother when she borrowed money she couldn’t pay back. Eduardo was just a boy. His father was trying to protect him, but the wedge between father had son had been firmly cemented.

  As gunfire rings out in the mansion, Eduardo grabs my hand and pulls me up from the chair. “Hurry. You must move quickly.” He looks me directly in the eyes. “Maria, tell our boy how much I loved you both. Don’t let him remember the man I used to be.” A tear falls as I squeeze his hand and nod softly. “Go through the side yard by the pool. You can make it to the stables. Ride Shadow through the canyon. I Love you.”

  I kiss him softly on the lips. “I love you, too.”

  “Go!” he commands.

  In the end, Eduardo is a man I love deeply, who sacrificed his life for me. Knowing that will leave a nasty scar, but our boy will know his father died a hero.

  I pace the café, waiting for Maria and Javier to show up. With each minute that ticks away, I grow more fearful that I’ll never see them again. I sit with my elbows on the table, covering my face with my hands as I try to calm my thoughts. They race with visions of the unimaginable, that Maria and Javier were caught in the firestorm taking place at the mansion.

  As I lift my head and look out the glass entrance, I see my son heading for the door. Marco follows behind him, and then Leticia and Alejandro. Farther back, I see Mr. Torrente getting out of a black Suburban parked at the curb. An overwhelming sense of relief and happiness sweeps through me. They made it. I rise and go to the door to open it for my family.

  This is it. The hustle I’ve spent months designing and perfecting has succeeded. Everything I’ve done, good or bad will be justified when Maria steps out of the SUV and walks into my arms. When I can take her home and make love to her. I’m going to marry her and spend my life devoted to her.

  As I hold the door, Marco and Javier enter the café and Leticia and Alejandro wait for their father. He helps Guadalupe from the SUV and closes the door. My eyes move to each face, none of them belonging to Maria. I go through the door to the SUV and look inside.

  “She’s not with us,” Marco says, startling me.

  “Where is she?” I shout in his face. “How the fuck could you leave her behind?

  “We weren’t at the mansion. She texted me to bring everyone here to meet the two of you. I assumed she was here. What’s going on?”

  “I made a mistake,” I say, although my voice sounds far away. “You should get her father.”

  Once Marco brings Mr. Torrente outside, I fill them in on my plan and how it backfired when Maria confronted Mr. Guerra.

  “We have to go get her,” Mr. Torrente orders.

  “No, it’s too dangerous. She’ll be here,” Marco insists, “give her some time.”

  “No, we must go now.” Alejandro looks at me with pleading eyes. “They’ll kill her.”

  “I’m going with you,” I say, opening the door to the SUV.

  Her father nods, before going inside to tell Guadalupe to stay with the kids. The drive to the mansion is the worst kind of torture. Although the car is full of silence, my maddening thoughts are screaming at me. I can’t turn down the noise. I fucked up. I fucked up so badly. My need for revenge has potentially cost me the one person who I was trying to save.

  The driveway seems infinite as we drive, as though we aren’t moving at all, but the trees pass by the window and the mansion comes into view. Marco draws his gun and gives one to Mr. Torrente and myself before we get out of the SUV.

  I hate guns. The cold steel in my hand bring
s on a flash of unwelcomed memories. The noise, the smell and the sounds of my family screaming as Sheila crashed to the floor. I was a coward then, slumping against the wall unable to stop what I knew was going to happen. I failed my mother, but I can’t fail Maria. If there’s a chance to save her, I have to try.

  Each stair seems taller than the next as my legs are weighed down with growing apprehension. The expansive front doors are wide open, which further alarms me. My hands shake so violently I can barely hold the gun. Marco reaches the doors first and stands off to the side, signaling for us to move behind him. He lifts his gun, aligning his sight with the barrel as he enters the mansion. My throat feels like I’ve swallowed an orange whole and sweat races down my spine as I follow him inside.

  The Guerra Cartel visiting the mansion to retaliate is confirmed with bursts of crimson spots exploding over the white walls. The red and white canvas exemplifying some twisted and poetic version of my plan’s failure. If life represents art, I guess this is the piece that currently defines my existence. Although I pray it doesn’t signify my future, like a symbolic looking glass into the curtain call of Maria’s final performance. It can’t. I know she’s alive.

  I’ve hurt a lot of people. I’ve made infinite mistakes and I deserved my punishments, but I served my time. I finally have it all figured out, and I refuse to believe fate would be so cruel as to bring her back into my life, only to tear her out of it an instant later. The horrific scene, like something out of a movie, presses me to believe otherwise.

  The thick red orbs trickle down the wall, gaining speed as they chase each other to the floor. Men I don’t know lie lifeless at my feet. It takes everything I have to choke back vomit as I follow Marco. I hear Torrente’s shallow breaths behind me. Marco continually turns his body left and right as he inches into the front room containing more misery and death.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Only Eduardo was supposed to get hurt, but instead this was a massacre and I’m responsible for it. And yet a part of me is rejecting the entire scene.

  Maybe I’m just relieved I haven’t found Maria, because none of what I’m seeing feels real. Like this is all a bad dream and if I squeeze my eyes shut, I’ll wake up. Maria and I will be happily married and Eduardo will be eight-feet under. Only on some level, I know I know I’m not sleeping. I’ve had this dream before and I don’t wake up.

  I turn around and catch Maria’s father scanning the room with anger blistering his features. These people were his employees, people who spent many years working for him. And people he considered friends. The breath he had been holding rushes out of him with a strangled noise like a wounded animal in the night.

  When I twist by head back to Marco, he ticks his head for us to follow him. But I don’t think I can do it, because he’s heading toward Eduardo’s office. If Maria is here in the mansion, she’s with him. Dead or alive.

  I don’t want to face what I may find. Still, I know I have to. I can’t leave without knowing if she’s in this house or not. It takes me a moment for reality to fully sink in that there’s a real possibility Maria didn’t make it out of the house. When I find myself at the half-open door to Eduardo’s office, that possibility stretches closer to reality.

  Eduardo lying flat on his back with bullet holes littering his chest doesn’t prove as satisfying as I expected. Instead, remorse crawls up my neck as I stare at a man I once feared, clutching a handgun that did nothing to save his life. In the end, Eduardo Montez was as helpless as any of the victims he’s murdered.

  I can’t allow myself more than a second to soak in that I brought evil to this house, because Torrente’s screams match my own as we enter the office.

  The final possibility is now reality, smacking me in the face with the sting of a blazing branding iron. Marking me with another one of my mistakes. I allowed one hour with Maria to soften me, and I told her my plan. If for once in my life, I didn’t cave to a woman, if I had any balls at all, I wouldn’t be staring at a chair where my heart and my hope and my future no longer has a pulse.

  Until this moment, I thought I could handle any situation, like what I watched my mother do somehow prepared me to face anything. But nothing, no matter how horrific, can prepare a man to find the one person who makes him whole is gone. While he’s alive, knowing he could have prevented her death. I never learn from my mistakes. It’s the Hunter family perpetual cycle of having to prove how much power we have. Like my mother, I couldn’t get past the betrayal until someone was dead.

  I know as I look at Mr. Torrente holding his little girl in his arms, that I’m just as crazy as my mother ever was.

  I sink to the floor and die right there beside Maria. While I may continue to breathe, I refuse to live without her. My mind fails to register the sharp pain in my chest or the tears falling from my eyes. Maybe they’re a result of pain and suffering but more likely they’re tears of fury and rage.

  I am fully aware my hand shakes uncontrollably as I attempt to cup my hand over her cheek. Her skin burns me before I even touch her as though she telling me I don’t deserve to grieve. Now my mind accepts the agony I’m in as I feel every ounce of pressure squeezing my heart until it feels like it shatters into tiny pieces.

  The cloak of guilt that followed me in the door wraps around me until I can barely breathe and I welcome the dark it brings. I took this man’s daughter from him, and yet when I look up at Alejandro Torrente, he appears to offer sympathy for my pain. Like he’s the one who’s sorry.

  “This wasn’t the cartel,” he tells me, his voice straining as he sucks in a sharp breath. There’s only one bullet . . . This was a mercy killing . . . Eduardo killed her to protect her.”

  “Do you hear what you’re saying? If he wanted to protect her, he should have let her go.”

  He blinks, gently closing her eyes with his fingertips. “It was too late. Guerra’s men would have raped and tortured her—forced him to watch. Eduardo saw to it she didn’t have to experience the grotesque nature of these men.”

  Does it matter who pulled the trigger? Or why? If it was one bullet or a fucking dozen? It’s my faults she’s gone. It’s my fault her little boy will grow up without a mother. That’s the real fucked up part about all of this. Not one of the adults in Javier’s life ever considered what our choices would do to that little boy.

  Part Two—A New Beginning

  Month One . . .

  The last few days have been the worst kind of hell, and not because Guerra threatened to kill me. I would have welcomed that fate if for nothing else I wouldn’t be left groveling to a dead woman for forgiveness. I’d no longer have to see pity in the eyes of my family. I wouldn’t have to weep every time Javier asks if his mommy is in heaven now. But Guerra wouldn’t have been satisfied with just my death. After learning of my involvement, he wanted me and my family.

  If not for Maria’s father, Mr. Guerra would have followed through on his threats. But at the end of the day, Mr. Torrente still held a great deal of power amongst the cartels. The men he had been in business with for over twenty years still respect and fear him.

  Torrente was able to explain how Eduardo’s alliance with the cartel was about saving his own skin and how he kept Torrente and his family hostage. Immediately after I returned Guerra’s money, the incident was forgiven and I was granted asylum to live in the prison of suffering I created.

  Once things were resolved, Torrente expressed his interest in retiring, citing grief over losing Maria. His request was granted as Guerra had a family friend interested in heading the cartel in Monterrey. How convenient that I was the one who provided him the opportunity to expand his family’s reach.

  Today is the day we’re supposed to say good-bye. The day I’m supposed to pretend Maria’s in a better place. How can there be any better place for her, other than with her little boy. Regardless of burying her next to her grandfather in Watsonville, and my family insisting her death wasn’t my fault, I own the blame. The woman in that coffin agrees w
ith me and will never rest peacefully until I’m made to suffer for my sins.

  The sadness I’m forced to feel, seeping out of the man sitting next to me in the limousine grows unbearable. There’s no doubt in my mind that once Maria’s father has time to grieve, he’ll ask me to explain. He’ll understand I’ve been right all along.

  It’s when the little boy, whose hair I stroke as he sleeps in my lap eventually wants answers that I’ll finally be punished and then Maria can rest. He’s all I have left of Maria, but one day, he’ll understand I’m the reason he hurts. Then I’ll feel the full wrath of what I’ve done. He’s clung to me like I’m his lifeline the last few days. I’m trying to be strong for him, but in the moments I look into his eyes and know that sooner or later he’ll hate me, I break down. Although I’m aware enough to hide it from him and sick enough to want him to keep me on a pedestal.

  I lift my head, staring at a man who appears ten years older than he did just six months ago. And just like that, guilt levels me again and all I want to do is flee the confines of the cramped car.

  “Young man, I don’t want you to blame yourself.”

  I huff, turning my head and then huff again. He doesn’t get it now, but he will. The anger coiled inside of me spring’s loose, taking aim at Maria’s father.

  “How can you say that? You’re old, not blind. Open your eyes, Alejandro.” The boy shifting in my lap makes me pause, but as he settles back to sleep, I finish saying what Maria’s father needs to hear. “I killed your daughter and you’re just so consumed with your grief you can’t see that.”

  Why the fuck he smiles infuriates me. I want to say more hurtful things to make him understand, to make him hate me. But his thick eyebrows draw inward and I see the pain I feel on his face. “No. It was the choices I made a long time ago when you and Maria were just children. I thought life in the cartel made me a man and money and power meant more than family. I could have married Maria’s mother, and while we would have been poor, we would have been happy. I’ll live with the burden of my mistakes until I take my last breath, but I don’t want you to.”