Violent Delights (White Monarch Book 1)

by Jessica Hawkins

  “I remember being sixteen and already crazy over you, but I thought you’d always see me as a little girl.”

  “I did,” he said. “Until I didn’t.”

  “I’ll never forget when you finally began to notice me,” I said. “I used to sit on the sidelines and watch you and the guys play outdoor basketball at Dad’s house. Then one day, I showed up, and you walked off the court to come talk to me. You’d never done that before.”

  “The guys teased me for it,” he said. “I didn’t care. It meant they knew you were mine.”

  “I never noticed anyone else,” I said, glancing back at the picture. “But you know that. When we took this, you were both a best friend and like a brother to me—I didn’t really know what was happening, but I was falling in love.”

  “Then why’d you leave me?”

  I set down the photo and perched on the bed to face him. “The same reasons I always get back on the plane. I don’t want to end up like my mother. And I don’t want to lose anyone else. Papá never gave me a choice anyway. He still isn’t giving me one.”

  He furrowed his brows. “Did you talk to him about us?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t understand that we’re serious, no matter how I explain it.”

  Diego pursed his lips. “I warned you he wouldn’t.”

  “But he wouldn’t hear anything. He doesn’t even want me seeing you anymore, like at all. Not even while I’m home.”

  He ran his hands over his face and looked to the ceiling. “Let me guess—I’m not good enough for you.”

  “According to him, nobody is—you know that. It’s not personal.” I stood and crossed the room to him, wrapping my arms around his middle. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks, though.”

  Diego lowered just his eyes to look down his nose at me. “You know it does. He’s your dad.”

  I shook my head hard. “Not enough to keep me away from you. I’m more worried about other things he said.”

  He nodded once to prompt me. “Like what?”

  I rolled my lips together, trying to think of how to put it in a way that Diego wouldn’t get defensive. “Papá thinks men who’ve only known this life can never leave it behind. Even if they want to.”

  “Of course he’ll say that,” Diego said. “It’s to plant a seed of doubt in your mind about me.” He used both hands to smooth my hair back from my face. “Is it working, Tali?”

  I hadn’t thought of much since yesterday except the new information involving my mother’s death, and what Dad had warned about Diego’s entrenchment in this world. I’d fought my father on each point, but with some distance, I worried his arguments might hold some validity. “Could you be happy in Santa Clara with me?” I asked. “It’s nothing like here.”

  “My love . . .” He held my cheeks and pressed his lips to my forehead. “Are you seriously asking if I can endure a life where I’m not in danger of being killed—or killing—each day . . . and I get to sleep by your side each night?”

  I smiled a little. “It does sound ridiculous when you put it that way, but still. What would you do for work?”

  “That’s why this Maldonado deal means so much to me,” he said. “The money I’ll make off it will set us up for a long time, Tali. And if your father makes an ongoing arrangement with them, even if I get a small percent for brokering the contract—it will be enough that neither of us will even have to work again.”

  “But I don’t want that,” I said. “I want an honest job and clean money. I’m not working this hard for a business degree I’m not going to use.”

  “It’s not about the money, Natalia. It’s important to me as a man that I provide for you. That means gifting you the freedom to follow your dreams, whatever they are, free of any financial burden.”

  “And what about your dreams?”

  “I’m afraid to have any until I know I can.” He smiled sadly and hugged me to him. “Once I pull this off, I can do anything. Including marry you. I want your father’s approval, believe me—it would mean everything to have him see me as a suitable son-in-law. But at the end of the day, once I can support us no matter what, Costa doesn’t have to agree.”

  I shook my head. “I could never abandon him,” I said.

  “Then we’ll stay in California or wherever you want, but we’re old enough to decide for ourselves. He’ll have to learn to accept our plans if he wants you in his life.” He smiled. “Because I’m not going anywhere. You will be my wife.”

  Excitement tickled my tummy the way a sip of champagne fizzed in my mouth. The idea of walking down the aisle to him made me giddy.

  “Let’s finish this talk over food. I’m starving.” He pulled me by my hand. “Did you eat?”

  “I had lunch with Pilar,” I said as we walked back through the house. When I noticed Diego humming Led Zeppelin, I gave him a quizzical look.

  “I’ve had it stuck in my head since this morning,” he said. “There’s this new drug in development, and it’s called Escalera al Cielo.”

  “Stairway to Heaven,” I translated.

  “Sí.” In the kitchen, he disappeared into the pantry. “You remember that guy Juan Pablo Perez?”

  “The really good chemist from Nogales?” I asked as I sat at the dining table.

  “He’s more than really good. He’s one of the top scientists in the country now. Probably the world.” He returned and handed me a Coke Light. “Tepic told me yesterday he invented a sedative with tetro-something. It’s a neurotoxin that comes from . . . ¿cómo se dice? Botete? What’s the word in English?”

  “Puffer fish,” I said and tabbed open my soda.

  “Sí. Anyway, it’s poisonous to ingest, but Tepic says in the right dosage, it’s not fatal.”

  I sipped my cola. “Why would anyone want to take that?”

  “Because, as Tepic put it,” Diego said, gesticulating with flourish to imitate Tepic, “it’s supposed to be a high more addicting than coke. More life-altering than ayahuasca. More euphoric than ecstasy.”

  I giggled, raising my soda can. “But is it more satisfying than Coca-Cola?”

  “Apparently.”

  “But why the name?”

  “Juan Pablo says it’s a round-trip ticket to heaven.” Diego came and hugged my neck from behind. “It’s peaceful. Euphoric. It starts with tingling in the lips . . .” He kissed the corner of my mouth, then brushed his lips over my neck. “Then moves down to your fingers and arms. It puts you in a trance, and . . .” He tapped me once between the breasts with his fingertip. “Slows your heart . . .” He waited several seconds, then tapped again. “Like that.”

  I put my hands on his forearms, keeping him close. “That sounds dangerous.”

  “That’s the price for a high like no other.” He kissed my cheek and returned to looking in the fridge.

  “And with the wrong dose?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You said with the right dose, it’s not fatal. What happens if Juan Pablo gets it wrong?”

  Diego leaned out from behind the refrigerator door and cut his finger across his neck. “Estás muerto.”

  “Death. It’s literal then—a stairway to heaven.”

  “He wouldn’t put it on the market until it was safe, but I’ll be honest. I’m not about to risk it.” He shut the fridge door and grabbed a mango from a fruit basket. “We don’t have shit to eat.”

  I toed off my flats and pulled my foot onto the chair to hug my knee. I fixed the skirt of my dress even though I wore boy shorts underneath. “Are you going to tell me about the meeting you and Cristiano had with my dad? I talked to him the next morning.”

  Diego picked up a small knife from a drying rack on the counter. “How much did he reveal?”

  “Everything, I hope.” If there was more to the story my father had shared, then Papá probably didn’t know it. I picked invisible lint off my dress. “He said Cristiano found and returned jewelry that the hitman had sold. And that the sicario admitted to being hired by anothe
r cartel.”

  Diego rested his hip against the counter. “That’s what he told me too.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I . . . I’m skeptical. I’m not sure how—” He blinked at me and shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m making excuses. No—I don’t buy the story. I don’t trust Cristiano, but I’ve never known Costa to be gullible.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “My father isn’t gullible. He’s trusting his instinct with the evidence he has.”

  “Something he’s known for,” Diego pointed out. “Strong intuition. But I’m afraid he’s too close to this.”

  Like my mother had been? She’d trusted her life in Cristiano’s hands and had lost it.

  “You heard what Costa said at the party—the prodigal son returns.” Diego balanced the mango on a plate and sliced a clean curve along the skin. “I think it’s obvious he has never been a good judge of Cristiano’s character.”

  “What if Cristiano’s telling the truth, though?” I asked. “Why would he come back knowing my father’s been hunting him?”

  “It’s been years. Maybe he thought the old man had softened.”

  “Papá made it sound as if it took Cristiano that long to track down the jewelry and the hitman.” If that was true, I could see why my father had said Cristiano had proven his loyalty. But I’d spent so long hating him, acknowledging anything positive about him felt foreign. And disloyal to my mom.

  Diego’s knife slipped, and I jumped as it slammed the plate. He glanced at the table, barely noticing, as if lost in a thought. “Whatever Cristiano’s reason for returning,” he said, “it must be worth risking his life.”

  “But if the Calaveras are as successful as you say, what could he want from us?”

  Diego resumed skinning the fruit. After a few moments, he responded quietly. “Once a man gets a taste of power, his need for it surpasses hunger. It’s a sickness that demands more.”

  Papá had said something similar about Diego. Because he was somebody in this life, he couldn’t ever be nobody. “What’s the more that he wants?”

  He twisted his lips. “He was Costa’s star quarterback, as the gringos say. Cristiano never failed at any task. Other cartels tried to lure him away, but he stayed true. He was the only one who could talk back to your father and not get punished for it.” Diego gently separated the mango’s skin, but his knuckles whitened around the knife handle. “Maybe Cristiano thought he’d one day partner with Costa—or even take over the cartel.”

  Picturing Cristiano at the helm wasn’t that hard to do. He’d worked side by side often with my father and had sat with us at the family dinner table far more than anyone else in Papá’s business. “If that’s true,” I said, “then Cristiano probably felt he lost all that when he had to flee.”

  Diego nodded. “And now he wants it back.”

  Even if Cristiano hadn’t killed my mother, he’d been blamed for it. What did an accusation like that do to a person? He’d had eleven years to nurse his grudge. I’d never forgotten what he’d said to me before we’d descended into the tunnel: “Look what loyalty got me.” Those weren’t the words of someone who wanted to be accepted home. They were those of a man who felt he’d been wronged.

  Certainly Cristiano’s definition of loyalty had changed that day.

  And that made him dangerous.

  Diego raised his voice as he ran the garbage disposal. “Do you know the real reason for the nickname El Polvo?”

  The Dust. That was what some had called Cristiano when he’d worked for my father. “Because he arrives on a cloud of dust, delivering death before the dirt clears.”

  “That’s what people say, but no.” He flipped off the disposal and washed his hands. “It’s actually because of how he executed his first kill.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “It’s gruesome.” He dried his hands on a dishtowel. “On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t say.”

  At this point, I was in too deep not to ask. My curiosity was being stoked at every turn and fighting it just made my imagination run wild. “Tell me,” I said.

  “He got a bucket of sand from the desert,” Diego said, rubbing his palms together. “Then tied up a man twice his age and poured it down his throat until he choked to death.”

  I gripped my neck, suddenly unable to breathe. “No.”

  Diego nodded. “I’ve seen him do it. No screaming that way. No blood. No marks. And the bonus of a slow death . . .”

  My nostrils flared as I inhaled. I felt that sand in my throat, strangling me. Death by torture—that was worse than death itself.

  “After the party, I started looking into the Calaveras more. I’ve heard all kinds of inhumane things.” Diego brought the plate of fruit to the table, removed his shoes, and sat across from me. “Apparently they have a soundproof dungeon where they keep one body part from each person who has betrayed them.”

  I stopped the question on my tongue—why. Why was a dangerous word. I didn’t want to know. Dungeons and soundproof rooms and body parts could only mean bad things. Despicable, torturous things. But what was worse—to know the truth, or let ignorance leave me vulnerable? Where Cristiano was concerned, I never wanted to be in the dark again.

  “What else have you learned?” I asked. “And don’t tell me not to ask. I can handle it.”

  He shifted in his seat. “The worst, I guess, is abducting children to do his bidding.”

  As horrifying as that was, my father had taken in Diego and Cristiano for similar reasons. They had food and a place to sleep at night, but also an obligation to the cartel that they could never escape. “Is that different than what you guys do?” I asked.

  “The kids in our cartel are like family. Your father never treated us like slaves. I’m talking bigger stuff. The Calaveras have gone as far as to purchase an entire shipment of children for labor.”

  I recoiled, clamping a hand over my mouth. What even was a shipment of children? And how did someone purchase one? Bile rose up my throat, and I pushed the mango slices away. “What . . . but how? How can he get away with that?”

  Diego ran his sock along my inner calf. It was a small gesture, but still comforting. He lowered his voice, leaning in although we were alone. “Cristiano is powerful. He has even the most pious of government officials in his pocket and within Badlands’ walls are all kinds of businesses, big and small. From supermercados and hardware stores to drone security centers and freight shipping offices.”

  “But shipping is your business,” I said. “Isn’t that stepping on your toes?”

  “We own ports and plazas and have arrangements all the way from individual fishermen to fleet management companies, which reduces our risk.” He ate a piece of fruit. “Cristiano invests but also has solutions in-house—”

  “Con permiso, señor.” A boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen stood in the doorway. “Hay un problema.”

  Diego nodded as he wiped his fingers on his pants. “Dígame.”

  “Tepic is trying to reach you. It’s, ah . . .” He glanced at me with anxious eyes. “Es importante.”

  Diego stood and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll be right back,” he said, taking out his phone. “Feel free to snoop around the kitchen—unless it’s not as much fun when you have permission?”

  I stuck my tongue out at him as he left, then texted with Pilar to update her.

  By the time Diego returned, I’d finished all the mango. “Sorry,” I said as he stayed in the doorway, typing something into his phone. “I guess I was hungry after all. Want me to cut another?”

  He glanced up but looked past me, staring off as if he hadn’t quite registered that I was there.

  “Diego?” I asked, sitting up straighter.

  He blinked, and recognition crossed his face. “What?” he asked. “Did you say something?”

  “What’s the matter?” I got up and went to him. “What was the problem?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, then looked at h
is cell. “Ah, it’s nothing, but . . . I have to get back to work.” As soon as he stuck the phone in his pocket, it started to ring, and he took it back out. “I’ll have someone take you home.”

  “I can get a cab.”

  “Hmm?” He checked the screen and ran a hand over his mouth with a curse.

  “You’re getting pale,” I said. “What’d Tepic say?”

  “I have to take this, Tali. Don’t get a cab.” He kissed me quickly on the lips, then retreated. “Sit tight, and I’ll send someone in to drive you.”

  “But—” He was already halfway out the door. “When will I see you next?” I called.

  “Soon, mi amor. I’ll be in touch.” As he exited the room, he answered the phone with, “Jojo? There’s been a theft.”

  Despite his unusual behavior, my shoulders relaxed with a small degree of relief. Stolen goods didn’t sound like much to be concerned about when a phone call could mean anything from a kidnapping to a RICO charge to the death of a family member.

  I put my shoes back on and sat to wait for a ride, feeling slightly comforted.

  As far as bad news went, I would take a theft over the alternative any day.

  9

  Diego

  Our waitress looked between my brother and me in the low light of a steak restaurant, trying to decide which one she liked better. It’d been a while since we’d been sized up that way. Women had started comparing Cristiano and me once I was old enough to get female attention.

  “Brothers?” she asked, placing Cristiano’s mezcal on the table.

  Don Costa sat back in his dining chair, reveling in the show. “What gave it away?” he asked her.

  She twisted her red lips at Cristiano, her eyes glimmering. Apparently, she’d chosen him, not that I cared. With a long nose and features that didn’t quite register as feminine, she was no Natalia. “The height,” she answered. “Dark hair. Same smile. You look a lot alike, but there’s also something very different about you.”