Violent Delights (White Monarch 1)

Pilar sat back on her heels. “How’s that?”

The dress swung at the bottoms of my heels. “Better. What am I missing?”

“A bouquet.”

I gasped, covering my mouth. “I completely forgot.”

“Just take something from the garden,” she said.

I glanced out the window. “Do you think Father Rios will mind?”

“Without the money your family has donated, there’d be no garden at all.”

“There’s a flowerbed out there in my mother’s name.”

Pilar came up behind me and rubbed my back. “She’s here now. I’m sure of it. Anyway, without a bouquet, you’d be offending the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

“Ah, verdad. I need an offering in exchange for her blessing.” I removed my shoes, gathered up my dress, and walked across the lawn behind the church. Sparrows chirped in the trees as I entered the garden that bore roses, lilies, marigolds, dahlias . . .

I closed my eyes and breathed in their fragrance, curling my toes in the springy, freshly cut grass before I picked red roses and white lilies and arranged them into a small bouquet.

I glanced up at a hovering monarch butterfly. I’d never seen a rare, elusive white one, and likely never would, but nonetheless, I stopped to appreciate this one in all its colorful beauty. It passed over the roses and landed in a ray of sunshine atop a lone group of marigolds.

I smiled to myself until it hit me—marigolds were the flower of the dead. “Mami?” I whispered.

It wasn’t the season for monarchs, not like autumn. They’d been everywhere during my mother’s funeral, so close to Día de los Muertos. As a girl, I remembered each year when they’d migrate south from the States and Canada in awe-inspiring kaleidoscopes through town—especially dazzling in our yard where Mamá had planted milkweed. I regretted how she and I had captured them just to feel their wings flutter against our palms. How must it have felt to be trapped?

The same as my mother had in her final moments?

“Lo siento mucho, Mamá,” I said, my throat thick. “I’m sorry.”

I hated to admit that I understood what Diego had meant when he’d spoken of a deeply buried desire to avenge his parents’ deaths. It was the kind of thing I never poked at for fear of awakening a thirst for revenge only the life of my mother’s murderer could quench. And that was why I’d tried to leave this life behind. Family bonds, wealth, vengeance, and violence—it was a vicious cycle of sins and pain. I was still leaving, I told myself. Not now, not yet, but when things had settled, Diego and I would have our fresh start anywhere but here.

The butterfly fluttered her wings. “What is it?” I asked.

What wish was she trying to deliver? Or was it a message? A breeze passed through the garden, ruffling leaves. I realized I was gripping the stems of my bouquet, and a thorn had pricked my finger. I sucked my fingertip and tasted metallic just as I got the sudden sensation I was being watched. I glanced around, but nobody was there.

Thoughts of my mother, and hope that she was looking down on me, should’ve brought happiness, but suddenly, a sense of dread permeated the fragrant air.

The wind picked up, and the monarch flew off through the trees. I watched until she was out of sight. In the distance, the sky had darkened to a deep blue-gray, the way it only did in the desert when a storm approached.

I wished my mother was here to see me exchange vows today, but since she wasn’t, I would carry her with me into the church. I squatted down to add the marigold the butterfly had landed on, the most brilliant of the bunch, to my bouquet.

I didn’t doubt she’d bless my union with Diego or that she’d be at the church today in whichever form she took. She would have understood my urgency, my passion. She had loved deeply too and had given up a family to gain one.

She had known Diego was worth saving as a child, and had taken him in. She would approve, I knew it.

The bird above my head stopped chirping and flew away the same instant a shadow moved over me. Two dirt-sodden boots stopped beside me, inciting a memory from eleven years earlier I often tried to forget. Blood-splattered boots and a Glock in the devil’s grip. I raised my eyes, hoping to finally meet Diego, but half-expecting Cristiano. I dropped my bouquet with a gasp.

A man with pockmarked skin, scraggly, graying hair, and an angry, diagonal scar across his face looked back at me. “They’re ready for you in the church, Miss Natalia.”

He was hard to look at, ugly as sin, scowling even as he smiled—the stuff of nightmares. I swallowed dryly. “Who are you?”

In one hand, he held a gun at his hip. With the other, he ran a fingernail between two of his teeth and then inspected it. “I’m just s’posed to take you in.”