“Hola, abejita, es bueno finalmente conocerte después de tanto tiempo,” she purred.
Hello, little bee, it is good to finally meet you.
It was her name.
Irina Ventura.
Because the woman who obviously knew me, based on the fact that she’d just referred to me by the name Ignacio called me, was none other than the wife of The Fallen MC’s archenemy, Javier Ventura.
Cartel boss.
Entrance’s corrupt mayor.
Irina Ventura’s husband.
Thankfully, she took my surprise for something else.
“Your father must have told you of me,” she surmised with a little chuckle as she plucked my hand from my side and shook it warmly. “You remember, I was once his boss?”
“I remember,” I said, even though I didn’t.
I’d always known Ignacio worked for the Ventura Cartel, but I didn’t know he reported to Irina.
She was still smiling so warmly at me, I thought she must have mistaken me for someone else. When she reached forward, I flinched slightly, but she only tucked a long strand of my dark hair behind my ear.
“So beautiful, like your father,” she noted, dark eyes heavily made up and glittering like obsidian gems. “Which brings me to the reason I’m here in this…quaint place. I wonder…” She stepped even closer, so close our breasts brushed together, and her sweet breath wafted over my lips. “If you might be as helpful as him too.”
LILA
After a childhood that consisted of visiting prisons, you would have thought I’d be used to it by now. Twenty-four years old, and I still felt like the little girl who had been forced to visit her father every Sunday after church for two years since I was almost too young to remember. Mama had put bows in my thick, tangled brown hair, the colour always matching the frilly, second-hand dress I was forced to change into in the car. I wore glossy, patent leather shoes and white socks with furled edges that made my ankles itch.
I’d hated everything about those visits.
I didn’t hate them now.
Because I wasn’t visiting Ignacio Davalos.
I was visiting Zeus Garro, a man who was as close to a father figure as I’d ever had, including the biological piece of shit who’d been in prison for almost fifteen years by that point.
There were some people you meet in life that were utterly magnetic, their gravitational force so absolute they acted like a third Pole.
Zeus Garro was one of those men.
He was a good man under all the tatts and illegal activities, and he drew good people to him with that magnetism so that the entire Fallen Motorcycle Club he was president of was filled with the same dichotomy he embodied.
Bad boys, good men.
I loved them all, even though I had none of the usual ties to the club.
No patched-in father, brother, or boyfriend.
Just one man who’d taken me in when I had no one left to give a shit about me.
One man who had given me the greatest gift I’d ever known.
The Fallen family.
And at the head of that family was Zeus, who had accepted me as his daughter’s best friend and his brother’s charity case easier than I ever could have imagined.
There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Zeus.
I smiled at him as I waited for the guard to let me through the final door to the bank of telephones and glass partitions separating civilians from the incarcerated.
I didn’t want to smile.
I wanted to rage. Just as I did every time I saw him behind the smeared plexiglass in a bright orange jumpsuit. He was just too big for prison, too colossal of heart and stature. His broad shoulders kissed the partitions on either side of him, and he dwarfed the plastic chair he sat in.
It made me ache to see him like that, like a great cat in a tiny cage.
“Zeus,” I said as I sat down across from him and picked up the cracked black phone. “I wish I could say orange was your colour.”
He chuckled, which I’d intended for him to do, because he didn’t give a crap about his colour wheel. “How’s my Lila girl? Helluva sight for these poor eyes after a day’a lookin’ at tatted skinheads, let me tell ya.”
I beamed at him. It wasn’t hard for me to admit that I’d been an unattractive child. My mother passed down her grandfather’s coarse hair, but without the curls, and she died before she could teach me what to do with the mass of it, so it was always tangled despite my attempts to keep it tame. From my father, I had inherited large, almond-shaped eyes, his Hispanic olive toned skin, plus his natural inclination toward gauntness.
So, not attractive.
But that was okay because I’d developed other aspects of my personality from an early age to make up for those deficits, and when I’d met Harleigh Rose at the age of seven and she instantly fell in love with me, I finally found someone to help me cultivate my looks.