Violent Delights (White Monarch 1)

“Yes, I have.”

“You know who he is?” she asked. “He’s close by.”

I nodded. “He’s here tonight.”

“I see great love for you.”

Diego had taken a bullet for me all those years ago, and he’d saved my life many times since as he’d seen me through brutal pre-teen years without a mom. We already possessed a deep devotion to each other, and we hadn’t even been intimate yet. I nodded. “It is a great love.”

“I see pain,” she said in the same flat tone.

I shifted in my seat. That was a given considering the circles my father moved in. He and I had already gone through tragedy—that was, if there was such a thing as going through it. Grief ebbed and flowed, but it never truly receded. Now, he ran a more respectable operation, but for those who dealt in vice and contraband, risk would always be present. The fortune teller saw pain? She could’ve been speaking to anyone in the room.

“I see betrayal and violence,” she continued. “And much death.”

The grandfather clock in the main ballroom chimed. How long had I been sitting there? “I’ve already experienced all of those.”

“And at such a young age,” she said, clucking. “There’s more to come, I’m afraid.”

Whether I believed in her powers or not, that wasn’t what I’d hoped to hear. I took my hand back to put it in my lap. “Whose death?” I asked, touching the diamond on my finger.

Her rings clinked against the glass ball as she palmed it, but she didn’t bother to look, as if that was just the most convenient place to rest her hands. “You will die for him, your love,” she said.

“I would, yes.”

“No. You will die for him.”

Goose bumps pebbled my skin. I thought of the barrel of Cristiano’s gun pressed to my forehead. “Bang. You’re dead.”

The dark came next. The pitch black, my cries, and the scurrying rodents, the smell and feel of blood that didn’t leave me for weeks. A shadow, the same one that often haunted my dreams, rose in me.

My heart raced. In the warm glow of the red and purple light, I couldn’t tell if the woman looked on with sympathy or delight. Either way, I didn’t like her face just then, or any of this. It was silly. Child’s play. She was wrong to hide behind a costume for a night and play with people’s lives.

“This is stupid,” I said and stood to return to my post at the curtains. I willed my heart rate to slow so I could focus on finding Diego. I spotted him standing in the entrance hall. He looked like he belonged in an old Western in his cowboy getup, yet blended perfectly amongst Mexico’s upper echelon. At the same time, he was utterly out of place. I could give him an escape. I could give him everything.

Was I going to die for him?

I slipped out from the make-believe lair, and like a hawk to a mouse, his eyes set on me. The worry in them eased, replaced with the same longing surely reflected my eyes. The soothsayer’s dark words lifted, and I saw them for what they were—generic, baseless, fearmongering sentiments, a one-size-fits-all likelihood that more than the majority of this room would encounter death, pain, violence—and riches. That was the point of all of this, anyway.

As if plotting his route to me, Diego rubbed his jaw. He’d catch the blame if we were caught together. That didn’t stop my craving to feel Diego’s lips on mine. He started toward me, but after only a few steps, my father appeared, slapped him on the back, and pulled him away to introduce him to a couple.

I moved through the crowd, catching and losing Diego’s gaze as people passed between us. He shook the hand of an Elvis impersonator as I ducked by a man in a toga. He kissed Catwoman’s cheek but winked at me. I touched my neck in mock-offense and stopped short of face-planting into a wall of a security guard.

“Perdón,” I said as I went to go around him.

The guard moved to block me, and in an instant, the energy around me shifted. I tilted my head back until I was looking straight up at a monster of a man and into the face of a ghoulish black-and-white skull. The blackened eye sockets, rimmed in deep red, didn’t hide the menacing way his eyes focused on me. Nor did the drawn-on teeth, shaped in a sinister grin, disguise his frown—or the flawless bone structure beneath his veneer. Raven-black hair had been slicked back, as stark against the chalky face paint as his tie cutting down the center of a pressed white dress shirt.

He stood as still and straight-backed as a mannequin, looking as polished as one too. He inclined his head toward me. “May I have this dance?”