Violent Delights (White Monarch 1)

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 another 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.”