Violent Delights (White Monarch 1)

To hear about cartel life over the phone was one thing, but the evidence of its non-stop demands stood in front of me. I hated to think of Diego overworking himself. “You need rest. Come. Sit and tell me everything.”

“I can’t stay, Tali. If Costa finds me here after dark—”

“He won’t.” I pulled him to the deck by his hand. Even his palm seemed rougher. “He never comes up here.”

“Your father’s serious about keeping us apart.” Diego sat in an Adirondack chair, following me with his eyes as I went to the linen closet. “It wasn’t an idle threat,” he said. “At dinner, Costa said he’s thinking of sending you back early.”

I stopped short, clutching a blanket. “But I’ve barely spent any time with you! I see you for a few hours, and then you disappear for a few days.”

He stood to take the wool throw from me. “Sit down,” he said.

I fell into the chair next to his. “He didn’t mention anything today, and we had lunch.”

“Does he ever? He keeps you in the dark to protect you. If he wants you gone, he’ll put you on a plane. He wouldn’t ask your permission first.” He unfurled the blanket over me. “I’m starting to think Costa will never come around to the idea of us. And then what?” He swallowed as he focused on tucking me in. “Would you still want me?”

I reached up to grab his cheeks. “Yes,” I said, forcing him to hold my gaze. “I’ll never give up on us. We’ll find a way.”

He searched my eyes. Though his were alight, the dark circles under them betrayed his lack of sleep. What had brought on his sudden doubts, and why did my father want me gone so soon?

“I have to ask, Tali . . .” Diego went as still and quiet as the sprawling night around us. “Could you be happy without your father in your life?”

To choose between my dad and Diego? It would be impossible. “He’s already lost too much,” I said. “If it came down to it, he’d be forced to accept us. I don’t think he’d ever make me choose.”

“But if he did?” Diego pressed his lips to my forehead before pulling his chair closer to mine to sit. “I just want you to start considering that possibility.”

I couldn’t imagine not calling Papá whenever I had a question, missed my mom, or simply had the urge. He always spent Christmas with me at school. And just because I only visited once a year didn’t mean I wanted to give up the possibility of coming home one day. Having one parent taken from me, I would never willingly give up the other. At the same time, I’d chosen to leave this life as much as I had been sent away.

But not once did I ever choose to be separated from Diego.

“And his approval is only half of the issue,” Diego added.

Diego didn’t want to be separated from me, either. It just wasn’t necessarily up to him. I opened the blanket to him, and he pulled part of it over himself, checking to make sure I was still covered. “You mean leaving the cartel,” I said.

“It’s not as if I can just put in my two weeks’ notice. If Costa thought I was abandoning the cartel without permission or trying to steal you away . . .”

My father raised the White Monarch, put it to the sicario’s head, and bang!

It was an image I doubted I’d ever be able to scrub from my mind.

What would it take for him to “handle” Diego? He’d leveled a threat in the kitchen days earlier, but I hadn’t taken it seriously. Diego was practically family to him.

“He wouldn’t hurt you,” I said. “He has to know what that would do to me.” I believed that, but there was another truth I couldn’t ignore. Papá hadn’t gotten to where he was by letting offenses slide, no matter how sentimental he might feel.

“As long as he doesn’t take us seriously, he’ll go out of his way to put up a wall between us,” Diego said. “He has to realize this isn’t a game to us, princesa. That we’re in this for life.”

Diego spoke with such conviction that for life inspired a thrill in me. I was his princess, but I was also that to my father—and in his eyes, Diego was just a ward of the cartel, forbidden from entering the proverbial castle walls he guarded.

“Then we’ll have to make sure my father understands that if he doesn’t let you go so we can start a life together, he will lose me.”

“You’ve told him how you feel. I’ve tried to broach the subject, but he won’t hear me. What else can we do to get him to see?”

It would have to be something that couldn’t be ignored, dismissed, or stopped. I thought back to my conversation with Papá in the kitchen about loving one person and being willing to risk everything for them. About the ties my mother had cut for my father. About how marriage was sacred and should only happen once. With the person you were willing to die for.