Black Hearts (Sins Duet #1)

“It’s for the greater good,” he says. “The only time lies are worth telling.” He holds her close to him, kisses her forehead. “It’s going to be okay. It will be.”

He needs it to be okay. They both do.

Her eyes are wide open, staring into the shadows of the room while she listens to Camden’s breath grow deeper and deeper as he falls into sleep.

Ben was acting weird tonight, she thinks. But she can’t bear to bring it up. He’d chalk it up to her paranoia again, her guilt over Sophia, that she’s not Ben’s real mother.

So many lies, one on top of the other.

A pile of matchsticks about to go up in flames.





Chapter Sixteen





Vicente




The dream comes back again.

Santa Muerte.

But this time she has blackbirds instead of hair, swirling around her in a gathering storm.

I’m alone in the desert, wide open and stretching as far as the eye can see.

There is no life here.

Only death.

This is the home of Santa Muerte.

The Saint of Death with Violet’s eyes.

I want to ask her what she wants from me, but I cannot speak.

She’s not alone.

She has a man with her.

Or the remains of one.

She drags him behind her on a leash made of frayed rope.

But though the man is nearly skeletal, his suit hanging off him in dirty, wet tatters, he’s not dead. He’s still alive.

She moves, throwing her arm out, birds flying forth from underneath the endless void of her cloak, and she whips the man around until he’s lying at my feet.

For one horrible moment, as the dust rises and falls, I think I’m staring down at my father.

It is my father.

Younger. Ten, twenty years younger. But still him.

Then it quickly fades and morphs, as faces do in dreams, and becomes the face of Juan Alvarez.

The first man I ever killed.

I had known him for years. He was the man who drove me to school in the mornings. He was the driver for our family, in charge of making sure Marisol and I got to where we needed to go. He watched over us, protected us.

Then one day my father found out that a federale had bribed Juan for information.

Juan would never give us up. I believed that even as a child.

But what he told the federale led to a bust on one of our shipments.

My father doesn’t take betrayal lightly.

And because Juan had been in charge of driving me to school for years, I was to be the one to end Juan’s life.

I still don’t like to think about what happened that day. My father had Juan down on his knees, naked, hands bound in front of him, in front of the wall that wrapped around the courtyard where my mother liked to have her coffee in the mornings.

In Juan’s mouth was an apple, shoved so far back against his molars that he couldn’t spit it out.

My father, dressed in a white linen suit, handed me his gun and told me to shoot the apple out of Juan’s mouth as “punishment.”

I was fourteen at the time. I knew how to handle all weapons. I wasn’t a bad shot. I knew that if I aimed for the apple, I would shoot the apple. I would shoot him clear through his head.

That was the moment in my life when everything changed. When I took the step from child to adult. When I realized that tears couldn’t save me. A good heart couldn’t save me. That I could never go back to the way things were, that I would call for my innocence but it would never return.

Despite being a good shot and handling all guns, this gun in particular felt heaviest to me. A brick of lead. I almost dropped it. Who knows what would have happened if I had. It would have probably gone off and killed my father.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s what should have happened instead.

But it didn’t.

I took the gun and raised it with shaking hands, squinting at Juan over the barrel, the Juan who would drive me through the heavily guarded roads on the way to school and give me sips of his coffee from the thermos. The Juan who would offer me a smile before he offered anyone else one. The Juan who sometimes acted like he cared about me more than my own parents did.

I shot that Juan right in the head.

A part of me died that day with him. Maybe all of me did.

I try not to think about it.

Until it’s looking right back at me, a figure from the grave, a reminder of how far off the path I’ve strayed.

Even though it’s a dream, a song lyric floats into my head.

The righteous part is straight as an arrow

Take a walk and you‘ll find it too narrow.

And it was too narrow. Too narrow for the likes of me.

In the dream, Juan looks up at me from the desert floor. A rotten apple rolls out of his skeleton mouth.

Santa Muerte laughs as more blackbirds fly from her eyes, her hair, her lips.

“Good job,” my father’s words ring across the desert. “You’ve done me proud.”

And I think that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Until now.



I’m tired the next day. The dream did a number on me. After I woke up, I tossed and turned for hours, wishing Violet was with me to keep the nightmares at bay, both the living ones and the ones in my dreams.

She wants to see me at her house today. We’re going to this damn music festival, which is the last thing I want to do.

What I really want is her here in this room. On her knees. On her back. That gorgeous face staring up at me, promising all the good in the world, even if it’s locked inside her.

And yet for all her softness and kindness and bleeding heart, I want to make her stronger, better. Something more like me.

God forbid.

But that won’t happen today, so I make do with what will. I’ll see her and that’s the most important thing right now.

Plus, I’m hoping she’ll confide in me what happened with Ben. When I got back to the hotel last night, I thought I would dig around a bit online and see what I could find about Ben McQueen, but there was nothing. Ben’s obviously got some mad hacking skills to pull up the stuff he did.