Black Hearts (Sins Duet #1)

“You better watch out for them,” he tells me, and though his tone is light, his words come out slow and deliberate. “They never stick around.”

I press my luck. “And do you have experience with that?”

He raises a brow, gives me a withering look. “Son. Please. You know I was in the states for a long time.”

“A long time ago.”

He sighs quietly. “Yes. A long time ago. But I’m sure their women haven’t changed. Just as duplicitous and na?ve as ever.” He pauses, taking a sip of his drink. “Where will you go? What will you do?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Head up the coast and figure it out. Maybe end up in Seattle. Experience the rain.”

“We get enough rain here,” he says, studying me. “You won’t be going alone, you know this.”

“I can protect myself.”

He lets out a caustic laugh, leaning back in his chair. His fingers run along the rim of the tequila glass as he smiles to himself. “Yes. Yes you can. I have no doubt. But the moment you leave this house, you know what happens.”

“No one is targeting me anymore. Not when we continue to be second best.”

His eyes fly to mine, sharp as knives. The fury of a million suns burns behind them. “You think this is funny? This position we are in? Or the fact that your fucking life is at stake every second moment you continue to live?”

I snap my mouth shut. Arguing won’t get me anywhere and where I need to go is far away from here. I’m inches from reaching it and I know that one wrong word will make my father call the whole thing off.

I can’t let that happen.

I need to find her.

The proof that my father once had a soul.

The whole thing started by accident. About a week ago my father was off on business and my mother asked me to find a file in his office, the very one we’re sitting in now. She said it would be old, dated before I was born. Information on the Tijuana Cartel before they joined with ours.

I did as I was told. Got to work in the office and spent the whole muggy afternoon going through metal boxes and rubber bins full of folders. I had to wonder why this wasn’t all digitalized, but most of the papers were computer printouts, maybe as a failsafe in case a file got deleted.

For the life of me I couldn’t find the specific file she was looking for. I brought every folder on the Tijuana Cartel out to where she was sitting by the pool, but none of them were old enough. She told me to look harder.

Of course I wanted to tell her that she should look for them herself but being disrespectful to your mother gets you a slap in the face, and as the only son, I’m expected to do a lot of shit I shouldn’t have to. Besides, my mother has seemed increasingly fragile lately. She’s only forty-four years old—she had me pretty young—and yet she’s losing weight and is constantly on edge. She’s always spooked fairly easily but now it’s like you can’t even approach her without her jumping out of her skin.

So I went back inside and went through the last cabinets. I pulled out an old wooden box, locked with a small padlock. The chance of me finding a key was pretty small—knives, machetes, handguns, rifles, AKs, even goddamn whips are plentiful but not much else.

I took a hammer from my father’s desk drawer (it’s in case some business deals go south—not a pretty sight) and brought it over to the box, smashing the lock off with a swift blow.

Given how far back in the cabinet the box was, I doubted anyone would notice that I broke it open, and so far no one has. Besides, she had told me to check anywhere and everywhere. You’d think she would have otherwise mentioned to “keep your hands off the secret box of mystery.”

Inside the box were a few file folders and yellowed and cracked newspaper clippings, so faded in places it was hard to read. They weren’t about the Tijuana Cartel at all and I probably should have closed the box and put them back.

But I didn’t.

Every paper in there was about one woman, a white woman. Sometimes her name was Eden White, sometimes it was Ellie Watt, and the more recent papers had her as Ellie McQueen. There were photos of her taken with a telephoto lens. In them she had long, white blonde hair. There were passport IDs with dark hair, there were candid photos of her on a balcony, laughing into the sunset. These photos were the most common and I found myself sitting there for a long time, flipping through them.

The way these pictures were taken, printed out on cheap 4x6 photo paper like they did in the old days, showed some kind of…I don’t know. Love. Adoration. Something that I’ve never seen much of growing up. Whoever took these photos of Ellie must have loved her dearly.

But who took them?

It took me another twenty minutes, going through old printouts of emails, unsent letters, newspaper clippings, and sheets of info and data before I knew the whole picture.

Ellie was a con artist, apparently my dad’s lover here and there, and the one that got away. The unsent letters, written long before he must have met my mother, told me that much and more. A lot more.

Actually, it was hard to even accept that they came from my father, but his name was signed at the bottom and his handwriting never changed. I’d just never seen my father offer up any part of his heart or soul to anyone. Yes, I had loving parents when I was growing up, but their affection never carried any vulnerability. My parents were fighters, business partners, and maybe more behind closed doors, but it was never anything I had been witness to. Love was expected and accepted in the Bernal family but very rarely shown.

It never made a lick of difference to me. It made me harder, smarter. It protected me, freed me from excessive emotions, and I think that was my father’s point all along. You couldn’t run a cartel if you weren’t built with steel bricks. You had to be a fortress, never bending, never breaking.

But his words on that paper showed a side of my father that I never thought existed. Perhaps the side of him before two of his sisters were killed, before he lost this supposed love of his life. Ellie seemed like the hand that slowly pushed his heart closed.