Total pages in book: 767
Estimated words: 732023 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 3660(@200wpm)___ 2928(@250wpm)___ 2440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 732023 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 3660(@200wpm)___ 2928(@250wpm)___ 2440(@300wpm)
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, 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.
“If we can’t tell him, then we’ll have to show him,” I said. “Even if it means something drastic.”
“Such as?”
My heart began to race. I looked out toward bruise-colored mountains as dusk swallowed the day. I was too shy to say it directly to Diego’s face in case it wasn’t anything close to what he was thinking. “We could always elope.”
When he didn’t respond, I finally chanced a look at him.
He stared at me with a tenderness that melted my insides and left me a puddle of need and longing. This was the art of life—the art of Diego—and what I would risk my father’s wrath for. Diego possessed a potential he would never reach here. He’d supported my decision to go away knowing he’d be left behind. And he wanted the best for me, even if it meant the worst for him. He would never make me choose between the two of them.