Black Hearts

  I may have everything I want, but I don’t have freedom.

  Not yet.

  “Just tell me,” he says. “What are you hoping to find out there?”

  Pieces of buried truth.

  I give him a quick smile. “An American girl.”

  Not a lie.

  I watch him carefully for his reaction, not expecting one. But there is a tic of muscle along his jawline. It’s not much but it’s enough.

  “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 naïve 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 print-outs, 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.

  And that’s when I knew, I needed to find her.

  I want to talk to her. I want to know who she is. What she has that cracked my father open all those years ago. What she knows.

  I want to see his weaknesses.

  And I want to use those weaknesses against him.

  That’s what I’ve been stewing on all week. I never found the papers on the Tijuana Cartel but by then my mother quickly dropped interest in it.

  The paper with the latest date, from a few years ago, states that Ellie lives in San Francisco. I don’t know why my father has this up-to-date intel on her, but then again I’m not too surprised. The older my father gets, the more personal he takes any slight. He’s also obsessive, manic, and bat-shit crazy at times.

  A quick Google search showed me that Ellie still works as a photographer, and with some more digging I found out her husband runs a tattoo shop in the city. Further digging brings up a son, age twenty-four, the spitting image of his father right down to the tattoos, who is an MMA fighter. They also have a daughter. I can’t get much dirt from her aside from an Instagram account full of art and professional photos, but her bio tells me she’s studying photography at the arts school. The picture of her is too far away, shot in black and white, so you can’t get a good look at her, but if she is anything like her mother, she is probably stunning.

  And now I have permission to go. To just leave and set out on my own for the first time in my life. Maybe this Ellie turns out to be nothing at all. Just some chick who
broke my dad’s heart. But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t change the fact that this is my first step out of this prison.

  “What the fuck are you smiling for?” my father asks me, pouring himself another glass.

  I let the smile turn into a grin. “Just looking forward to the day I leave.”

  He narrows his eyes at me. “You’re coming back, mark my words.”

  I just nod at him.

  We’ll see.

  A week later and I’m leaving.

  I say goodbye to my mother as she gives me a tearful hug. I send my regards to my sister, Marisol, who is staying with my aunt Marguerite in New York for her first year of university.

  My father gives me a firm, albeit reluctant handshake. I tower over him by a few inches and yet he seems taller.

  “Tio and Nacho will be your eyes when yours fail you,” he says to me, voice grave, and jerks his head toward the waiting SUV. Bulletproof glass and carriage, shiny black. Tio and Nacho stand outside of the open back door, hands clasped in front of them, waiting for me.

  They’re my babysitters.

  Armed to the nines.

  “And here is everything you need,” my father says, pressing a leather pouch into my hands. “Passport, two in case you need them, one American, one Mexican. California Driver’s License. A bank card. Credit card. Nine thousand dollars cash. You’re Vicente Rodriguez, American citizen, born and raised in Sacramento. You’re twenty-five years old, born in two thousand twelve. At least this way you can rent a car, fucking bullshit laws they still have there. Your parents are Mexican immigrants who came over to America before the embargo. They were self-made millionaires.”

  “Doing what?” I ask.

  “Whatever the fuck you want them to. You know how to lie, don’t you?”

  “I’m your son, aren’t I?”

  He raises a brow, staring me down for a moment with glittering eyes, and gives me a hard slap on the shoulder. “Behave yourself, Vicente. Starting trouble over there is completely different than starting trouble over here. One gets others killed. The other gets you killed.”

  I nod.

  Get in the car with my two amigos.

  And we’re off to the Mazatlán airport.

  Off to a new land.

  Where I am no longer Javier Bernal’s son.

  Where the prince can become the king.

  Chapter Three

  Violet

  The envelope haunted me for the rest of the week.

  I could barely concentrate on my assignments and I walked through the school and streets of San Francisco like a zombie, seeing everything and taking in nothing at all. As if school wasn’t overwhelming enough with the need to get my projects exactly right, now my thoughts were pulled to a puzzle I desperately wanted to solve.

  I had to talk to someone, but at the same time I knew I couldn’t confide in just anyone. The article had talked about my father in a negative way. And that’s putting it mildly. It said he was involved with a drug cartel and presumed dead, and he’s clearly not. Dead, that is.

  Plus, there’s a reason that this has all been kept away from me, the big, dark secret that I always imagined hung above their heads.

  Either way, I can’t say anything to Ginny about it so I let it fester inside me, a slow simmer of black heat, all week.

  Ben comes up from Santa Cruz most weekends. It’s Friday evening and he’s downstairs right now, talking to Mom about something. Dad is still at work.

  I don’t want to appear overly anxious—as I’ve said before, my parents are paranoid as fuck—but I also don’t want to hang out in the house much longer.

  I go downstairs and play the part of the bored, petulant child, something I do very well. I lean against the kitchen counter and sigh dramatically.

  My mom gives me a wry look as she pushes her long dark hair behind her ears. “What?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I mumble. “Just bored.” I give Ben a hopeful look. “Want to hit the Haight?”

  Ben and Mom exchange a wary look. I get along well with my brother, even more so since he went off to Santa Cruz for college, but it’s not like we hang out one on one all that often.

  Maybe he can pick up on the silently pleading look in my eyes because he shrugs. “Okay, sure. You got your fake ID? I wouldn’t mind a beer.”

  I know in any other household we’d probably get a lecture. But Mom is as lax as possible when it comes to those kind of rules, especially the ones set by the government. She’s been a supporter of my fake ID and underage drinking, so long as I’m responsible. And I am. To a fault.

  There’s a tiny bar at the end of the street, by Amoeba Records, that serves delicious Asian fusion food with amazing cocktails. It’s dark, narrow, and the music isn’t obnoxious or overpowering. It’s the kind of place that seems perfect for divulging secrets.

  As we walk up the street, Ben going on about some MMA fighter that I’m pretending to care about, I feel my phone burning in my pocket, as if the picture I took of the newspaper article is trying to leak out into the world.

  “So, what the hell is going on with you?” Ben asks as we sit in a booth, the waitress leaving with our order.

  I chew on my lip until I’m sure my Chapstick is completely scraped off. “Ben…” I say slowly. “Do you ever get the feeling that our parents…” I lower my voice and lean in, “aren’t who they say they are?”

  He rolls his eyes. “This again?” He attempts a smile, like it’s a joke, but it looks forced.

  “I’m serious. Just answer me.”

  He sighs, sitting back in his chair and running a hand through his dark hair, the ends still spiky. “They’re weird. Okay? That’s it. Mom is just…well, she’s paranoid. And Dad is probably the same guy he was when he was young. They’ve always been very…I don’t know, cool, I guess. I mean, I know they’re Mom and Dad, but they don’t act like typical parents. Doesn’t mean they’re hiding anything or lying about anything.”

  I pause as the waitress drops off his beer and my lychee martini. “You sure about that?”

  He studies me for a moment. It’s amazing how much he looks like Dad at times. I got my mother’s high cheekbones, dark eyes, and small bone structure from her Estonian ancestry. It would have been nice to have gotten the striking blue eyes like the guys have, or Ben’s darker complexion, or their height, but I’m not complaining much.

  “Vi, you’re not very good at beating around the bush, so just say it.”

  I exhale slowly as I pull my phone out. I flip to the picture and slide it across the table to him.

  “What is this?” he asks, picking it up.

  “Just read it and you tell me,” I say. My hair is starting to feel too hot on the back of my neck, the ends tickling, so I put it up in a ponytail as I watch him.

  He frowns as his eyes scan the photo, zooming in and out as he tries to read the text. His face goes through a gamut of emotions. Confusion, shock, anger.

  “I don’t…” he finally says, staring down at it with disbelief. He begins to slide the phone back to me and then quickly snatches it back, looking over it again. “What the fuck?”

  “I know. I’ve had all week to think about it.”

  “You’ve known for a week? Where did this even come from?”

  “Someone sent it in the mail. That’s all there was in the envelope, just the clipping. No note. No return address.”

  “You didn’t tell Mom or Dad?”

  I shake my head. “No. I slipped it back in. They never noticed I opened it.”

  He reads the article again. “Fuck. Vi, I don’t get it. Why would Dad lie about his father? He told us he was dead.”

  “Maybe he was ashamed of him. It obviously seems like something big happened if the word scandal was used.”

  “Yeah, a scandal involving a fucking drug cartel.” He sighs. “Even with the internet regulations over the years, I bet if I looked hard enough, I could find something about this.”

  “You’re Ben McQueen.
The internet is your bitch.”

  He gives me a half smile. “Yeah, well, I never thought I’d be looking for information about our father, that’s for sure.”

  “But this explains a lot, doesn’t it,” I say to him. “Why they act so cagey sometimes. For, like, no reason.”

  He purses his lips, nodding slowly. “Could be. I can’t believe you’ve kept this a secret.”

  “I wanted to show you in person. You probably wouldn’t have believed me otherwise.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You can be like Mom sometimes, you know.”

  “Paranoid?”

  He shrugs and takes a sip of his beer. “I would have said combustible.”

  He knows the right word to get to me all right, though at least he didn’t call me sensitive. He knows that’s a sore spot for me.

  When he puts his beer back down, he starts to spin it in his hands. “I can’t believe we had a grandfather. That he was still alive. A sheriff? And what about his wife? If that’s his second wife, what happened to his first one? Did she die early too or was that another lie?”

  “Makes you wonder about Grandpa Gus and Grandma Mimi.”

  Now Ben looks extra alarmed. “What about them?”

  “Nothing,” I say as I undo my ponytail, my hair feeling too tight now. “I just hope they’re actually who we think they are. Gus married Mimi after we were born. Mom never talks about her real birth mother much. The few times she has have been in passing, and when I was younger I used to ask but she said she was raised by Gus and didn’t remember much about her mother. That never sounded right to me. I don’t know why.”

  “Because you’re paranoid.”

  “There’s that word. Now you see that maybe I have a reason to be?”

  He exhales loudly, his eyes following every move of a hot redhead as she walks past.

  “Ben,” I chide him. “Focus.”