On Every Street (The Artists Trilogy #0)

“No,” I told him, grabbing his face. “I need to love you.”

I searched his eyes, imploring him to lose the guilt, the anger, the shame. To lose his past, his ghost, the things that haunted him. I coaxed and pleaded and tried to open myself up so he could see everything I was, and how it was all for him.

We gazed at each other for what seemed like ages, so lost but so found.

Finally, a small smile crept up on his lips, making his eyes dance like tempered flames.

“I am yours, angel,” he said determinedly. “And you, you are mine.”

We kissed as if it was the first time. As if it was the last time.

“You are mine,” he repeated against my lips, wrapping his hand around my wrist and holding it like he’d never let go.

“My angel is mine.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“That tattoo is healing pretty well,” Javier said to me as he loaded the dishes in the dishwasher. I was putting my hair up in the copper-trimmed mirror over the kitchen table and my bicep flexed. We had gotten tattoos a little over a week ago, and the music notes that were inked around my arm were still looking fresh and new to my eyes. To be honest, I jumped a little every time I looked in the mirror. It was my first tattoo and it was taking me a while to warm up to it.

Of course, I didn’t get it alone. A few weeks ago had been our one-year anniversary. Javier thought it would be great to celebrate our love by getting tattoos dedicated to each other. Since we both loved music so much, we decided to pick out songs for each other. I chose the Nine Inch Nails’ song “Wish” to go on his wrist. He already had his mother’s name on his inner arm and that huge cross on his spine, so it definitely wasn’t as big of a deal as it was for me.

I had the musical notations of the song “On Every Street” wrapped around my bicep. Javier said the song represented him more than anything could. He was the man who would travel to the end of the world for me. He was the one who would never give up. He looked at it and looked at me and I could tell he had branded himself on me forever. It was his mark. It was his stain. I was permanently his. No matter what happened to us down the road, the tattoo told me he’d come looking.

Sometimes it bothered me. I didn’t want him to come looking because I didn’t want to leave. I was happy with Javier, happier than I’d ever been in my life. Even a year later, I still woke up in the morning, marveling at how handsome he was, how attentive, receptive and loving he could be. He wasn’t good and he wasn’t bad, he was just Javier. And he was mine.

After Javier had brought up the truth about himself, he’d been careful not to involve me in it. As ashamed as he was about it, he still kept the job. He still worked for Travis. As long as I never asked any questions, he never told me anything. It was easy to pretend he really was a consultant. I would spend months believing he did nothing at all except enjoy the good life.

But, occasionally something would betray him. Instead of lipstick on his collar, I’d find blood. One time he came home late with a broken nose. I helped him tend to it, fussing over it like he was the victim when I knew very well he wasn’t. If Javier’s nose was broken, it meant someone else was in a shallow grave.

It was my new reality, my new life I’d come to accept. As long as I kept it out of my head, I went on being Eden White and being madly in love.

Besides, Javier once had his own mission as I once had mine. He had his revenge.

He opened up about his childhood and his family a few months after he told me about the cartel. By then, he had purchased Northern Girl from Raul and we made a point to go sailing whenever we had free time. Me, being stubborn, still insisted I work at Hogan’s Heroes. It kept me sane and busy, and I made a good friend out of Julie. So whenever I wasn’t working, we were usually on the boat, sailing lazily around the Gulf.

I had just served him a gin and tonic, practicing my bartending skills on my day off, when we saw a pod of dolphins frolicking in the distance. I took out my brand new SLR camera, a gift from Javier, and started shooting them excitedly. Meanwhile, he was watching me like I was some cute new species.

“What?” I asked, after the dolphins had swum out of view. “Dolphins don’t do it for you?”

“You do it for me,” he said, leaning back in the seat behind the wheel. The boat was on autopilot but he still liked to look like he was steering. “No, I’ve seen a lot of dolphins. In La Cruz there was one pod that would swim up to the shore every morning. I always thought they were saying hello to me. Turns out my sister Beatriz had been feeding them fish scraps. I was very disappointed.”

“Awww,” I teased. “Not everything can fall for your charms, Javier.”

He shrugged. “I guess not.”

He never talked about his sisters very often, so I decided to broach the subject.

“So, tell me about Beatriz.”

He raised a dark brow. “Beatriz? Why?”

“Because I don’t know anything about your family.”

He leaned forward, eyes glinting. “And I know nothing about yours.”

“Yes you do,” I said, completely conscious of the lie I was still living. “I’m an only child. I have a cousin in Florida. My parents still live in Arizona. My dad works in air conditioning and my mother is a schoolteacher. Not much else to add.”

He wiggled his lips, thinking. Finally he shrugged again in that completely nonchalant way of his and said, “Okay, my angel, I will tell you everything you need to know.” He took a long swig of his drink then cleared his throat. “As I’ve told you before, my sisters are Beatriz, Marguerite, Alana, and Violeta. Beatriz is a year younger than me. Violeta is the youngest…and brattiest.” I smiled at that. “Alana and Marguerite are the twins. They were the favorites. They are also the prettiest girls in La Cruz, and I hope I never have to go back there because I know I’d kill any man that looked at them.” My smile tightened now, my brain glossing over the fact that he probably would kill them.

He took another sip before squeezing the lime into the glass, taking his time. “My father was a good man. A bit of a bastard but a good man. He never hit my mother or us. But he didn’t really…love us, either. As I told you before, he worked as a marine mechanic. But…it wasn’t his only job. None of us knew about his other job, except maybe mama. But if she knew, she never let on that she did. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was oblivious until the end. You see, my father, he was part of a cartel. The Gulf Cartel. The cartel that did not have any presence in the area. Everywhere on the coast, that was under the control of someone else. But my father was there. A mechanic by day, a spy at night. We lived under false pretenses. We were living a lie for my father.” He looked off into the distance and slipped on a pair of shades that were sticking out of a cup holder by the wheel. Now I couldn’t see his eyes. He wanted it that way.

“One day,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm and steady, “he was gunned down. I don’t really know what happened. I was sixteen at the time and in school. After that, everything changed. My mama could barely take care of the girls, and there was no one left to make a living. I had to drop out of school and take over the mechanic’s business. And naturally, I wasn’t as good at it as my father. But I did it. I supported us, all of us.”

My heart pinched for him. “Didn’t the police do anything?”

He laughed to himself. “Oh, my angel. The police? The police are more corrupt than the cartels. The police have their fingers everywhere, in every cookie jar. They did nothing because my father was the enemy and that was that. To them, it was good riddance.”

“And to you?” I asked softly.

“To me? It was a burden. He was a stranger to me, and now I had to do his work for him. It wasn’t fair and I hated him for it. Especially when mama died.”

I gulped. “How?”

“Same thing. A few years later, people came by in the middle of the night and they shot her. The only reason I’m alive is because I was still awake when it happened. I heard them come into the house, in my mama’s window. It was too late to save her. I went in my sisters’ room and made them hide under the bed and in the closet. We heard them kick in the door. They would have found us easily, but they were already attracting attention. The children just weren’t worth it.”

He trailed off. I watched him as pain tried to claw its way onto his face. He fought it off and finished his drink.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, feeling helpless and dumb.

“So am I,” he said. “After that, I talked to some friends. Miguel was one of them. I found out what my father was a part of. The Cartel Del Golfo. I wanted to join. I wanted revenge.”

His words were hitting me deeper than I would have liked, festering inside for all the wrong reasons. The selfish ones. He wanted revenge. He was like me…the old me. Suddenly it seemed Ellie Watt and Javier Bernal had a lot more in common than I thought.

“So, eventually, I moved east and joined them. They knew my father, and Miguel helped me in. I had no idea that he had such ties with them too. I felt so blind all those years, never picking up on anything. It was always just women and beer and dreaming of a better life. I never knew what I could hold in my hands, what my father held. Then, after a year or so, things split apart…you may have heard it on the news, though the news in America tends to ignore what’s really going on. A mercenary army was brought in to help with the war with Los Rojos, the rival. Our rival. And the leaders found I was better at negotiating than I was at fighting. I was brought out here to help control the import under Travis Raines. Because, of course, Los Rojos is here too. You see the USA, you see the gulf of Mexico, but you don’t see the Mexico in the gulf. The real Mexico. This is everywhere and under everyone’s nose. Not all of the wealth here is from oil.”

I noticed I was wringing my hands together nervously, sweat piling up on my palms. “And what about your sisters? Are they okay? Are they safe?”

He nodded. “They are. Beatriz works in a café and takes care of Violeta, who is still in high school. The twins are training to be flight attendants. I pay for their schooling, their houses, everything that I can.”

“So you work to pay the bills like everyone else.”

He looked at me sharply over his glasses. “You don’t need to justify what I do. I do what I have to do to survive because that’s all I know. I don’t make excuses, I own it. This is me, this is who I am, this is my life. It shames me but not enough to stop. At one point, this was all about revenge; it was about getting the men who got my father and my mother. But somewhere along the way, I forgot about the beast. Vengeance is a beast, you know. It can be tamed. I just stopped feeding it.”

And, as the months went by and Javier and I settled into our routine of sex and love and sea spray, I realized I stopped feeding the beast too.

But it wasn’t gone. Not for good. Right after we had gotten the tattoos, it reared its ugly head.

Javier was attending a lavish fundraiser held at one of the casinos in Gulfport, ironically the same casino that my father once worked at. That was enough to make me a bit leery of it. Not because I thought I’d be recognized or that he’d be there—my father and mother had been gone for years and I knew they were nowhere near the coast—but I was afraid of the memories being brought up.