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)
Whether I believed in her powers or not, that wasn’t what I’d hoped to hear. I took my hand back to put it in my lap. “Whose death?” I asked, touching the diamond on my finger.
Her rings clinked against the glass ball as she palmed it, but she didn’t bother to look, as if that was just the most convenient place to rest her hands. “You will die for him, your love,” she said.
“I would, yes.”
“No. You will die for him.”
Goose bumps pebbled my skin. I thought of the barrel of Cristiano’s gun pressed to my forehead. “Bang. You’re dead.”
The dark came next. The pitch black, my cries, and the scurrying rodents, the smell and feel of blood that didn’t leave me for weeks. A shadow, the same one that often haunted my dreams, rose in me.
My heart raced. In the warm glow of the red and purple light, I couldn’t tell if the woman looked on with sympathy or delight. Either way, I didn’t like her face just then, or any of this. It was silly. Child’s play. She was wrong to hide behind a costume for a night and play with people’s lives.
“This is stupid,” I said and stood to return to my post at the curtains. I willed my heart rate to slow so I could focus on finding Diego. I spotted him standing in the entrance hall. He looked like he belonged in an old Western in his cowboy getup, yet blended perfectly amongst Mexico’s upper echelon. At the same time, he was utterly out of place. I could give him an escape. I could give him everything.
Was I going to die for him?
I slipped out from the make-believe lair, and like a hawk to a mouse, his eyes set on me. The worry in them eased, replaced with the same longing surely reflected in my eyes. The soothsayer’s dark words lifted, and I saw them for what they were—generic, baseless, fearmongering sentiments, a one-size-fits-all likelihood that more than the majority of this room would encounter death, pain, violence—and riches. That was the point of all of this, anyway.
As if plotting his route to me, Diego rubbed his jaw. He’d be blamed if we were caught together. That didn’t stop my craving to feel his lips on mine. He started toward me, but after only a few steps, my father appeared, slapped him on the back, and pulled him away to introduce him to a couple.
I moved through the crowd, catching and losing Diego’s gaze as people passed between us. He shook the hand of an Elvis impersonator as I ducked by a man in a toga. He kissed Catwoman’s cheek but winked at me. I touched my neck in mock-offense and stopped short of face-planting into a wall of a security guard.
“Perdón,” I said as I went to go around the man.
The guard moved to block me, and in an instant, the energy around me shifted. I tilted my head back until I was looking straight up at a monster of a man and into the face of a ghoulish black-and-white skull. The blackened eye sockets, rimmed in deep red, didn’t hide the menacing way his eyes focused on me. Nor did the drawn-on teeth, shaped in a sinister grin, disguise his frown—or the flawless bone structure beneath his veneer. Raven-black hair had been slicked back, as stark against the chalky face paint as his tie cutting down the center of a pressed white dress shirt.
Standing as still and straight-backed as a mannequin, and looking as polished as one too, he inclined his head toward me. “May I have this dance?”
Natalia
It wasn’t a request.
The stranger costumed as a brooding calavera sugar skull wasn’t asking for a dance. There was more than simple bass and gravel weighing down his words—he spoke the way a lion growled, with a snarl and a gaze as powerful as the muscles rippling under what appeared to be an expensive custom suit.
May I have this dance?
No. Neither my gut nor my brain left any room for argument, but my body drew toward his, as if he were the sun pulling me into its orbit. I forced myself to step back. He wasn’t security; he wasn’t here to protect me, but the opposite. He was the danger my father had warned me of. This was a man who walked into a room and left with what he wanted—revenge, money, women . . .
Me.
No one in the room matched his obvious strength. It would take a bullet to stop him.
He’d asked my permission, and though I declined in a whisper, he put a large hand on my waist anyway, drawing me in, towering over me like a threat.
The dancers gave him a wide berth, staying just outside the span of his long arms—as if he might reach out and snatch one of them. He placed my hand on his solid bicep and engulfed my other with a gentleness that contradicted his hold on my side and the severity of his costume.