Page 75 of No Darker Temptation

“Dee—”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not. What’s wrong?”

It feels wrong to vent to Diego about my relationship with his brother and subconsciously, I know I’m crossing a boundary I shouldn’t. Diego has always been my closest friend here and Lettie more like a baby sister. Karina won’t answer the phone and it isn’t like I have anyone else in my life I can unburden myself with.

Somehow, there are still tears left in me because I feel them roll down my cheeks in quick succession, heating my skin and gathering at my chin. For every one I wipe away, three more take its place.

“I don’t think I can do this, Diego. I thought I could but…it’s too much.” I cry quietly. “He has no idea how alone I feel. How isolating it is to live here. I don’t have my own friends or my own family and if I did, I couldn’t tell them the truth. All these horrible things keep happening and I have no one to help me navigate this. Because the truth is, he fucking terrifies me.”

The confession liberates me of a secret I’ve been carrying with me for weeks. Diego can’t seem to string together a word in response but what is there to say?

“And it has nothing to do with a lack of love. I need you to know that. I love him. I love your brother,” I say desperately, trying to defend myself even though he’s raised no accusation against me. It’s my own guilt gnawing away at my conscience. “But I used to be a normal girl. Sometimes all I want is for things to go back to the way they used to be…”

I struggle to catch my breath but all of it comes out at once. My shoulders tremble as uncontrolled sobs rock through me. Whatever grasp I had on my self-control, my inner filter, comes undone in seconds.

“I don’t know what to do. I’m at war with myself trying to rationalize all the things happening around me, but I can’t. There’s no rhyme or reason. I’m surrounded by people who do terrible things every day. And I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings because I love you and Lettie too, but it’s true. Alejandro told me what it would be like and I was the naïve idiot who thought it wouldn’t be as hard as it is.

“I can’t leave him,” I say. “Because even if he did let me go, which I doubt he would without a fight, it would kill me, Diego. I would never, ever recover. So where does that leave me? With an ever-growing list of crimes on my conscience I will never be able to free myself from. What happens when we get married one day? When we have children?”

I can’t speak anymore. My throat tightens and the passageway nearly closes.

After a while, Diego finally speaks. “Love is so cruel. Isn’t it?”

I drag my sleeves across my wet cheeks to dry the tears there.

“Did my brother ever tell you about my birth mother?”

The tears subside on their own and I lift my head to meet his gaze. There’s no concealing how his question has shocked me. “No…never.”

“But you know we’re half-siblings?”

For some reason, I’m ashamed to know this. It feels like something I shouldn’t. “He said it was your story to tell.”

He sucks his teeth. “Well, much like my hot-headed brother, dear old Dad had a temper like Hell. Which is why when Mom found out the family business was, in fact, a family business, he did what any reckless, prideful, man does after his wife leaves them. He went to go find someone else.”

This is the most I’ve ever heard about Lisandro and Gloriana. Alejandro so rarely speaks of them and the topic is sensitive so I never ask.

“Mom and Dad are college sweethearts. Disgustingly in love from the moment they lay eyes on each other. Ten years later they’re married with a baby and living in Mexico for a little while to help my aunt get the new tequila business off the ground. At the time, she’s teaching at a bilingual school in the local pueblo because there’s a nursery and she can take Alex with her, who was only about a year and a half. One day she comes home early. Hears screaming from somewhere on the estate. She locks Alejandro in a closet because she’s alone and the landline isn’t working and then goes to look for Dad.

“She finds him in the capilla—a private chapel on the grounds—and witnesses the swift execution of four men she didn’t know but whose faces she’d remember for the rest of her life.” The quiet that follows is unsettling. “I imagine she felt much like you did…every time you walked in on something you shouldn’t have but wasn’t your fault to begin with.”

Jean Beauchamp, I think. And Rico Salcedo.

I still remember their names.

“Mom took Alex and left. Bolted out the house with nothing but her purse and Alex on her hip. She drove sixteen hours straight from where they were in Jalisco to Texas. I’ll never forget when she told us the story for the first time…I don’t think I’d have believed her if Dad hadn’t been in the room with us, silent and ashamed, as she recounted one of the most traumatic experiences in her life.”

“What happened after?”

“Mom and Alex disappeared for months and Dad couldn’t find them until he received divorce papers from New York. He flew up there, begged on his hands and knees to be taken back, and when she sent him to Hell, that’s exactly where he ended up. Literally. My biological mother worked at a brothel called El Infierno.”

“Oh…”

“Dad made the mistake of thinking our mother loved him more than she loved herself. And as was often the case during arguments between our parents, Dad realized how wrong he was and went back with his tail between his legs. Severe begging was part of his second apology tour but so was telling her the truth. Because the last time he tried to get her back he did it by attempting to sell a bullshit story about trespassers on the property and how the execution was somehow justified.”

Diego’s eyes glow iridescent blue in the darkness, haunted by sins that are not his to carry. “She never held it against me, you know. If not for the fact that my biological mother got sick when I was a teen and begged to see me in the hospital, I don’t think Mom and Dad would’ve ever told me. I never felt a difference in their love. Mom especially. On the contrary, I felt she always loved me a little more because of it. So that if one day, I ever did find out, the revelation wouldn’t be so traumatic.”