Inked in Lies: The Fallen Men #5 Page 2
He was too beautiful, too well dressed to be the owner of such a rundown house, to be the one to discharge a gun in his home with his kids outside in the yard.
This was Ignacio’s magic as a criminal.
People don’t expect beauty to be bad.
“Is Lila your daughter?” Diogo asked, completely unfazed by Ignacio.
Diogo was taller, built thick and heavy like he could wrangle a bull.
I thought maybe Ignacio should be the one to look afraid, but, of course, he didn’t.
“She done something?” Ignacio questioned, shooting me a look and a wink.
He wouldn’t mind if he had.
In his own way, he loved me. Called me his abejita, little bee, because I always had pollen dust on my nose.
If Diogo had a serious problem with me, Papá would put a bullet in his head rather than chastise me.
Family meant everything.
“No, but we were concerned when we heard a gunshot,” Diogo said calmly as he crossed his big arms over his chest. “Everything okay in there?”
Ignacio’s face tightened, features sharpening, his smile a slick spill of evil between his cheeks. “You a cop or something?”
“No, but I did call them.”
Ignacio leaned a hip against the doorframe and crossed his bulky forearms over his chest. He appraised Diogo as if he had all the time in the world and not a single care about the police coming.
I was five, but I knew better.
“You some big shot from Vancouver, think you can roll into my town and stick your nose where it don’t belong?” Ignacio mused, coiled and still like a snake before the strike.
I wanted to warn Diogo, but when I went to move closer, Jonathon held me still with a hand on my shoulder. When I looked up at him, he whispered, “You’ve got a scary dad.”
I nodded like duh.
He winked, and on his kind face it was an entirely different expression than on my father’s. “So’s mine.”
“Just a common fisherman,” Diogo replied, and I noticed he had a slight accent, the spice of a foreign land like the kind I’d always wanted to visit. “But even a common man can sense evil when it comes around. Whatever you got going on in there, think about hitting pause while your kids are around, yeah?”
Quick as a lightning strike, amicable Ignacio was gone, and the drug lord was in his place. He lurched off the doorframe before Diogo could blink and was in his face, a knife suddenly pressed to his throat.
When he spoke, spittle flew into the taller man’s beard, trapped like bugs in a web.
“Let’s get one thing straight before you and your Brady bunch get any ideas. This is my house. My territory. You want friendly neighbors, I suggest getting another postal code. And, blanquito? Next time you think to fuck with me or mine, remember that I know where you live, and I gotta helluva lot more friends in this town than you.” Abruptly, he stepped away from the Diogo with a wide, almost manic grin. He backed up into the doorframe, whistled at me with a jerk of his head to join him, then addressed the family gathered on our lawn as I made my way to him. “Welcome to the neighborhood, amigos.”
He laughed as he turned on his heel and disappeared into the dark, dank interior of our home.
I hesitated.
Truthfully, I thought the Booth family was foolish.
Even I knew you didn’t just move into a new, seedy neighborhood and insert yourself into someone’s conflict. If Ignacio had taught me anything, it was to mind your own business because no one else was going to mind it properly for you.
I couldn’t understand why they’d come over to check on me, and it was mostly curiosity that made me stick my head back out the front door before I closed it.
Jonathon and Molly had joined Diogo on our cracked concrete path. Across the street, the three other boys waited patiently in the front yard playing a game together.
They were so fascinating. I felt their strange, new beauty like an ache in my chest, an echo in a hollow place that I didn’t know back then should have been full.
Full with love and support and laughter.
Instead, I watched with empty eyes as Molly lifted a hand to me as if she wanted to reach out and touch me.
“Be safe,” she whispered, unshed tears thick in her voice.
“You come get me if you need me,” Jonathon said, voice strong, brow angled fiercely over those velvet brown eyes.
It seemed like something a father would say, yet he was only a boy.
“You need anything, you know where we live,” Diogo echoed.
“I’m good,” I lied easily, because I’d been lying all my life, and it was all I knew, sunk so deeply in my DNA it felt part of my very flesh. “I’m with my family. We’re all good here.”
And then I closed the door.
Dammit.
I could still remember just how much it hurt to do that, to close the door on the first people to give me a taste of hope.
It was still sweet in my mouth as I turned the two locks and slid the deadbolt home.
But it turned to ash when I moved down the dark hall, listening to Dane whisper furiously at Ignacio.
“I can’t believe you. I seriously cannot believe you would do this right now. With Lila in the front fucking yard!”
“She’s not a kid anymore,” Ignacio argued with a shrug. “She should know the family business.”
“She’s fucking five,” Dane argued.
This was true, but even at five, I knew there was some truth to what Ignacio said.
I didn’t feel very much like a kid.
And whatever childish inclinations I might have secretly harboured in the deepest hollows of my soul died a swift death by decapitation when I rounded the corner to the living room and saw exactly what had happened to the gunshot.
It had pierced a man right through the center of his chest.
Ignacio flipped his Zippo open to light his cigarette then regarded me curiously over a plume of smoke. “Just a dead body, abejita, nothing to cry about, okay?”
I nodded woodenly. I didn’t want to cry, but the fact that I didn’t made my stomach curdle like bad milk. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen blood, but this was different.
Or at least, it should have been.
Instead, I stood there as silent and dead inside as the body Dane was tidying on the ground.
He stopped mopping up the blood on the hardwood and leaned back on his haunches to regard me. “Go to our room and stay there, okay, Li?”
“No, no, she’s here. She might as well learn the facts of life and death.” Ignacio laughed lightly and moved forward to clasp my shoulder warmly. “This is the family business, Lila, and just like our family, no one fucks with our business. You get me?”
My tongue was buried in the ashes of my combusted hope, so I nodded, mutely, dumbly.
He didn’t like my lack of passion.
Ignacio sighed heavily, smoke swirling into my hair as he bent to one knee to look me in the eye.
He regarded me then, like a scientist with a microscope.
“You listen to me good here, Lila. Family is everything. You earn, you fight, you die for family. This man here? He died for our family because he threatened our family. Tienes que defender tu honor. Y a tu familia. It’s as simple as that.”
You defend your honour. And your family.
Ignacio lived and died by that mandate.
He paused then moved so quickly I flinched when he jerked the gun from the back of his waistband. Grabbing my hands, he fitted them to the gun, his meaty hands clasped on top so that I could bear the awful, awkward weight.
“You feel this? This is the weight of a life. I took it with one squeeze of the trigger.”
“Ignacio,” Dane argued, standing up and lunging toward us. “Don’t put a gun in her hands. Fuck. What is wrong with you?”
Ignacio moved our hands easily, swiveling the gun so it pointed at my brother. My arms locke
d, breath a wheezing pant as I tried to pull away from the gun, from my papá and his evil intent.
Ignacio raised a brow at Dane, making a silent point I didn’t understand, but my brother seemed to get it because his lips thinned, and he held up his hands in surrender.
Satisfied, Ignacio turned back to me and smiled softly, his expression tender against the hard sight of the gun held between us. “You’re a sweet girl, abejita, but you must grow strong. You cannot be soft if you want to survive, si?”
“Si, Papá,” I murmured, but my voice was a single thread pulled from a complicated tapestry of emotion clogging up my chest.
I was scared of the gun and angry with my father for putting it in my hands as if it was a disease that would seep through my skin and infect me for life.
I was horrified that I’d leveled a weapon at Dane for even a second, even forced to do it as I had been. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt like crying.
The tears lodged in my throat and made my eyes hot and glazed over like fired pottery.
Ignacio smiled as he dropped the gun from my grasp, easily taking it in one hand and tucking it back into his pants. I swallowed thickly when he took my face in his rough hands and brought me close to kiss my forehead.
“You are my sweet girl, but don’t worry, I will see you strong before you are grown,” he promised.
I wasn’t sure why, not at the time, why that sounded so much like a curse.
The only thing I understood with absolutely clarity as I helped my father and brother roll the body up in an old sheet was that I didn’t want to be there doing that. I didn’t want to be wiping blood up with a white towel, watching it turn thick with blood and red as paint. I didn’t want to watch Dane’s jaw clench and his eyes smolder as he glared at our father the entire time we helped him out.
I didn’t want to be there when the police came, suspicious but resigned because they didn’t have a warrant and couldn’t enter our home without one. They questioned Ignacio who lied and Dane who lied, and even me, little Lila with the flowers in her hair who Officer Hutchinson often gave candies to whenever he was called out to check us out (which was often) lied too.
As I said, lying was second nature to me by then, even at five.
There is a saying my mother taught me.
El que con lobos anda, a aullar se enseña.
He who runs with wolves learns to howl.
You are the company you keep.
I had been born to liars, raised by liars.
It never occurred to me to tell the policemen the truth. I wasn’t hardwired that way.
All I knew after that day was that I didn’t want to be there anymore.
In a house with a father who scared me even though he loved me.
In a house with a mother who tried to be gone as often as she could to avoid the monster of Ignacio under all our beds.
I didn’t want to be there.
And my yearning heart had finally found a beautiful flower to land on.
If you had asked me the next morning what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you with absolutely certainty, excitement in my eyes and resolve in my voice…
“I want to be a Booth.”
LILA
From that day on, I was with the Booths more often than not.
For Dane and I, the Booth family was a godsend. Jonathon and Dane were the same age. Milo was four years older than me, Oliver two, and Hudson one year younger.
We fit.
More than that, Diogo and Molly Booth were more than happy to make us fit. It was clear they were not the kind of people that could live across the street from neglected children and do nothing.
So almost every night, we joined them at their massive, hand carved oak table for dinner. Diogo was a fisherman, a good one, so we had seafood nearly every night from the leftovers brought in on his commercial boat. He liked to cook dishes from his native Portugal, rich stews that used the entire fish carcass and rustic bread he made using his big, rough hands. Molly was good at sewing, a necessity with four overactive boys, and she took to making me clothes too. She even forced Dane and I to shower more than our usual once a week.
It took me three days to love Molly.
Maybe three weeks to love Milo, Oliver, and Hudson.
A few months to love the quiet, somewhat rough and blunt Diogo.
And, of course, my little heart had loved Jonathon from the moment I saw him wearing the sunlight like a crown on his pretty head the day they moved in.
I’d never before in my life felt so cared for.
I knew my mother loved us, because she tried as well as she could to show us in little ways that she cared, even if she avoided the house as often as she could. She worked long hours at the diner off the Sea to Sky highway outside town, and the rest she spent at the bar. She drank too much, but the scent of it was sweet in my nose when she returned home late at night and checked on me in bed. She liked wine and sweet coolers that smelled of peaches and pears. I didn’t care that she drank because she was a nice drunk, even affectionate sometimes.
Ignacio loved Dane, and looking back, it was obvious he would have taken a bullet for his son, but he had a poor way of showing it. He was grooming Dane more than raising him. Preparing him to ‘be a man’ the only way he knew how. Being a man meant being ruthless, being loyal enough to kill or die for your brethren. It didn’t mean hugs or praise or shared mealtimes.
He was raising Dane to be a man, but he straight up loved me. I looked like him, for one. Even though I was an ugly child, there was the promise of his carved features in my plump, childish face, the lingering sense despite my mismatched features that they would somehow rearrange themselves as I grew into something appealing.
At least, that was what Ignacio told me. He cared about beauty because it was one of his most effective tools, and I could tell he was excited to see how I might make use of it when I came into my own.
He liked to keep me close, tucked under his arm, perched on his knee, a mini-me doll to draw compliments from his business associates. He liked to play the good papá, the family man drug dealer who was just trying to provide for his family. And he was, trying to provide for me, at least, his abejita, but barely for the son he viewed as a soldier and certainly not for the wife he didn’t love.
Outside our parents, before the Booths, we had no one.
Ignacio’s family was still in the Yucatan and Mamá’s family were originally from Puerto Rico, but her immigrant parents had died years ago.
So Dane and I had each other.
We were more than siblings. More than best friends.
Dane was everything to me, and even though I was only five, I tried to take care of him as much as he took care of me.
It was nice when Molly and Diogo stepped up to help us, though. If anything, it made Dane and I closer because we were happier.
Laughter became a daily occurrence in our lives, and I discovered for the first time that Dane had a belly laugh, deep and low like water rucked up from an old well.
I loved it, and I loved the people that gave that to us.
I should have known that it wouldn’t last long.
Nothing good ever did for the Davalos family.
* * *
* * *
I was six years old when my mother died.
Memory is a funny thing because I couldn’t remember her ever being much of a mother before her death, but as soon as she was killed, I could suddenly recall half a dozen ways she’d been good to me.
The way she worked oil through my thick brown hair then plaited it into braids that made me feel almost cute.
The way she collected cans and jars for me to use as vases for the many flowers I picked in the spring and summer.
The way she made maduros that tasted sweeter than candy, and how she let us eat them straight out of the hot pan, still dripping with oil.
How one time she had crawled into bed with me and Dane after a really bad fight with
Papá and held us all night, singing sweetly and telling us stories of her own life when she was a girl.
I hadn’t known much about Ellie Davalos except that she was gorgeous like no one I’d ever seen before. Exotic and curvy and so unique I could pick her out of a crowd just catching sight of her almond eyes or big curls.
I hadn’t known much about my mother, but I remembered every single thing about the night she was murdered.
Because I was there.
I saw who did it.
And then, when she fell to the ground in her sullied yellow summer dress stained with blood, I was the one to catch her.
But first, I woke up to yelling.
Any child in an angry home has their own barometer for domestic disputes.
A low, thudding bassline of shouts meant I should try to go back to sleep.
The shrill wail of my mother passionately defending herself meant I should try to stop Dane from getting involved because one or the both of my parents might turn their anger on him.
My mother was known to hit as well, pretty yet mean as a rattlesnake when she went up against Ignacio.
That night the house filled with static, the air buzzing, thick and hot with summer heat and deep, vibrating anger.
“You’re a filthy cunt, you know that, Ellie?” Ignacio demanded coldly. “Only a fuckin’ bitch would sleep with a man for money.”
“It wasn’t for money,” she shrieked. “It was for one ounce of affection! When was the last time you touched me?”
“When was the last time you deserved it, hmm? When was the last time you made dinner for the family? The last time you played with Lila or even asked Dane how he’s been doing?”
I could hear them as clear as if they were in my cramped bedroom at the back of the bungalow with me, and no amount of layering my pillow, blanket, and stuffed rabbit over my head would muffle their fury.
“You sleep around like a goddamn whore,” Ignacio fumed. “And what do I do? I fucking let you because hey, I don’t wanna touch that snatch, and it keeps you away from the house, away from our kids, so I’m fine with it. What I am not fine with, puta, is you selling information about my fucking business.”