“There’s always room for improvement,” he said.
He went up to the building’s entrance and I was impressed to see it had a buzzer system. His finger trailed along the buttons until they paused at #301 Bernal. His shoulders rose and fell as if he were steadying himself before he held down the button. I knew, back in the day anyway, that Javier was fond of his sisters and had taken it upon himself to take care of them financially after his parents had been murdered by a rival cartel, the same cartel that Travis was now a part of, the same cartel that Javier suddenly had his sights on. Or maybe it wasn’t so sudden after all.
We waited for a few anxious moments, the ringing repeating until we heard a faint yet demanding “Hola?” over the intercom.
He shook his head and looked at us. “She shouldn’t even be answering this right now.” Then he faced back to the intercom and said, “Violetta, es Javier.” There was a longer pause and he added, “Tu hermano.”
“Javier?” she asked. “Que …?”
He quickly asked her to let him upstairs and after a few more heavy pauses the door buzzed open. He grabbed it and swung it open for us and marched inside the cool building, his dusty yet sharp shoes echoing on the tile floor, nodding quickly at the concierge who only briefly looked up from his newspaper, not even batting his eye at Camden’s blood-stained shirt. We walked past the elevator and went for the stairs, running up the flights until we got to the third floor.
We walked swiftly and quietly down the hall, stopping in front of #301.
Javier knocked quickly and took a step back from the door as it promptly swung open.
We were greeted by a large gun aimed at his head.
CHAPTER THREE
I automatically threw up my hands, though Javier barely even flinched. A slender young woman stood on the other side of the door, a large Beretta in her hands aimed right at him. Her eyes hadn’t even left his face to take me and Camden in, but one look at those golden green eyes of hers and it wasn’t hard to see she was related to Javier.
“Violetta,” Javier said calmly. He rattled off a question to her in Spanish with that smooth voice of his. Her gun never wavered, if anything her eyes narrowed even more. Finally she looked over his shoulder and spotted me and Camden. She frowned, lowered the gun and then jerked her head to follow her into the apartment.
Camden and I eyed each other nervously. I don’t know what I was expecting but I certainly wasn’t expecting this, particularly from someone that had to be in their late teens, early twenties. Then again, I guess I was handling guns at a young age too.
We walked into her apartment and Camden slowly closed the door behind us. It was quite large considering how much space seemed to be an issue in this city, with a terracotta-tiled floor, blue and white porcelain accents in the kitchen and large windows that looked out onto the sea of roofs. There was a room off to the side and I caught the sight of a rumpled bed and a large balcony beyond that. There were hair appliances and makeup and clothes strewn all over the place, cementing the fact that Violetta may have had a gun in her hands, but she was still a young girl.
She spun around in the middle of the room and suddenly slapped Javier clear across his face. I couldn’t help but suck in my breath, afraid of what Javier might do. But he merely took it as she started to rant at him in rapid-fire Spanish, throwing up her hands and launching what must have been a million obscenities.
Violetta really was a very beautiful woman, slim-limbed and around my height, 5′6″, with thick and long golden highlighted hair, dark olive skin and full lips, slightly slanted yellow-green eyes. She was wearing a summery dress that was cut short and had applied her makeup with a heavy hand.
When she was finally done, Javier retorted with a sentence or two, still succinct in his own language, and it wasn’t until I picked up on the words Eden White, that Violetta looked toward me.
She frowned and pointed my way, looking askance at Javier. “Eden?”
“Ellie,” he corrected her with a grim smile. “Her real name is Ellie. And she doesn’t speak Spanish, not that much, anyway.”
She stepped slowly toward me, her flip flops smacking against the tiles, and though I was very conscious of the gun in her hands, I stood my ground and looked her in the eye.
She smiled, playful and deceptive all at once. “So you are the famous Eden. You’re the one who broke my brother’s heart all those years ago.”
It took everything I had to keep from rolling my eyes. Of course I had been painted the villain. Of course Javier never bothered to fill his sister in on the fact that he was cheating on me with a woman he’d later end up beheading.
“I guess it depends on what side you hear,” I answered.
She smirked and took another step forward. I caught a whiff of her perfume, freesia and linen. Fresh. Out of place in this smog-filled super city.
“You know, for the longest time I swore I’d kill you if I ever saw you,” she said slowly, her accent barely audible. “I wanted to make you suffer for the pain you caused my brother. But, now I’m older. And I see how Javi is. The only thing I want to do is shake your hand.”
She put hers out for me to shake and I did so, surprised at the strength of her grip. She smiled and jerked it up and down. “I’m Violetta Bernal.”
“Ellie Watt,” I said, returning her smile. I nodded over my shoulder at Camden who was still by the door. “That’s Camden McQueen.”
Violetta looked at him, her eyes widening appreciatively. “Hello, Camden McQueen.” Then they went over to his shoulder. “What happened to your arm?”
“Got shot by the policia,” he said with a grin and I felt a weird prickle surge through me. He sounded almost as if he was flirting with her. I couldn’t help but look over at Javier to see what he felt about all of this. He was watching the three of us carefully; his brow was furrowed and he was slowly running the back of his hand underneath the scruff of his jaw, calculating something.
“Let me get you something,” she said brightly and took off to her room. Through the doorway I could see a flurry of clothes being tossed across the room and within seconds she’d come back out with a large plain black tee-shirt. She placed it in his hands.
“Here,” she said. “Some guy left it here. I won’t be calling him again anyway, so it’s yours.”
“Thank you,” he said genuinely, flashing her his drop-dead gorgeous dimples. Damn, and I thought those were reserved especially for me. “Do you have a washroom I can change in? Banos?”