The charity was one of those where Christina didn't see how it could ever turn a profit. There was a small army of waiters, all of whom looked like they doubled as models and all of them dressed to the nines. The food was a feast of plenty, the wine flowed like waterfalls, and the live band Christina thought had some music videos under their belt.
And, of course, all the guests seemed to have spent vastly more on jewelry, high fashion, and plastic surgery than they would ever donate.
She knew it was her dissatisfaction with Angel writ large, but she found herself gravitating out to the balcony, watching the setting sun instead of hiding from the chill it brought with it. It suddenly struck her that, after years of struggle and strain to get where she was, now here she was: surrendering the high society she had aspired to without a fight.
Christina turned around, to at least look at the festivities, and saw Emma like she was under a spotlight. Her frock didn't look any less like negligee with a bolero jacket on top of it, but no one seemed to care. Or rather, they cared, but they didn't disapprove.
Men and women, they fawned over Emma like moths around a naked light. Her limbs were tawny, her ass was small and tight, and her expression was darling—a fresh-faced smile that you could just tell everyone would love to have turned on them.
Angel was at her side, guiding her around by the arm as he made his rounds. Introducing her to all the palms he greased and all the sycophants who kissed his ring. A spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Emma was the velvet glove and Angel, the iron fist.
"I can't believe he's going to replace you,
mami,
" a familiar voice said, so American it was practically Anglo despite the perfect Spanish pronunciation. "It's like seeing someone throw out a steak hot off the grill. Even if you're not hungry... you're never
that
not hungry."
Julio Torres was Angel's son from his first marriage. His white mother had given him fairer skin than his father, almost a pallor, but perversely he looked darker, with eyes such a deep shade of brown that the light seemed to glint off them and hair that seemed like black ink spilling from some diseased font in his jagged skull. A full beard and Roman nose furthered the matter.
At six foot seven, he had a tendency to look down his large nose at others, bringing his wide nostrils to bare on them like the twin muzzles of a double-barrel shotgun. His ears were pierced with shiny studs that reminded Christina of the sights on a gun. And when he spoke, it was always unexpectedly, his mouth breaking open like a sundering iceberg to deliver a whipcrack of a first word.
Facing him was like being held at gunpoint—all the silver finish of a gun and the dead of night blackness at the bottom of a gunbarrel. When he opened his mouth, she never seemed to see a tongue or palate, only black between the paired constellations of his shining teeth.
"Your father isn't replacing me," she told him. "And even if he was, I wouldn't get passed down to you like some old car."
"
