The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (56)

She wondered if that was what her grandmother had felt during her trek from Guayaquil to Four Rivers. If fear was the key to every decision her grandmother had ever made. Why else put her children on a path that could lead to their deaths? Why keep them locked in a house they’d rebel from?

Marimar wasn’t Orquídea, but she didn’t have to be. The Montoyas were now hers to protect and it started with the house. She remembered that sensation she’d only truly felt once. That night with Christian Sandoval, when her flower bud had nearly opened. It had reacted to the perceived threat, even for a moment.

Her muscles still ached from digging the graves, and her heart hurt worse from the things she couldn’t change. She pressed her palm against the front of the door. She’d painted it a deep teal, the color of peacock feathers. She’d bloodied her knuckles sanding the wood beneath. She felt the heat at the core of her palm, and when she withdrew her hand back, there it was. A gold laurel leaf etched into the grain.



* * *



Marimar knew what they had to do, even if it would be difficult. The wind howled as she stepped back in and shut the door behind her. In the sitting room, she looked up at Orquídea Divina Montoya, watching them from the half of the painting that had survived the fire. That little girl had grown up. She’d had five husbands and nine children. Even when they thought her heartless and cold, she had given them these gifts. Marimar touched the closed flower bud at her throat. The thorn it grew to fight back against her. There was only one place they could go to learn their grandmother’s secrets.





Part III

THE HUNT FOR THE LIVING STAR





17

THE LONDO?O SPECTACULAR SPECTACULAR FEATURING WOLF GIRL, ORQUíDEA DIVINA, AND THE LIVING STAR!




Bolívar Londo?o III wanted Orquídea Montoya more than anything. But he would take his time. First, he needed to see if she was cut out for this life. The travel made the body weary. His own mother hadn’t been suited for it. His father, Bolívar Londo?o II had turned a backwater country magician act into something spectacular. The first Londo?o Spectacular had been nothing but a con because the very first Bolívar Londo?o had been a conman.

Born to a Galician mother and a mestizo father from Cartagena, that first Bolívar was orphaned after a fever swept through their town one particularly nasty rainy season. His father’s estranged brother had taken charge of the finances after the funeral, abandoned Bolívar in a dingy little tavern called San Erasmo, then he boarded a ship to Santo Domingo and never looked back.

Bolívar had nothing but the clothes he was wearing as his uncle had taken everything including their last names. Celia Londo?o, the barmaid who found him searching for food in the alley, took him home. Gave him her name, because she’d never had a partner or children of her own. She raised Bolívar in the tavern, and when he got old enough, he was put to work scrubbing the floors and keeping the liquor bottles stocked. He had a knack for fighting and for card tricks, but soon enough the card tricks would have a knack for him.

After Celia died, he stopped working at San Erasmo and made his fortune cheating at cards. The older he got, and the more money he earned, the more he spent on women, liquor, and gambling. When he lost it all, because he always lost it all, he’d go back and make more. Bolívar would have been devastatingly handsome if he bathed, but there was still something about him. Reckless, easy to provoke into defending his honor, if he’d actually had any. The women who had the misfortune of loving him said there was something of Satan himself in that smile, the jeweled blue of his eyes. He was always half sober, and migrating across the city, coming hard and fast and ruinous as a hurricane.

Bolívar Londo?o never married but fathered a boy, whom he trained in the art of cards. One night, after cheating a merchant out of a small fortune, and even later that night taking the merchant’s wife to bed, Bolívar had a price on his head. A two-wagon traveling variety act called The Spectacular rolled through town the next day, and Bolívar and his boy left Cartagena with them as a father-and-son act who were so clever, so deft at sleight of hand, they were often accused of witchcraft. What the audiences didn’t see was that Bolívar II was so practiced because if he wasn’t, if he fumbled, the father would beat his son within an inch of his life. After the beatings, he’d have to go back out and perform.

Bolívar, the first one, could have been great. He had the seeds of potential, but there truly was something about him. Not the devilish grin. Not the misfortune or loss. There were some kind of men who could turn a gift into ruin if they weren’t careful, and that was Bolívar. When the Spectacular returned to Cartagena years later, the city remembered Bolívar’s crimes because, even when men don’t remember, the earth does. He was found dead exactly where he was left orphaned all those years ago, only this time there was a dagger in his back. His son, who hadn’t shed a tear, not a single one, for his father, left with the Spectacular, only to inherit it and rename it the Londo?o Spectacular.

Bolívar II was just as handsome as his father. But where his father had cared only about his own needs, Bolívar II care too much about everyone else’s. He gave too much. Too much of his profit. Too much of himself. A happy drunk. Funny. Gullible. Soft. The Londo?o Spectacular was his gift to the towns and cities they traveled to, and he would have rather earned the smile on a child’s face than a dime. But all would change with his son.