Gold Cage

by Francesca Baez

“He tells us to give him all our money, so Max hands over his wallet real quick, but I’m frozen. I can’t move. So Max grabs my purse from me and hands that over too. Then the thug sees my necklace. It was big and shiny, with a huge diamond and a bunch of emeralds. Hard to miss. Max always told me I shouldn’t wear it out so much, but it used to be our mom’s. She never let me play with it when I was a kid, but it reminded me of her, so I loved to wear it once she couldn’t stop me anymore. Anyway, the guy tells me to give him the necklace. I hesitate, not because I’m scared or high, but because I can’t. I can’t let him have this. Max is telling me to just do it, and he tries to help me but the guy tells him not to move, keeping the gun right on him. The guy asks again, but I still can’t do it. So just like that, the guy shoots Max, and grabs the necklace anyway. Then I guess he leaves. It’s all a blur after that.”

  Bang, bang. Maybe the actions on my periphery were a blur but I can still remember the visceral feeling of what happened next as if I was losing Max all over again in this moment. I remember screaming until my throat went raw, holding my brother in my arms as the light left his eyes, pleading for forgiveness as blood pooled around us, soaking through my dress, staining my skin. The memory of the pain that wrenched me apart still twists my gut painfully, even as my body remains perfectly still. I’m outside of myself, stuck in a moment five years ago, stuck in a living nightmare that never ends.

  “I used to think that was the worst thing I ever did,” I go on, voice wavering even in its matter-of-factness. “A dozen therapists have assured me it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t have prevented a random act of violence, but that’s not how it felt. If I hadn’t been at that club, if I hadn’t been a brat all those years, if I had just handed over the damn necklace immediately, Max would be here right now. Max would be here, and you guys wouldn’t.”

  Maybe Vega is right. Maybe I deserve this after all, this torture and suffering. Maybe I deserve to lose all my money, to be stripped of my power and put in my place, on my knees in servitude of people I don’t understand.

  “You used to think that?” Miel asks, and I nod.

  “Before what Vega made me do at the garden party, anyway. Now I know what it truly feels like to be responsible for someone’s death.”

  “What do you mean?” Miel asks, surprising me even as my blood churns in my ears. It never occurred to me that Vega hadn’t told at least Miel about what happened that day. It piques my interest, the fact that he’s been holding onto my secret. Is it to protect me, or another way he gets off on control? I’m sure it’s the latter. Maybe that’s why I’m so quick to tell Miel, because it’s a way to undermine Vega’s power, at least a little.

  “I tried to run away at Isla’s garden party,” I begin. Oddly, I feel centered in my resolve to reveal my darkest shame, and my balance holds as I release the cold words in a steady, calm voice. “Vega caught me, of course. It was so stupid of me to even try. He caught me, and he said someone had to pay. He made me choose, Kate or the guards. So I did. I chose, and I even told Hernando exactly what to do. Now I know for sure that’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

  A beat. “What?”

  “It’s true,” I say, eyes shut, breathing steady, my body feather and stone. “It’s my fault they’re dead.”

  I hear Miel rise and walk toward me, then her voice is in front of me. “Wait. You told Hernando to kill those two men?”

  I nod again. Miel sets her jaw, her face back to its usual hardness. Without another word, she springs up and leaves the room. I rise back up to standing, pulling my hands together at my heart, ignoring the tiny tremor in them. My favorite therapist always told me that telling my truth would make it a little smaller every time, easier to handle. She was wrong. My new secret is still big enough to suffocate me, big enough to push even someone as hardened as Miel away.

  I’m a terrible person. I deserve everything that Vega is doing to me, and worse.

  * * *

  Miel bursts into the study, slamming the door shut behind her. Apparently this is the only way she knows how to enter my presence anymore.

  “Is it true?” she asks, slapping her open hands down on the desk, making the fountain pens rattle in their cup. “You made Selina have her own guards killed?”

  I say nothing, which says it all. Miel’s face falls.

  “Holy shit, Javi. Why did you make her give the order? That’s steps away from having her just pull the trigger herself.”

  “It’s what had to be done,” I say, rising to meet her stance.

  “Is it? Because she’s not like us, Javi. This is really fucking her up, even though she’s pretending to be fine. This could lead her down a road she can’t return from.” Miel throws her hands up only to let them fall again, and I swear her eyes are misted when they meet mine. “God, Javi, this is so fucked up, even for us.”

  This is exactly why I had kept this from Miel, despite her pleas to be let in on every cog of our scheme. She’ll cut a stranger’s dick off to prove a point, but once you worm your way into her heart, even a little, she’s ride or die. Her loyalty is welcome when it’s for me, not so much when it’s for the girl who is supposed to be our pawn.

  I sigh, pushing my shoulders back up. “Miel, you can’t lose sight now. Selina doesn’t matter. Her so-called trauma doesn’t matter. We’ve all had it just as bad, if not worse, and we never got any pity for it. Don’t go getting soft now just because you finally have a girl to hang out with.” Miel’s expression darkens even further, but I hold my hand up to silence her. “We can’t afford to cater to a rich girl’s fragile psyche when it’s the only thing propelling us toward freedom. We aren’t her shrink, Miel, and we’re certainly not her friends. We’re her owners, her masters, and she’s our piggy bank, our blank check. She’s ours to use, not to fix. Don’t get it twisted.”

  “I never thought there was a line left I wouldn’t cross, but I might have just found it,” Miel says, voice low and a little shaky. Her brows bend up, pleading now. “Javi, this doesn’t feel right. You have to know that.”

  I turn my back to her, grabbing the crystal decanter and pouring two whiskeys, using the moment of distraction to take a breath and force any and all emotion out of my head.

  “We’re not the kind of people who get to care about right and wrong,” I remind her, offering her a glass. She doesn’t move to accept, so I set it on the desk in front of her and knock back my own drink in one big gulp. “Leave this alone, Miel. That’s an order.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” Miel admits, a definite tremor in her voice now.

  “Find a way,” I say, lowering myself back to my seat, reminding myself that this big leather chair is power, control. I am power and control. “Or you’re out.”

  “You can’t do that,” Miel says, shaking her head at me with a humorless smile. She knows exactly what out means. “We’re as good as family, Javi.”

  “I’m not a little boy sharing bunk beds anymore, prima,” I say, fixing her in a dark stare. “You have no idea what I’m capable of now.”

  My threat might be a bluff, and it might not be. Honestly, I’m not sure even I know what I’m capable of anymore. The years of desperation and loss have broken me, twisted me, irrevocably ruined me. This is my only shot at escape, at freedom, and I don’t think anything can stop me. Not Selina’s fragile soul, and certainly not Miel’s sudden crisis of conscience. I hope my oldest friend won’t put my will to the test. She needs this as badly as I do.

  She must see it on my face, because hers crumbles. Chest heaving, she grabs the glass of whiskey from the desk and hurls it in my direction with a guttural scream. I fight the urge to flinch as the glass crashes against the wall behind me, shattering and spraying expensive liquor all over the hardwood floor. I’ll have to get Selina to clean up the spill quickly, before it leaves any permanent damage.

  “Fuck you, Vega,” Miel spits, but I know her bitterness ensures her complacency. Her hatred is directed at me, yes, but also at herself
for having to be the kind of person who caves to the wrong we both know we’re committing. She leaves the room just as loudly as she came in, and I can hear her boots stomping down the hall.

  Miel is a liability now. She won’t be spending any more time with Selina, that much is certain. Her skills are better applied in the field anyway.

  I turn my attention back to where it usually resides, on the camera feeds, specifically the one that shows my captive. She’s still on the yoga mat, wasting time she should be spending on her responsibilities, but I let it slide. She’s a master of her own body, stretching those lithe limbs expertly. But there’s a new tremor in her fingers, though her core remains made of steel. Miel is right. Selina’s nerves have been strung tight since that day in the stables, despite her refusal to show weakness. My fingertips mindlessly drum on the desk as I watch her pull back to center, then fold down, hands wrapping around her ankles. I can’t help but remember my own moment of weakness that day. The feel of her body in my hands was intoxicating, and her mouth against mine was devastating. Miel is worried about me breaking Selina, but if I’m not careful, our pretty hostage might be the one to break me.

  * * *

  I don’t see much of Miel after my confession. She never stays behind to babysit me anymore, and she’s dodgy during meals or when we run into each other in the halls. She hates me. I can’t say I blame her, but being on the receiving end of the cold shoulder from a hardened criminal is an exceptionally new low.

  The last days of summer burn hotter without reprieve, even as the calendar races toward fall. I used to dream of living in the Pacific Northwest, where the days are cool and the humidity nonexistent. I thought maybe I’d go to college out there, or marry some poor but handsome fisherman straight out of a fairy tale, and our only currency would be love. But then Mom and Dad died and I couldn’t muster up the will to even think about applying to colleges. When Max died I knew I could never leave Johns Creek. I don’t believe in ghosts or an afterlife, but I swear I feel the pull of my brother’s spirit chaining me to this place. I wonder, if I’d fled Atlanta when I had a chance, would this fate have caught up to me anyway?

  At least Brock and Hernando don’t hate me yet. Now that I know they don’t know my secret, I feel a little looser around this half of my captors. I’ve particularly bonded with Brock, as we quickly developed our own shared rhythm in the kitchen. A few years ago, his blond good-old-boy charm would’ve quickly captured my heart, or at least landed him in my bed. Now his exuberant personality is a welcome reprieve from my miserable life, but hardly attractive. He deserves some flighty young thing with no baggage and a wide-open future. Honestly, I have no idea how he ended up running with these hoodlums. It scares me a little, to remember how cold that pretty face looked when they first burst into my home, guns first. If someone like him can be drawn to the darkness, that means anyone can.

  Even me.

  I shake the persistent downpour of negative thoughts from my mind, bringing myself back into the present. Mindfulness is harder and harder these days, as my inner turmoil threatens to boil over at any moment. I always feel at the edge of myself this time of year. And then it goes away as the leaves turn brown. This year though, I’m not so sure. Things have never been this bad before.

  Let the thoughts roll away like tumbleweeds, I remind myself. My worries are cars on a busy highway, and I’m just watching them pass by. They’re clouds in the sky, and I’m letting them drift. I’ve heard every metaphor, read every book, practiced for ages, but my concentration can still be so easily broken. I guess none of the gurus I’ve studied with over the years ever dealt with captivity and forced servitude, let alone being a breath removed from cold blooded murder.

  “Selina,” Brock says, loud enough to blessedly snap me out of my spiral. “The pot is bubbling over.”

  Sure enough, the water I’m supposed to be watching is dripping down the sides of the saucepan, liquid hissing into steam as it hits the hot eye of the stove. I’m back to not even being able to boil water properly. I grab the lid and give the pot a quick stir, watching the big bubbles simmer down to a more reasonable size.

  “You’re never going to graduate to sauce at this rate,” Brock teases as I fish out a single piece of the short-grain pasta and stab at it with a finger, inhaling sharply and jerking back. Hot. I abandon the idea of checking its doneness and toss it back in the pot with its brothers.

  “It’s just so boring,” I protest, blowing on my pinkened finger. “A watched pot never boils, but an unwatched pot never fails to boil over. What’s a girl to do?”

  “It just takes a little patience,” Brock says, checking his own saucepan, which is simmering pleasantly. “I thought you were the queen of focus, meditation, all that shit.”

  Not these days. Brock scoops a spoonful of sauce up, blowing on it delicately.

  “Okay, so we’ve been over pasta a million times,” I say as my cooking partner tastes the sauce, then holds the wooden spoon out to me. “Chicken, steak, casseroles, all that lame, basic bitch shit. When are we trying some fun stuff, like curry, or falafel, or tacos?”

  Finishing my question, I wrap my lips around the spoon and take a taste. Brock was right, the made-from-scratch sauce totally trumps the canned stuff Kate used to use, no matter how expensive the can. I’m not convinced it’s good enough to warrant the hour of chopping tomatoes and dicing garlic, not to mention the smeared mascara from the onions.

  “Tacos?” Vega repeats, and I turn to see him lurking in the doorway. My breath catches, and I feel a little tingle rush down my spine. Fear, I tell myself. That’s all this sensation is. “I had you pegged for a total coconut, Princesa.”

  It could be my imagination, but I swear Vega’s eyes darken as he watches me lick the sauce off my lips, and Brock seems to jump a full foot away from me when he notices his boss.

  “Ha ha, never heard that one before,” I say humorlessly, rolling my eyes and checking back on my boiling pasta. The truth is, I really hadn’t, not that much. The private school Max and I went to was primarily white, and no one gave a shit what color my skin was when they heard my family name. But a few years before he died, Dad insisted on me and Max playing on a local youth soccer team. Not the one associated with our school, but what he called a real one, one populated with kids that looked like us. Shared brown skin and dark hair wasn’t enough to bond us, though. And it certainly didn’t help that neither of us spoke Spanish. The first decision Max and I made for ourselves in the wake of our parents’ death was to walk away from that soccer team and never look back.

  “You ever had street tacos before?” Vega asks, settling down on one of the island stools. Brock has effectively managed to all but disappear from the kitchen, impossibly focused on salting his sauce. “The kind where they’re sloshing the plates through murky water before they hand over your order, and you can only go at night because you’re afraid to look at the guacamole in the light?”

  “That sounds disgusting,” I say, wrinkling my nose at his grinning face. “Don’t know why I’d ever want that. But my Mom used to make us tacos al pastor all the time, just the way her Mamá made them.”

  I don’t know why I’m trying to prove myself to my tormentor. I don’t give a shit what he thinks about me, and I certainly don’t care if he wants to revoke my latina card. Still, I eye him out from under my lashes as I stir the pasta, trying uselessly to gauge his reaction.

  “That’s sweet,” Vega says, picking up a small paring knife left on the counter and spinning it between his fingers, making the dangerous motion look easy. “But everyone knows rich people can’t cook for shit, and neither your Mom nor your Mamá were less than millionaires for a day in their lives.”

  He’s right about the latter, I have to give him that. Even before my mother’s parents moved to Georgia, their family had been flush with Colombian coffee cash for generations. Maybe some cocaine cash, too, if the rumors are true, but I refuse to believe that.

  “Rich people can’t cook
?” I repeat, choosing to focus on the former part of Vega’s argument. “Tell that to Rachel Ray, Ina Garten, Gordon Ramsey—”

  “We get it, you watch HGTV,” Vega interrupts with an exaggerated eye roll, and even Brock snorts at that. I cut a glare in his direction. I thought we were supposed to be friends. “All I’m saying is, maybe it’s best you stick to pastas and casseroles for now.”

  There’s a fuck you on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it back. I have a favor to ask, after all.

  “Listen, Vega,” I say after a moment of silence, turning my back to the stove. His name feels foreign in my mouth. I’m not sure I’ve ever addressed him directly like this. I glance at Brock quickly, but he’s back to playing invisible. “Um, you probably know this, but coming up this week is kind of an important day. Thursday is the anniversary of Max’s—my brother’s—death. Five years. I always go to his grave, take flowers. Is that… I mean, can I please go?”

  What I really want to say is, surely you won’t keep a poor grieving girl from visiting her dead brother’s grave on the anniversary of his death, but I decide the passive-aggressive route isn’t worth the risk on this one.

  I can feel Brock tense beside me, and watch Vega’s brows twitch up. He’s not surprised by the information. He knows everything about me, after all. No, he’s either surprised that I felt I had to request this basic human right, or that I had the audacity to demand this privilege. I’m hoping it’s the former.

  There’s an endless silence as Vega contemplates me. Surely he’ll say yes. It would take a true monster to deny me this, and there must be at least a shred of humanity left in his ash-black soul.

  “That’s fine,” Vega says at last, and I exhale in relief. “Thursday? I’ll take you.”

  I was hoping for Miel’s company. Even after everything, she’s still the only one of my captors I could truly feel even halfway at peace around. Still, beggars can’t be choosers, and I’ll take what I can get.