by Hart, Callie
Another cop car burned past us, heading in the opposite direction, and I finally twisted to look ahead out of the windshield. Fix didn’t even look at me, but I could sense his thoughts searching, reaching out to me, as if I were inside his head and I were able to read them as if they were my own. He had a thousand questions, I knew, but mostly he wanted to know if I was afraid of him.
Once upon a time, a set of rules had governed him. Ten non-negotiable commandments that provided a set guideline as to how he was supposed to live his life. Since he’d left the church, Fix had broken so many of those commandments. Theft. Adultery. Murder. But lying? Dishonesty wasn’t something Fix undertook lightly. As far as I knew, he’d only lied to me once, and that was a lie of omission. He hadn’t told me he’d been hired to kill me when we’d first met. He had told me he was a paid assassin, however, and he hadn’t pulled any punches with me since then, even when the truth had been a hard thing to hear. So, if he asked me if I was frightened of him right now, putting his fears into words, I was going to have to tell him the truth.
Yes.
I was afraid of him.
I was fucking terrified of him.
But…
I was also in love with him, more than I’d have ever believed possible, and I trusted him with my life. I knew he would die before he ever let anything bad happen to me. The lengths he’d already gone to in order to keep me safe had gone a long way to proving that. The beating he’d taken at The Barrows simply so he could try and find out what the fuck was actually going on had made me sick to my stomach.
Yeah, he’d been pissed, but I knew he hadn’t killed Rabbit out of anger. He hadn’t done it for the sheer fun of it, either. He’d done it out of fear, because of what had almost happened to me, and he wanted to make sure Rabbit could never pose a threat to me again.
Where did that leave me?
There were so many sides to Fix. He was so damn mercurial. One second he could be making a joke out of something that, nine times out of ten, was definitely not funny. The next, he was bending me over a table and fucking me senseless. And the next moment, he was drawing a gun and firing it into the face of a twenty-something-year-old hacker.
I knew what Sadie would be telling me right now if she were here. My friend would tell me to leave, to get the fuck out of dodge before something really awful happened.
She wouldn’t understand, though. This pull that I felt whenever I was around Fix wasn’t something that could be ignored. I would feel it no matter which state I ran to. I could flee to another country altogether and that same tugging in my chest would still be there, calling me to him.
I’d meant it before: when I’d lived under Sixsmith’s rule back in Montmorenci, I’d fabricated this small, limited world for myself. Fear, anxiety and pain had been an ever-present constant within that world, and for a very long time they had been the only things I had felt. Months into the arrangement Sixsmith had made with Sam Halloran, I’d realized that I needed to feel something else or I was going to end up slitting my own wrists. I decided I wasn’t going to feel the fear, or the anxiety or the pain anymore. I was going to blot out the negative by purposefully seeking out and fixating on the positive. Small, brief moments of happiness that I treasured and secreted away inside, so I could close my eyes and draw on them, disappear into them whenever Sam laid his hands on me. Making milkshakes with Amy in the kitchen while our father was at work. The quiet moments after school, where we’d venture out into the back fields to soak our feet in the creek. Stolen minutes in the middle of the night, where I adventured inside the pages of a book, becoming someone else entirely.
I’d only allowed myself to really feel anything inside those moments. I’d carried that practice forward even after I’d escaped out from underneath Sixsmith’s tyranny, and I hadn’t even noticed. For years in Seattle, I’d been numb, only experiencing flashes of emotion whenever something truly unexpected and wonderful happened.
And then something changed.
I hung up a phone in the lobby of a shitty motel in Liberty Fields, Wyoming, and a tall, broad, incredibly sexy, arrogant man had spoken to me. His words had rankled at me from the get-go; he’d provoked such strong emotion in me from the moment our eyes had met, and that had only gotten worse. Or better, depending on how I thought about it.
It was as if I’d been living my life in black and white, and suddenly along came Fix and my world was suddenly painted in startling, vibrant technicolor. I felt the fear I’d become so well-versed at blocking out again with such an intensity that it was almost paralyzing, but I also felt a happiness I hadn’t known before. Wild stirrings in my soul that I’d frankly thought other people were making up before now. Everything was electric, and perilous, and wonderful…
And I wasn’t going to give that up.
Not for Monica, not for the malignant specter that was Carver, and certainly not for the dead man we’d left behind in those crypts.
I made up my mind.
I cast away the image of Rabbit’s ruined face, banishing it from my head. The memory of it was never going to go away, but I would be able to breathe around it now, fucked up though that was. Fix was right; there had to be consequences. The unshakable bond we shared was paramount above anything else. He would go to extraordinary lengths to defend it—defend me—and I would do the same. Other than Amy and Sadie, there wasn’t a person on earth I wouldn’t shoot to save him. No crime was too heinous, if it ensured his safety.
Maybe I was fucking crazy for feeling that way, but Fix hadn’t just gotten under my skin. He was a part of my soul, and I wouldn’t willingly part with that. Swallowing, I reached out and found his hand tightly gripping the stick shift. I rested my palm on the back of his hand, loosening his fingers so I could thread my own between them. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and a rush of adrenalin surged through my veins.
Fix exhaled, a long, ragged blast of air leaving his body, and it was only then that I realized he’d been holding his breath. His shoulders relaxed. His features remained strained, his brows banked together, his mouth still pressed into a flat line, but the light in his eyes had changed. Where he’d looked cold and hollow inside a moment ago, now he looked relieved.
ELEVEN
SERA
We didn’t head back to Brooklyn, after all. Instead, we doubled back on ourselves and headed north. The night grew darker as we left behind the tall buildings and the lights of the city, and the hustle and bustle of New York began to fade to indeterminable stretches of highway that whipped past suburbs and eventually small towns with names like Elmsford, and Sleepy Hollow, and Archville.
I’d never heard of half the places we passed, but still I didn’t ask where we were going. I wasn’t one to bury my head in the sand. When I’d left home with Amy, I’d made sure to enter into unknown situations armed with the facts. Made it easier to know what to expect, how to react, and how to handle whatever came my way. But right now, not knowing seemed better than having to face whatever shit storm was about to land in my lap. I needed a break. I deserved a damn break, even if it was only a temporary one.
We continued to head north.
Soon, the towns we passed grew more and more infrequent and the landscape changed, tall trees looming up on either side of the road like sentinels. Maple. Redwoods. Beech. Oak. Mountain Ash. In autumn, the canopy of the forest we had entered must have put on the most vivid, striking display of color, but now, with little more than the hint of moonlight piercing through the thick cloud cover overhead, everything was painted in black, greys, a deep, depthless shade of royal blue, and shimmering silver.
Monica was so quiet, I swung around to check on her—I didn’t know the girl, but during my brief encounters with her, the last thing she’d ever been was quiet. Her forehead was pressed up against the window, her face relaxed in sleep, the panic and the fear of the night’s events gone from her face. How the fuck was she sleeping?
“She was so wrong to do what she did,” Fix mur
mured. His eyes were practically glowing incandescent, reflecting the blue glow of the sedan’s dashboard. Normally so angular and sharp, his features were much softer than usual. The bruises that marked his jaw and beneath his right eye were darkening to an angry violet, but I barely noticed them. He was tired. So much driving. So much worrying. So much running. It was finally beginning to take its toll on him. I’d begun to think the man was impervious to the body’s need for sleep, but looking at him now I realized I’d been wrong. Fix had his limits, just like the rest of us. Granted, those limits were beyond those of anyone else I knew, but they did exist.
“She’s from Canada,” he said, his voice a soft lull against the rhythmic rumble of the tires on the road. “She was fragile before she even came to America. Her mother was schizophrenic. Dad left when she was a kid. Sometimes things were okay with her mom, but whenever she had an episode or stopped taking her meds, Monica was put into foster care. Spent a lot of time being passed from one home to the next. Her mom killed herself when Monica was fourteen. The care workers couldn’t find her a permanent place to stay at that age, no one would take a teenager with a tricky background who was likely to cause trouble, so she ended up in a church funded facility. The nuns were good to her. Things became a little more consistent. I think she found comfort in the rules and the routine. So when she finished high school, she stayed on. Became a novice. Decided to help out. When they sent her to the States on exchange, it was meant to be a learning experience for her. Supposed to give her confidence. Help her interact with strangers without flipping her shit.”
His chest rose as he took a breath that never seemed to end. “I knew none of that when she came to St. Luke’s to serve. Her file was sitting on the desk in my office. I’d expected her, but that morning I’d been trying to write my homily, and people just kept walking through the fucking door, needing something from me. If I’d taken a moment to flip through her paperwork, I might have chosen to spend some time with her, making her feel comfortable. Safe. As it was, I was listening to the most pointless fucking confession ever when that bastard came into the church and took her. He raped her while I was trying to stem my own boredom in the confessional. He beat her. He broke her body so badly, it didn’t look like she was going to live.”
A cold, unwelcome sweat broke out across the back of my neck. The shit Monica had been through was the stuff of nightmares. I was intimately familiar with the terrors that plagued her when she passed out each night, and that were probably tormenting her even right now. A tendon strained in Fix’s throat as he rubbed his thumbs against the steering wheel. “The shit she pulled with Rabbit was really fucking bad, and I’m fucking furious with her, Sera, believe me. She could have cost both of us everything. But I owe her. I owe her so fucking much. If I’d been a little more diligent in my responsibilities, she never would have been attacked.”
This was hard for him. He spent so much time presenting a grave, stony, impenetrable front, occasionally diverting those around him with a level of sarcasm and dry humor that even I couldn’t match, that this kind of open communication was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. I fucking knew it was hard for him; his uneasiness was carved into the lines of his face and radiated off him like heat from a dying fire. Still, he continued with a dogged determination.
“I lost my faith so gradually that I hadn’t even noticed. People were relying on me at St. Luke’s to help them. I was supposed to be a solid foundation they could lean on in times of need, and I wasn’t. I couldn’t help them in the way they needed me to. I was lying to them. I still wanted to help, though. The path I chose to walk with Monica… it was the only way I knew how to do that. But I should have walked that path alone. I should have refused to let her tangle herself up in this fucking life. I thought it’d give her some kind of peace to know that the evil in the world was being dealt with, one way or the other, but she wasn’t strong enough. She never has been. I should have fucking known that.
“I didn’t just let her down once, Sera. Every day I’ve permitted her to live this kind of life, I’ve been letting her down all over again.” He growled at the back of his throat, an angry frown forming two deep lines between his eyebrows. “I need to forgive her for what happened tonight, because it’s my fucking fault. I don’t expect you to be able to. If I were you, I’d fucking hate her for what she did. So, I get it.”
I hadn’t allowed myself the time to think about Monica’s duplicity. Just as I’d screamed at her back in the crypts, she didn’t fucking know me. She didn’t know the first thing about me. Her actions hadn’t surprised me in the least. If I’d been in her position, left to my own devices, not knowing what was going on, worrying about the safety of someone I cared deeply about…would I have done the same thing? I couldn’t say for sure.
Part of me wanted to say no. I would have listened to Fix. I would have waited. I would have given the unknown woman in the file the benefit of the doubt before doing everything in my power to make sure she wound up dead.
But I was stronger than Monica. Whatever made one person more capable of handling traumatic experiences than another was a mystery to me, but obviously I was better equipped to handle my past than she was. She was as fragile as a butterfly with broken wings, extraordinarily afraid of the huge, terrifying world that surrounded her, with no way of dealing with her own vulnerability.
Well… she had one way of dealing with her vulnerabilities, and that was to lean on Fix. I’d threatened that crutch. I’d essentially taken it away from her, and that must have been petrifying for her.
The thing about anger was this: you could argue and reason with it all you liked, but it was like a drug coursing through your veins. It was almost impossible to relinquish. It made you feel righteous, and it made you feel strong, and at the end of the day there was nothing worse than feeling unjustified and weak instead.
I looked over my shoulder at the girl sleeping on the back seat, and I did my best to bundle up all of the fury and the resentment I felt toward her. When I turned back, I cautiously slid my hand onto Fix’s leg; beneath the material of his jeans, his muscled thigh tensed.
“My father sold me to his friends when I was fifteen. For two years, he let one of his friends use me as he saw fit. Sixsmith was in a lot of debt, and Sam, his friend, agreed to settle that debt by…by fucking me twice a week.” I nearly choked on the words. They were like poison, bitter and terrible tasting on the end of my tongue. “Each time Sam fucked me, eighty-six dollars and seventy-three cents was deducted from the amount Sixsmith owed.”
I risked a sidelong look at Fix. He wasn’t looking at me, though. He was staring ahead out of the car, his jaw locked, his shoulders rigid, his back ramrod straight. His body was taut as a bowstring, drawn to the point of snapping.
“Sam wasn’t kind to me. He wasn’t…gentle.” God, this was so fucking hard to say. Fix hadn’t pushed for the information, not once. He’d made passing comments which had made it clear he knew something had happened to me when I was a kid, but he’d never tried to force the details out of me. His patience and his trust that I would tell him when I felt the time was right had been one of the very first things I’d loved about the man. I would keep my secrets inside me until the end of time if I waited for the right moment to share them with him, though, and I couldn’t keep on holding things back from him anymore. Not now.
“Things would get bad. And then they would get worse…and I did my best to keep myself together. Then, Sixsmith did something really fucking stupid. He hired someone to bet Sam for his business. Sam owned a bar in Montmorenci. Sixsmith tricked him in a game of poker, and he won the bar from him.”
I was shaking as I told the rest of the story. There was a wild animal inside me, trapped in a snare, trying to free itself from the inevitable, wrestling to run and hide itself from reliving that day in Sam’s apartment, when I’d taken hold of that piece of glass and I’d buried it into Sam’s flesh. That wild, scared animal was me. I wasn’t going to give into myself. I was go
ing to grind the words out, and I was going to be rid of them once and for all, because once I’d said them, I knew I wasn’t going to have to clench them so tightly inside my chest anymore.
I parted with every last one of them, not sparing the details, and once it was over…I really did feel free.
“If you can forgive Monica for selling you out, and for selling me out, then I can forgive her, too. It might not be easy, but I’ll do it, because I have a long-lasting relationship with hatred, and it’s eaten me alive for too long. I refuse to be a shelter to it anymore.”
He growled—a sound filled with pain, and regret, and an unquenchable need for violence. I twisted in my chair, digging my fingers into his leg. When he looked at me, his torment was so obvious and painful that it nearly broke me. I knew him well enough to know exactly what he was thinking: he hadn’t been there to protect me when I’d needed him. He hadn’t been able to swoop in and kill Sam for me, to save me the horror of having to protect myself. His self-recrimination was futile, and he must have known that. It didn’t stop him from feeling it all the same, however. It was just the type of person he was.
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me, Felix Marcosa,” I whispered. “And you didn’t know me back then. You can’t be responsible for every single wounded person’s pain. I didn’t tell you any of that to make you feel bad for me. I told you because you deserved to know, and because I…” How did I word what I needed to say? How did I give meaning to the thoughts and emotions that were cutting me to the quick? “Because I want you to know that I’m not like Monica. I walked the road to hell, and I lived there for a time, but I’m not going to be another broken girl you have to take care of. You’re a fixer. But you don’t need to fix me. I mean it, Felix. I already fixed myself a long time ago.”