Pretty Fierce

by Kieran Scott

  “That’s what it’s like there,” Marco said. “The country of missing children. Kids get recruited by the cartels or they flee to the United States or they end up…”

  “Dead,” Kaia finished. The word hit the table like a ten-pound sack of flour.

  “What happened next, mija?” Marco asked gently.

  “Two men walked in. One was Scarface, the guy we saw at the rest stop,” she said, her gaze flicking to me. “He was following us back in South Carolina,” she told Marco.

  “Describe him,” Marco prompted.

  “Tall, kind of skinny, but strong-looking. He has this horrible scar like this.” Kaia drew a line with her finger from her ear to her jaw. Marco’s expression hardened. He clearly knew the guy.

  “And the other?”

  “Very handsome. I remember thinking that even though I was terrified of him. It seemed wrong that someone that good-looking could be so evil. But you could see it in his eyes.” Kaia took in a shaky breath. “He crouched in front of Mom and me, but he didn’t even look at me. And then he said the weirdest thing.”

  “What?” Marco asked. “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘It’s been a long time, Marissa.’”

  Marco whispered something in Spanish I didn’t understand.

  “Marissa, like the—?” I stopped when Kaia narrowed her eyes at me.

  “Why would he call her Marissa?” Kaia asked Marco.

  Marco pushed back his chair and walked to the back door, staring at his reflection in the glass.

  “What’s going on, Marco?” Kaia demanded. “Why would that man call Mom Marissa?”

  “What happened next?” Marco demanded, turning back to us. “Did he hurt her? Did he take her?”

  “I…I don’t know,” Kaia said, getting up as well. “The man with the scar reached for me, and my mother screamed. That’s all I remember. He must have smashed my head against the wall because when I came to I had this throbbing lump on the back of my skull, and everyone was gone. My mother, the men. All that was left of her was this.”

  She tugged on her locket, and Marco’s expression softened.

  How could she have kept this from me? How had she been dealing with it alone all this time?

  I’d never forget watching my mom slowly slip away, the day my mom left my life. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for Kaia, it happening so unexpectedly. So violently.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Marco,” Kaia said. “Do you know these men? Why did they call her Marissa? Was that my mother’s real name?”

  Suddenly, a shrill beeping sounded upstairs. I startled, thinking it was an alarm—that someone else had tracked us down.

  “That’s the GPS,” Kaia reassured me. “It located my mom’s phone.”

  We both started for the stairs, but Marco didn’t move.

  “You don’t need the GPS,” he said. “I know exactly where your mother is.”

  chapter 22

  KAIA

  “My mother is a member of a Mexican drug cartel?”

  I couldn’t believe those words had come out of my mouth, let alone that they might be true.

  “No. Your mother hated everything the cartel represented, including our father, who ran the whole damn thing.”

  I had no idea how to process this information. My mother had never talked about her past, except for a few stories here and there. Like the time she’d found a baby lamb that had wandered into the garden outside her bedroom and her mother had let her keep it. Or when Marco had almost drowned in the ocean when he was seven, but a Brazilian movie star had saved him and then given him a kiss. They were always sweet, honey-colored stories that left me feeling as if she’d had a blessed childhood, until her parents had died and she and Marco had come to America.

  Which was what she’d always told me had happened.

  “So your father…my grandfather…is…?”

  “Vincent Quintero Mallorca, the head of the Black Death cartel.”

  “And he’s alive,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And my mother’s real name is Marissa?” I asked.

  “No, it’s Marisol,” Marco said. “But her husband Hector always called her Marissa because that is what our mother called her.”

  I held on to the back of the nearest chair to keep from blacking out. “Her husband?”

  “Yes. Her husband. Hector Tinquera. The man my father tapped to take over the cartel once he was gone.”

  “Hector T.,” Oliver said under his breath.

  “You heard of him?” Marco demanded, locking a suspicious glare on Oliver.

  “There was this guy. He came after us on the road,” I explained, my stomach turning as I remembered what I’d done to him. The resistance as the blade entered flesh. “He told us someone named Hector T. had hired him.”

  “Hector is not a nice guy, mija. Your mother was forced to marry him when she was seventeen.”

  I turned the chair around and fell into it. Oliver moved behind me, but didn’t touch me. He seemed very far away. After days of being so close, the distance was conspicuous. He was angry with me or disappointed in me or both. I should never have lied to him. Back at the first safe house in South Carolina—that had been my moment to tell the truth—the whole truth—and I had missed it.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Oliver walking away from me, like he had in Chicago. But this time, when I called out to him, he didn’t look back.

  “Your dad didn’t tap you?” Oliver asked. “Or Kaia’s mom?”

  Marco chuckled. “A woman would never have been an option for him, and I was only ten years old, not that it’s any of your business, Surfer Boy,” Marco snapped. “Our father had been getting a lot of death threats and he needed everyone to know who would take over if anything happened to him. Hector was his man.”

  Marco said this last part to me, clearly irritated by Oliver’s presence. There was a bitterness in his tone that I chose to ignore. Marco had always had a questionable set of values. It didn’t surprise me that being passed over as head of a multimillion-dollar criminal organization wouldn’t have sat well with him. Even if he was still a child at the time.

  I had never much liked Uncle Marco, not that I would have ever said it out loud to him or to my mother. I hated the way he treated her—how he was always disappointing her and making her worry. But my mother seemed to have a blind spot when it came to his behavior. No matter what he did, whether it was gamble away all his money or go on a three-week bender, she always forgave him, as long as he came home safe and sound. They shared a love so fierce that watching them together had always made me long for a sibling. They had a shorthand, all these shared memories, all of this history. Mom and Marco would do anything for each other.

  “But if Mom was married, how did you guys end up here?” I asked Marco.

  He sniffed. “Like I said, Hector was not a nice man. He used to get very jealous when it came to your ma, and he used to take it out on her in ways you don’t wanna know about. I tried to protect her once and ended up gettin’ my arm broke in three places.”

  “Oh, God.” I was starting to sweat. “This is insane.”

  What must Oliver think of me? Not only was I a liar and a murderer, but I was a direct descendent of a notorious crime family. Even after everything Oliver had been through, he had a true moral compass. I knew he loved me, but that was before he knew who I really was. Before all of this.

  Marco cleared his throat. “One night, when I was ten, your mom and Fernanda, my nanny, shook me awake and said we were going. They had already packed our bags. Your ma had found some money—she never would tell me where—and paid somebody to smuggle the three of us over the border. She had just turned eighteen, and she’d had enough of living with that bastard. Once we got to Arizona we stayed with distant relatives of Fernanda, and changed our names… Maris
ol joined the army to get citizenship and got legal custody of me. The rest you know. Neither your mother nor I have seen Hector T. since.”

  “Until that day,” I finished.

  We were all quiet. I was dizzy with the information Marco had dumped on me. My mother had kept so many secrets. Had anything she’d told me about herself, about her childhood, about her life, been true? Had she even really loved my dad? Loved me? Wanted me? Or were we only part of her cover?

  “Do you think my father is alive?” I asked shakily.

  “Not if Hector T. got to him, mija,” Marco said quietly. “Your dad could take care a’ himself, but Hector T. would’ve brought an army. He would’ve seen your dad as the enemy who corrupted his wife. He probably would have—”

  “Okay. Okay. I don’t need the details.” I tried not to imagine what Marco was about to say. Instead I asked, “Why would they have taken a job in Oaxaca? Wouldn’t they have known how dangerous it was for Mom to go to Mexico?”

  “Your dad…he never knew about your mom’s past,” Marco told me. “He wouldn’t have thought twice.”

  “But what about her? She could have told him they had to turn down the job. If she’d said no, they’d both be here right now. None of this would have happened.”

  Oliver’s chair made a loud, scraping sound on the tile.

  “I don’t know what she was thinking,” Marco told me, and rubbed his brow. “You’d have to ask her.”

  There was a moment of suspended silence as I realized I could ask her. All of my questions could actually be answered. After all this time trying to accept that she was gone forever…she wasn’t.

  “You said you knew where she was?”

  Hector shoved his hands into the pockets of his black pants. “If I know Hector, and I know Hector, she’s with him. She was his wife. In his mind, she belongs to him forever.”

  “Okay,” Oliver said. His voice startled me. It was quiet, but determined. “So where is Hector?”

  “I heard that he set up shop north of the border a couple years back,” Marco said. “Came here to strengthen the Black Cartel’s presence in the good old USA.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Out in LA, I can find the exact address with a coupla texts. I still know a guy,” Marco said, seeming proud of this fact. “But I don’t recommend you go after him, kid. You’re lucky he left you alive the first time you two crossed paths.”

  “No way,” I said, rising on shaky knees. “If my mother is alive, I’m going to find her. I’m going to bring her home. We were a family. A team. It’s what my father would do.”

  In the back of my mind, all I could hear was my mother’s voice. Never stop fighting, mija.

  I didn’t care that she’d told me to stay away. I needed to know that I was still her little girl, her Kiki. I needed my mom.

  “We’re going to LA,” I said.

  “Kaia,” Oliver said. I gathered my courage and looked him dead in the eye. His expression was hard. “Can I talk to you for a sec?” he asked, and his gaze flicked at Marco. “Alone?”

  chapter 23

  OLIVER

  “Actually.” Kaia paused. “Marco and I have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “It’ll only take a second,” I said, grinding my teeth. Though that was clearly a lie. After the conversation we’d just had and all the new information swirling like a tornado inside my brain, I wasn’t sure which way was up.

  “Oliver, please… Why don’t you go back up to bed?” Kaia suggested, nailing the lid to my coffin. “I’ll be up soon.”

  And that was it. I’d been dismissed. I glanced at Marco. His smirk said it all. I had been replaced by a paunchy, aging relative. She had her uncle to help her. She was going to get her family back. And she didn’t need me anymore.

  “Fine,” I said.

  I walked up the stairs like I hadn’t been slighted, but by the time I got to the top, I felt sick. My entire life was slipping through my fingers, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  I paused outside Kaia’s pink travesty of a room. Where we’d kissed this afternoon and passed out in each other’s arms only a couple of hours ago. Everything had changed so quickly—I’d felt so close to her then, and now she’d rejected me. I couldn’t go back in there. I hovered in the doorway, frozen with indecision. Then I saw the blue glow emanating through the door of her parents’ bedroom. The Batcave.

  We hadn’t cleaned up the mess Kaia had made during her fit, and we hadn’t gone back to close the doors to the supersecret room, either. I had a feeling Kaia wouldn’t want me going in there without her, but at the moment, I didn’t care.

  Sure enough, the map on the computer screen had a pulsating dot over Southern California. Kaia’s gun was on the table next to the keyboard. I picked it up—it was heavier than it looked—and squinted one eye to stare down the sight line. I caught my reflection in one of the glass cases. Robin hadn’t had time to cut my hair since before school started, and it had gotten long over the past few weeks. Some of my freshly cleaned curls had dried into ringlets. Surfer Boy? I looked more like a six-year-old girl. No wonder Marco wasn’t taking me seriously.

  I put the gun down and backed up to get a better look at myself, running my hands over my hair. My elbow hit a speaker on the wall and suddenly, the Batcave filled with voices.

  “…dead meat, kid,” Marco was saying.

  “He’s my boyfriend, Marco,” Kaia replied. “He’s coming with us.”

  My heart stopped. What?

  “Please? That kid? Not only will he get himself killed, but he’ll get you killed too.”

  My jaw clenched so tightly I swear I heard a tooth crack.

  “He’s tougher than he looks,” Kaia said.

  “First of all, no,” Marco said with a laugh in his voice. “And secondly, tough’s got nothing to do with it. He’s not one of us. This kind of thing, you keep it in the family.”

  “He is family,” Kaia replied.

  I squared my shoulders a little. Maybe all wasn’t lost.

  “No. He’s not. He’s not blood. And he never will be. The sooner you figure that out the better.”

  I waited for Kaia to defend me again. And I waited. My fingers curled into fists. The hum of the computer towers was deafening. There was a hitch in the back of my throat.

  Say something. Say anything.

  But she didn’t. I reached up and clicked off the intercom.

  On one of the monitors, a search bar was open, the cursor blinking. ENTER NAME: read the prompt.

  He’s not blood. And he never will be.

  I was already typing before I fully realized what I was doing.

  VICTOR MICHAEL LANGE

  A dozen photos popped up on the screen. My father’s was the third one. He looked older. Scruffier. He had my same blond curls and a reddish-blond goatee, which I’d never seen. But it was him. I sat and clicked on his picture. A record of his last few residences scrolled in front of me. They matched up perfectly with the post marks on my birthday cards. A year in Virginia, a couple in New York, about a year and a half in Chicago, and on and on. It was his current residence that made me gag. He was living in Charleston. Not ten miles from Robin’s house. The man practically lived down the street from me and had never even come by to say hello.

  My hands clenched atop the desk.

  He’s not blood.

  What the hell did blood matter? It didn’t. Not one goddamned bit.

  I cleared the computer screen. I never wanted to lay eyes on that asshole’s face again.

  I walked back into Kaia’s parents’ bedroom, still seething. There was no way Kaia would leave me behind. No freaking way. On some level, I understood that Marco was necessary. He knew these people, the cartel, and would know how to deal with them. But she loved me. We were family.

  Or—there was alwa
ys an or—maybe I’d been right all along. Maybe I wasn’t good enough for this version of Kaia. And Marco was sitting in the kitchen, hammering that point home.

  I walked around the end of the bed, stepping over crumpled sweaters and balled-up socks. Near the edge of the large dresser was a framed picture of Kaia’s dad with three other soldiers. They all wore green camouflage gear and bulletproof vests. Her dad held a nasty-looking rifle in front of him with both hands. His blond hair had been shorn tight to his head and sweat sheened his lip and brow. There was a scowl on his face that would have made any intelligent enemy throw up his hands in surrender. The man was hardcore.

  No wonder Kaia was as strong and brave as she was. If her mother was half as cool as she’d made her out to be, Kaia basically had the combined DNA of a superhero. And I had the DNA of a deadbeat jackass and sweet woman who’d died young of cancer.

  I glanced in the mirror above the dresser, then turned and walked into the bathroom. I found what I needed in the bottom drawer.

  Marco thought I wasn’t good enough? He wanted to convince Kaia to leave me behind? Well, we’d see about that.

  chapter 24

  KAIA

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” I snapped.

  My words hung in the air. A darkness fell across Marco’s face, as if he’d pulled a mask down over his eyes.

  “What did you say to me?”

  “I said, who the hell do you think you are?” I stood up fast, knocking my chair over with a clatter, and glared down at him. “You can’t tell me what to do. You can’t tell me who to leave behind. Some family. You broke my mother’s heart more times than I can count.”

  “You are way outta line, kid.” Marco got up and jammed a stubby finger in my direction. “Respect your elders.”

  “Sorry, but people need to earn respect.” I stalked to the refrigerator to have something to do, somewhere to focus my kinetic energy. I could barely contain my rage as I grabbed a glass and filled it with water from the door dispenser.