I closed my eyes. There was simply no way I could look at him through this. It was going to be bad enough getting it through the spiked ball stabbing the back of my throat.
“Maybe it's too soon to talk about the future...about family,” I said slowly, trying to keep my composure. “But I need you to know-”
I froze. The acid in my stomach roiled violently. “Because things were...rough, near the end-”
“Doctors-”
My throat closed completely, almost choking me with its suddenness.
I can’t do it. I can’t talk about this.
I bit my lip so hard I thought my teeth would go through it.
Then I remembered who I was dealing with. My actions had reached him before I’d started using my words again. Talking wasn't absolutely necessary.
I reached out blindly and waited. A heartbeat passed before I felt his hand in mine and I grabbed it, bringing him closer.
The bed dipped as he crawled back on top of it, and I focused on his nearness while I splayed his fingers across my stomach and held them there. I felt his confusion without needing to look and watch his brows crease. The ticking of an imaginary bomb took up residence inside my skull. A countdown to a reaction I knew I wasn’t going to be able to handle.
His fingers twitched and I knew the realization was hitting him. I peeked up at him in time to see the pain I felt reflected in his eyes.
Breath frozen in my lungs, I waited for the disappointment that was sure to follow, and a knot of dread tightened at the base of my neck until I thought something might snap. His throat bobbed, mouth opening, and right then, I wished I could take it all back. This was too much to deal with.
I was too much to deal with.
My body trembled with genuine fear that this would be the last time I ever felt his touch on my skin. Felt the healing balm of his existence soothe wounds he had never caused.
A moment later, I felt his lips on my forehead and my whole body tensed.
Then his lips drifted down to my eyebrows. Lashes. Cheeks. Nose. Pillow soft brushes against my skin that calmed me in a way only he could while he eased himself down beside me. I released a ragged exhale as he forced me to relax enough to be pulled against his chest without fighting it.
His silence seemed to stretch into infinity. But when he did speak, he shattered me with the low rumble of five words. Every wall I’d ever built shuddered once and came tumbling down with a deafening crash.
“It was not your fault,” he said roughly.
Another sob finally broke free from inside me. “But-”
“No.” His tone was firm, brooking no argument, but he gently swiped the pads of his thumb over the stains my tears had left. “You didn’t ask to be put through hell, Sylvia. They took that choice away from you and for that, I hope they rot for eternity. But you did what you had to do, and you survived. You did the impossible and made it to the other side anyway.”
“It cost me,” I whispered, hand going to his chest. Feeling his steady heartbeat through my palm.
“It did,” he agreed softly. “But it also forged you into the woman you are today. And I’m in love with that woman.” My heart skipped a beat. “There is nothing beneath the stars that could change that.”
I believed him.
Totally.
Completely.
So when I started weeping again, it wasn’t for the past. It was for the future. Both the one I knew would never be and the one slowly coming into existence as he held me.
I snuggled closer into his side, his deep breath fanning out over me. I held that warm certainty close and let it grow. Let it seep into my bones. Let it rebuild the foundations I’d torn down a hundred times stronger than they were before.
Exhaustion took me not long after, and I only fought its embrace for a moment. Long enough to kiss his jaw once more and feel the rasp of whiskers against my skin. He squeezed me tight, and when darkness came, I went peacefully.
CHAPTER 27 - Carlos
I continued holding onto her long after her breathing evened out and her body went limp with sleep. Moving earlier might have disturbed her and she deserved this rest. Sylvia deserved everything, and yet nothing would ever make up for what the world had taken from her.
She can’t have kids.
She hadn’t spoken the words out loud, and neither would I. But those four words needed no voice to carry them into my soul. They needed no hands to grasp a hope I was grateful I had never revealed. They needed no prompting before they took that branch of hope and the things that might’ve sprung from it and twisted until nothing recognizable remained.
Later - much, much later - I would allow myself to do more than blink away the stinging pain behind my eyes while my throat bobbed up and down.
Later, I would allow myself to hear the gentle sigh of a dream crumbling to ashes and dust.
Later - when I could allow myself the luxury - I would mourn this moment and fall apart before getting back up.
But that was for later.
Slowly, and with the kind of care reserved for carrying a priceless object, I untangled us and got up. My heart ached when I looked down at her and I rubbed at my chest so hard my skin burned, red rising below the surface. She was beautiful, painfully so, but it was more than that.
Awake, she was larger than life and I’d had a birds eye view of it for the last week and a half. Everywhere we’d gone, she demanded attention without ever having to work for it. I’d watched our surroundings almost as much as I had watched her.
Every event.
Every club.
Every business. People had been drawn to her every move, instinctually aware that someone more powerful than themselves was within their midst. For personal reasons, I’d kept track of the snide comments some made about her appearance but there hadn’t been as many as I’d expected.
More often than not, the city at large had been impressed, and none more so than myself.
But now, with her body curled into a relaxed sprawl, I could hardly believe they were both the same woman.
She seemed so small in the middle of my bed, ivory skin standing out against the lavender sheets. Years of nonstop fighting and rigorous training showed in the athletic cast to her shape and the scars both large and small visible across her body. I cast my mind back to the night she spared my life, comparing then to now, and the differences were minimal. Either way, she wouldn’t have been able to fight off grown men.
No, not men. What had she called them? Monsters wearing human skin.
My fists clenched at the injustice of it, the need to do violence pumping through my blood like a war drum once again. I needed an outlet because the pieces of shit who deserved killing were already dead. Unfortunately, no amount of connections could bring any of them back to be killed again - slowly, brutally - so I would have to settle for the next best thing.
Narciso had known.
I wasn’t sure to what extent exactly, and it didn’t matter. He knew my father had been taking women off the streets and selling their bodies for profit. As far as I was concerned, he was guilty by association. His inaction had indirectly led to the horror my woman had recounted for me nightmare by nightmare, each one worse than the last.
Frankly, her surviving the ordeal was a miracle on its own. Five months at the mercy of her abusers, and so young too.
Five.
Fucking.
Months.
That was an eternity. I had broken grown men with easier methods in half the time. Instead of breaking, she came out swinging so hard the most dangerous man in the state took her in and turned her loose against their enemies.
“You awe me, diosa,” I said quietly, leaning over to place a soft kiss to the top of her head. She shifted for a moment before resting peacefully once more.
I was glad for her. At least one of us was going to get some sleep tonight. Keeping my wrath on a leash while she spoke had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done in my life. It needed to be released
before I exploded.
I made a quick stop in the closet, throwing on a pair of athletic shorts before heading towards the elevator. There were perks to owning several floors of a building. I could do whatever I wanted across any of them. Like turning part of one into a recreational area with a pool, and the other an indoor gym.
The sound of blaring rap music, loud enough for me to feel the thump of it in my chest, ushered me into a cornucopia of stainless steel, state of the art equipment, and there was a piece already in use. Manny was on the bench, easily pushing weight off his chest I wouldn’t touch even with a spotter. He racked the bar and sat up, sweat dripping from his face as he turned and noticed me.
He had to yell to be heard over the bass thumping through the room, which wasn’t an issue for his big ass mouth. “Can’t sleep?”
I shook my head in answer. My focus was lasered in on the only thing here that could help right now. Quick steps brought me to the heavy bag and it was Narciso’s fat, evil face I pictured when I threw the first punch.
My fist connected with a satisfying thud that traveled up my arm. I pictured his nose exploding, blood arcing from it as his head rocked back. I threw a quick combination - jaw, kidney - forcing the bag to sway.
It swung towards me and I let my footwork carry me out of the way before darting in with a quick knee to where a sternum would be. On its own, that would likely kill the overweight man. He could barely get oxygen into his lungs as it was.
My blood sang, filling my veins as I upped the tempo.
I brought the boiling fury inside me to the surface and allowed it to overflow. An elbow landed where a throat would've been. An uppercut like lightning struck hard enough to turn brains into scrambled eggs.
Over and over again, it was Narciso's face I turned to mush. His body I beat until it was a broken, misshapen hunk of useless meat unfit to call a person. When I finally grew tired of pulverizing him, the rage had yet to have enough. So I offered up others to it instead.
One after another, I pictured the men who used to work for my father.
“Fucking.” A flurry of kicks left the bag dancing to a violent beat. “Trash.”
They had been decent enough to me, because of who their boss was. Sylvia hadn't been so lucky.
My body moved like a machine as it accomplished the task at hand, dismantling the memories of guilty men. I needed no confessions. No trials. They had already been sentenced by a judge I found beyond reproach. I finally understood what Syliva had been looking for the day she walked in the room where my brothers and I were hiding.
Creed might not have heard the complete story as I had, but I could only imagine the way she must have looked when they initially found her.
Heads on spikes had never before seemed so completely reasonable.
I turned myself loose in a way I hadn’t indulged in for what felt like years, keeping the multitude of faces firmly at the forefront of my thoughts.
The skin of my knuckles started to split about the same time my breathing became labored. I switched to kicks only, but I was slowing down. Quicksand settled around my limbs, making every motion excruciatingly slow. Movement caught the corner of my eye, and because my focus was split, the heavy bag jostled me hard enough I nearly fell.
I hunched over, hands on my knees while I tried to get my breathing back under control. In through the mouth, out through the nose. Manny hovered beside me and I didn't realize the music had been turned down until he spoke.
“So…” He tossed me a towel and I caught it, wiping away the beads of sweat on a fast track towards my eyes. “What crawled up your ass in the middle of the night to have you down here acting like this?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I panted, standing straight again. “There's no nightcap waiting for you in your room? You always bring back a souvenir.”
He walked a few steps to the fridge and pulled out four ice cold bottles of water before passing two my way. Between both of us, the first two never stood a chance. They were guzzled down immediately.
“I brought back two,” he said after a moment. Then nothing else.
My eyes narrowed, taking him in. Where was the gloating? The smile? The celebration? The long and completely unnecessary retelling of each position he put them in I would later need to scrub from my brain?
“And…”
He shrugged and looked away, taking another sip from the bottle his gigantic hands dwarfed. “And nothing. They were getting on my fucking nerves chattering away about bullshit, so I kicked them out before coming here.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Maybe I wasn’t in the mood.”
“You’re always in the mood. I almost threw your ass off a staircase the other week because you couldn’t keep it in your pants. Try again.”
“Drop it, alright,” he snapped, eyes flashing. His flare of anger waned as quickly as it had come, and the familiar grin returned. “Now stop distracting me. Our more reasonable third is fast asleep which means I’m playing armchair psychologist for the night. Come tell Big Manny about your problems.”
My nose scrunched in revulsion. “Dios mío. Never call yourself that again in my company. And the only problem I have is that my problems are dead.”
“I’m gonna go ahead and point out the part where that makes no sense.”
Even his idiocy wasn’t enough to lift my spirits. I glanced around before parking myself on the end of a treadmill, letting my head hang. The worst of the rage had blown through. But without it, I was left with nothing to fight the deep and abiding sense of frustration, or the abject loss I hadn’t even begun to process.
“Shit,” he muttered. “This can't be good.” He sat criss crossed on the floor in front of me. “Alright, hit me with it.”
I scrubbed both hands down my face and took a deep, calming breath. It accomplished nothing. “I know all of it. Every single detail.”
He didn't understand. I could see it in his face. “All of what?”
“What turned a girl only slightly older than us into a Reaper that could make grown ass men piss themselves.”
There it was. Awareness. His face paled by two shades. “It's bad, isn't it?”
A mockery of a laugh barked from me and I shook my head. “Bad would be a fucking picnic by comparison. I honestly don’t know where she found the strength to survive the experience, although I can’t put into words how glad I am that she did. Fuck.” I roughly raked my fingers through my hair just to do something with the restlessness.
“You know what kills me more than anything? While we were playing and laughing and messing around, oblivious to the rest of the world, our piece of shit father was ruining so many lives, including hers. My woman got thrown into the fire and made it through to the other side, but how many can say the same? Now his blood runs through our veins.”
Manny was quiet for a while and I was too lost in my own head to give it much thought.
Until today, I believed I was doing a damn good job of making up for the sins in my family’s history. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Despite the power I had hoarded, there remained things beyond my reach. Any traces of the other women who had gone through something similar to Sylvia were lost to time. And even if they weren’t, what would it change?
Assuming finding and reaching out to those families was possible, what good would it really do?
I could offer them sincere apologies. I could write checks big enough to support each of them for the rest of their lives. I could go into great detail about the lengths I went to in order to make sure nothing like that happened beneath my watch.
It wouldn’t bring those too short lives back. It wouldn’t allow them to hear their laughs. See their smiles. Feel them in their arms.
“Step back, Carlos.” I blinked as the train of my thoughts came to a screeching halt. “You heard me. Step. Back. Yeah, dad did awful, terrible things, but those are his sins to be judged by, not ours.”
“I’m-” An empty plastic bottle came fl
ying at my head, cutting me off. I dodged, shooting a scowl his way that was firmly ignored.
“Nah. I’m not done yet.” He scooted closer to me until the imploring look in his eyes was the only thing I could see. "Take a look around and tell me what you see."
"A gym?"
"Don't be a smartass, that's my gig. But sure, we're in a gym. Above us there's a heated, backlit pool most people will only ever see on television. Our condos are the size of houses. And between the three of us, we either own or control enough parts of this city to rename it if we chose to. You see what I'm getting at?"
"No. Not really."
Manny groaned. "For once, let your brain take a much needed break. We showed up here twelve years ago with nearly nothing, not even a roof to put over our heads. Months went by while we only had each other for company, and you know who stepped up and got us through it? You did, hermano."
I grunted, looking away as emotion filled my throat. "Is this really the time to get sappy on me?"
"Maybe it is," he said, voice firm. "You were the one who barely slept every night while you watched out for us. You were the one who found Mama L, along with the means to keep us fed. When caution and avoidance failed, you were the one to spill blood in order to keep us safe. And the list goes on." He waved his arms in an all-encompassing circle. "Don't you realize none of this would've been possible without the sacrifices you made?"
"I did what I had to do and I would do it again," I told him honestly, matching the sincerity in his stare. "I promised myself I would take care of you both because it's what older brothers are supposed to do. I don't need to be patted on the back for it."
He nodded, lips quirking in his familiar, cheesy grin. "And that's exactly why you don't need to be concerned with dad's bullshit. You outgrew it the moment he left us for dead and you faced down hardened killers to protect us."
I glanced at him sharply. My voice was rough when it emerged. "You knew? All this time?"
"That dad had no intention of coming back for us? Of course. Isaac and I figured it out the moment you tried to lie to us about it."
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