“You promised to stay away from me, Joseph,” I chide softly, turning around to greet the man whose name is beginning to outline something in my chest.
“Do you love trouble, Anna?” he growls. “Or does it just have a fucking hard-on for you, too?”
He’s standing a couple of yards away, and crowding up the small store with his massive frame. Same black jeans and stained white T-shirt. He’s still Captain America gone rogue. This is how I’ll always picture him now. It’s an unfiltered Polaroid of a beautifully damaged man who endures an endless field of landmines to protect me.
“How did you sneak into the store without the bell sounding?”
“Shadows don’t give explanations.” His fires his gray-blues at my face as if he’s firing another round from his gun.
I want them to crystalize again.
I want them to crystalize for me.
“No, they don't,” I argue. “They curse and fight; shield and defend. They take on the darkness to let even the dullest light shine.” I watch his jaw tense up again. “Thank you.” It feels so good to finally articulate the words I’ve had tattooed on my tongue for so long. “I guess we should stop meeting like this, though.”
“I guess we should.” I can tell he’s laughing at me now, and I like it. I like it a lot.
“How did you find me?”
“I put a trace on my—your car.”
Oh. “So, my freedom came with a caveat?”
“I’m not fucking apologizing, if that’s what you’re after… You promised free pussy, and I’m here to collect.”
A dull beat explodes between my thighs as he kicks the dead body away from me. “Free pussy?”
A touch of a smile graces his lips. “The only pussy.” He glances down at the corpse. “This man was Fernandez’s best. We keep firing arrows at him like this, he’ll send in his tanks.
“Do you even know how to apologize?”
“Never apologize, never explain… Dante taught me that.”
Yeah, I bet he did. “Just because he lives by that code, it doesn’t mean you have to.”
He slides his gun into the waistband of his jeans with an expression that’s set with russet stubble and stillness. “Don’t go thinking there’s some big fucking difference between me and him, Luna. We’re cut from the same red cloth, and we always will be.”
“I don’t agree.” You’re more. You’re so much more. You could be everything.
He grunts and shrugs. “Think what you like. I can shoot sicarios in the head for you, but I can’t protect you from the shit you tell yourself at night.” In one stride, he has his hand locked around my wrist. “Time to go.”
“I don’t think much about anything at night,” I say, trying to ignore the firecrackers go off under my skin. It’s intrinsic. Wanted. “I’m too busy hunting for my moon.”
He stops and turns, his shutters dropping for a split-second.
“What?” I say, but his expression is written in hieroglyphics.
“I don't have time to explain.” Gray-blues have frozen up again as he yanks me toward the back of the store.
“What about the body?”
“Gomez will sort it.”
“Gomez knows you’re here?” I say in surprise.
“The whole of fucking Colombia knows I’m here, thanks to you.” He leads me toward a restroom, through an open door to the side, and then out onto a path that leads us back out front. Stopping next to his car, he opens up the back door with a jerk.
“Get in. We don't have much time.”
“We need to wait for Vi!” I turn in her direction, but the payphone booth is empty.
“Where the fuck is she?” he roars, fists slamming down on the roof of the SUV.
“Here,” she says calmly.
A beat later, a second gunshot is ringing out across the bloody Leticia sky.
22
Anna
My mother once told me that my first memory would have the strongest roots. She was always coming up with weird shit like that. She lived her whole life believing that a single event would have the ability to sprout seedlings when I least expected it—guiding judgements, inciting emotions, warming me with nostalgia in the lonely cold of dawn.
Mine turned out to be a hunting trip to Maryland with my father when I was five years old. Later, I would tell mom that I was the luckiest girl in the world to claim this as my first.
I lied.
I wasn’t lucky, and it wasn't special. It was dark, dirty and damaged, and I would grow to hate it like I did all the men who stole something precious from me. That day, I watched my father kill a stag, but his reckless bullet lodged deep inside me as well.
I can’t recall much of the day leading up to the kill shot, besides the scratchy feeling of his beard against my skin and the way my tiny hand slotted inside his. But when he cocked his Remington, with me hunkered down in the dirt next to him, my mind hit a flashing red record button.
I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be here; I wanted to be making cookies with mom or playing unicorns with Ria from next door. Most of all, I didn’t want my father to kill something that didn’t deserve to die. The stag hadn’t charged us or hurt us. He was targeted simply for being, and this made the memory of my father’s actions even more of a traitorous ruin.
I screamed when the bullet hit home. I cried as the stag circled and folded, as graceful in death as he had been in life— proud and defiant, and fighting the inevitable even as his heart stopped beating. I wanted so badly for him to get up and run. To fight back, even though I knew deep down in my five-year-old brain that some things couldn’t be brought back to life, no matter how badly you wanted it.
The memory isn’t a comfort. It lurks in the corners of my mind during the worst possible times—superseding love, all the Christmases, the trips to Disneyland California. Years later, when I was locked in a basement and forced to fuck five or six men a night, it mocked me like a sick perversion of karma.
Those men deserved to die, but they lived.
The stag deserved to live, and now he’s dying again in my arms.
The memory is all around me. It’s on the back seat of a car in an unfamiliar town, in an unfamiliar country; it’s cradling the head of a man in my lap, and pressing a fist to a wound that won’t stop pumping blood. It’s the surety that nothing is working, and that another is going to die, whether I beg or scream to a God we once both mocked each other for ignoring.
“Faster!” I scream at Vi.
“I’m trying!” she cries, guilt driving her foot to the floor, driving like a maniac.
The car gives another brutal jolt forward, and I hear him groan out. We’re doing sixty on dirt tracks where a slow crawl is a white-knuckled fairground ride. We’re still ten minutes out from her aunt’s place. There’s nowhere else to go. If I take Joseph to the local hospital, I’ll be condemning him to a different kind of death.
“Is there another route?” I say desperately. “A highway or something?”
“This is the fucking Amazon, Anna! It’s not the sunshine coast!” She’s crying as well. My pain is her pain—that’s how much our lives have merged in the last day. Grudges lose their power when their consequences are bleeding out in front of you. “Anna, I’m so sorry. I heard the gun go off in the store. I saw him dragging you into the restroom…”