Two Roads(4)

“You enjoy wearing women’s jewelry?”

He flips the locket open and holds it up for me to look at. I have to crane my neck closer to make out the faces on the faded photograph inside. Three teenagers who look like siblings with their matching noses and chins.

My heart skips a beat as I recognize one of them.

Mariana. Of course. I knew I’d been right.

I look at Luis, stunned, as he closes the locket again and tucks it back under his shirt.

“My mama,” he says, his voice thick with passion, his blue eyes ablaze with fury.

I nod slowly, my head whirling.

“She spoke about you,” I whisper. Memories of the past slam into me like a car knocking the wind from me and tossing me high into the air. I can’t get enough air into my lungs as I remember those final few days before hell descended upon us all, when we still truly believed we would escape the vicious hold of the Gypsy Brothers.

That admission surprises him. His eyebrows practically hit the roof. “She did?”

I nod. “She didn’t say your name. But she told me. She told me about her baby boy with the big blue eyes.”

He swipes a hand over his bald, bronze-colored skull, averting those big blue eyes away.

“I knew there was something about you,” I say, the first real thing I’ve said in hours. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.”

He smiles, giving me a sidelong glance that’s almost…shy. Which is funny, given that he’s seen me naked on more than one occasion and even worse than that. He’s seen the things Dornan did to me, the dark moments after he forced himself on me. Luis has seen me have a complete fucking meltdown while I screamed at my mother. He’s watched me be tortured and he’s fed me when I was about to pass out from hunger.

“Why you?” I ask suddenly.

His lips curl into a knowing smile. “You know how hard it is to break someone out of a prison? Like a real, legit prison?”

I shrug.

“It’s very fucking hard, bebé. And it’s a piece of cake compared to the things we had to do to get you out of that hellhole.”

I chew on my lip, mulling that over. My arms are itching like crazy, in fact, my entire body is screaming to be scratched, for me to rake my nails across crawling flesh until bright red blood springs forth in jagged lines. But I restrain myself for the moment. I don’t want to show Luis how much he’s right. How much my veins are screaming, sizzling on shot nerve endings, dying for something to soothe, for something to help me forget.

He sees right through me. He watches my fingers as they tremble, as I make tight fists with them and then loosen them again, and I know he sees the truth.

He takes the baggie of heroin out again and tosses it at me. Stepping over to the door, he flips the lock, then comes back to me, a syringe materializing in his hand.

“We’ll wean you off slowly,” he says, looking badass in his leather, his blood-spattered white T-shirt, and needle in his hand. He holds it like it’s a weapon, and in another place it would be.

For Dornan, it was, anyway.

***

The gear is good. Better than good. As soon as it enters my vein I feel a rush, a burst of stars that appear behind my eyelids and make them droop. I sag to the side and feel hands stop me from sliding to the floor.

Though, with the heroin kicking around inside me, I honestly wouldn’t give a fuck if I did fall down.

Something troubling gnaws at the edge of the bliss, and this is how I know he’s given me less than Dornan did. A troubling thought rears its head—if I died, if my heart ceases to beat, even momentarily, what did that do to the baby?

I make a mental note to think about that later. I can’t focus on anything right now, and I think I’m giggling, the sound muffled with my face pressed against Luis’s shoulder.

Strong arms loop around me and pick me up easily—much, much too easily. I am skin and bone. I sigh, letting the bed swallow me up as Luis deposits me under the covers and pulls them up to my chin.

“You’ll be okay, mamacita,” he says, but I’m already fading into the blissful void, and I’m frozen, unable to reply.





A noise rouses me from sleep, the scrape of a door hinge that needs oil.

I sit up in bed, my hair still plastered to my forehead, the comforter too warm, but without it too cold. I peer at the figure in the dark, trying to decide it it’s Luis or Elliot.

It’s too tall to be Luis.

“Elliot?” I whisper.

I reach over and flick on the bedside lamp, bathing the small room in an eerie yellow glow.

And my stomach seizes.

“You can’t be here,” I say, panicking, sliding myself over to the far side of the bed. I don’t have anywhere to go—even if I could somehow maneuver myself out the window, I’d be dropping into an icy sea and drowned before I could second-guess myself.