Mia eased me back to the thin comfort of the hospital bed and tucked the sheet around my waist. I let her do it…because damn, I ached all over.
I wasn’t even sure how I’d really gotten hurt. I winced as the harsh sheets pressed against my back, but that was a small twinge compared to the overall pain in my body. It felt like I’d been beaten—not beaten with a whip or a leather strap, but beaten with fists and kicks inside my body. But when I ran my hands over my stomach, I didn’t feel any bruises or cuts. The pain was on the inside, hurt and anger coalescing into a sick burn inside me.
Mia’s expression was pure sympathy. No, scratch that. Empathy. Like she knew exactly what I was going through. Which she did, really. She’d been with Carlos. I tried to let that sink in. She’d been through exactly what I’d been through, except instead of days, she’d been with him for years.
“How did you do it?” I asked helplessly.
Her smile was sad. “It was hard sometimes. Other times…I found it surprisingly easy. To put my trust in someone who was strong enough to take it. To focus on the sensations only. But I’d been with him a long time by then. I wouldn’t expect it to be the same for you.”
Her voice lilted up at the last word, turning it into a question. The really crazy part was that I understood what she was saying. The release of being bound and gagged, the freedom of having nowhere else to go. And instead of feeling horror, I felt curiosity. Was he always that rigid in the way that he fucked her? Was he relentlessly cruel? Or had he, at some point, opened up to her?
Strangely enough, that had hurt the most. If he had been a mindless, heartless animal and treated me that way, I could have understood it. I could have moved past it. You didn’t blame an animal for biting you. A monster only knew how to scare. But Carlos had too much intelligence, too much thoughtfulness to his actions to be an animal. A monster. He was just a person. He wasn’t kind, but then neither was the world.
“I hope you don’t mind me coming here,” Mia said. “I can go if you’re too tired…or if seeing me will upset you.”
“No, I’d like to talk to you. Actually,” I said, feeling unaccountably shy, “I’d like it if you could talk to me. Tell me about your time with him. We didn’t get to talk very long the day I came to see you. And now I—” I spread my palms, as if in supplication. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to know or why. Only that she was part of the answer.
She drew up the plastic chair and sat down. “I can tell you about him. Maybe it will help you reconcile what happened. Or…I don’t know, help with closure.”
“Or help us catch him,” I whispered.
“Right. Of course.” She said it so quickly that she clearly didn’t think it would happen. To her, he was invincible. And I wasn’t sure she was wrong.
I sighed, letting my eyes fall closed. In the darkened hospital room, it was almost the same. My eyes felt tired, and I let her words wash over me like a lullaby. Like a story before bedtime, and that was what it was. Her voice was a sweet melody, soothing to my roughened nerves.
“Carlos’s father ran a fairly large drug trafficking operation out of Colombia. His mother was an American woman. I saw a picture of her once. She was really beautiful. Exquisite. And you couldn’t tell her origins from the picture. Her dress was shimmery, and she had diamond earrings and a necklace. It was kind of a fairy tale, back then, and they were royalty.”
I could picture them, the stern-faced drug lord in a sharp suit. The glittering bride at his side, elegant and severe. My mind painted them in black and white, with vintage glamour. But this story had a dark side. Even light casts a shadow.
“Families were important back then. All the important men had wives and kids and they’d meet up for big dinners. La familia.” Mia’s laugh sounded soft and musical, like a wind chime in the night air. “When Carlos was eight years old, there was a dinner. His parents’ anniversary and it was a big affair. But the two of them had been fighting that day, in private. The way things worked, the women didn’t talk back to the men. Not ever.”
Mia paused, and I felt her sadness drench the air. For who, though? For Carlos? Or for the woman from a previous generation, who was so much like her. Used for her body and elevated through her status with a man who did her harm.
“That night, she turned on him. In front of everyone, she shouted at him and told him she’d been sneaking behind his back. He pulled out his gun and shot her. In front of Carlos.”