I looked down at Luisa, my blood spilled all over her back and mixing with her own. I pulled the knife out of her and shook the remaining drops on her rising back as she caught her breath. I ran my hand down her spine, smooth, blending our blood together. It was the best that I could do, it was the most of me that I could give.
I didn’t say anything to her as I got off the bed and went to the en suite bathroom. I washed my hands in the sink, the cut across my inner fingers not too deep, watching the water swirl down the drain, our blood together. Blood of family. Blood of marriage.
Then I looked at myself in the mirror and was glad to see a man I didn’t recognize staring back at me. You couldn’t take anything from this man. He had dead eyes.
When I emerged, she was standing naked, vulnerable, beautiful, the sheets and blankets piled at the foot of the bed, white splashed with feathering red. Our eyes met and I saw that need in them. She wanted me to come back to her. Maybe just to put her in the bathtub and wash the horror from her back, take care of her, like I always used to do.
I could only stare back at her, wishing she could see that this was all I had. That we were lucky it hadn’t taken a turn for the worse. That her wounds on her back would heal.
Even if the wounds in her heart would not.
She nodded once, reading the futility of it all. She was so good at that, seeing the truth. It made me wonder what she’d seen in me all along.
Did she hate herself for losing her heart to a monster?
“I’ll get clean sheets,” she said, her voice small. She started for the door, seeming to forget that she was naked and bleeding.
I quickly walked over to her and put my good hand on her shoulder. She looked at it in surprise, the generosity of my touch. “No, you go clean yourself up,” I told her. “I’ll deal with the bed.”
She blinked, then gave me a timid, grateful look.
“Thank you,” she said, then walked to the bathroom. I watched her go, her back bloodied, yet she wore it like a cape.
And I knew she was thanking me for more than that. She was thanking me for being intimate with her. She was thanking me for waking up, even if just for a few minutes. Even if I brought her a lot of pain with some of the pleasure.
I hoped I had the strength to never let it happen again.
CHAPTER THREE
Javier
I dreamed about Alana again.
It’s always the same fucking dream.
It was the last time I saw her. Wal-Mart of all damn places, just outside of Durango. Figures it would be in a fluorescent-lit hell. She’d met me and Luisa there, looking frightened and vulnerable. Lost. A cast on her leg. She thought her brother could save her. She’d survived an assassination attempt. Two, actually, if you counted her getting hit by a car. And the third attempt, the one that blew her and my boat up, that’s the one that got her in the end.
I could have done more for her. Maybe that’s why the dream didn’t stop. Why I kept seeing her crumpled face, why I kept hearing myself say the last thing I said to her.
“I will take care of you, you got that? The only way I know how.”
I would hear those words of mine when I was awake, too. They mocked me.
Because I failed. Because I didn’t take her seriously enough. But I never did, did I? The only person I ever took seriously was me.
What I thought at the time was that Alana was a trail straight to me, my compound, my cartel. I assumed that the reason she “survived” so many attempts on her life was because they never meant to kill her, whoever they were. They just wanted to scare her, right into my arms.
And it worked. I brushed her off. Of course I didn’t turn her out to the wolves, but I certainly didn’t trust the situation, nor her so-called Canadian boyfriend. I needed to get away from her, for my sake, for Luisa’s sake. And yes, for her sake, too. Because when I was caught, when I was killed, what would happen to her? As long as I was unattainable — safe — she, in a sense, would be too.
But I was wrong. About everything.
I hadn’t heard from her for a week. I thought she was going to call the number I gave her. I thought she would have trusted me to take care of her. But she didn’t. And now I couldn’t blame her.
I got a phone call at five in the morning from the chief of police in Mazatlán, someone who was already on my payroll. He said there had been an explosion in the Sea of Cortez, and the crew who went out to investigate found wreckage of my mega-ketch, blown to smithereens. Ironically I had named the boat Beatriz, after one of my other deceased sisters.
I had no idea what was happening, and it wasn’t until they reviewed security footage from the marina, which showed a group of men, presumably dressed like old sailors, pushing a few wheelbarrows down the docks. One of the men stopped and pulled back a blanket that was lying across the wheelbarrow.
It was Alana’s face. She was curled inside, unconscious or already dead.
The man kept his back to the camera, fuzzy grey hair sticking out of his sailor’s cap that could have been real, could have been fake, but Alana was kept in full view. The man wanted us to see her.
He wanted me to see her.
The next thing they found was footage of Beatriz sailing out to sea.