Black Hearts (Sins Duet #1)

I head down to Haight, the only place that feels remotely safe at eleven at night. A lot of the bars are still open and tourists still walk the streets. I move anonymously among them with no direction in mind.

My body is humming with electricity. I feel his lips between my thighs, his teeth at my nipples, his hard length inside me. I can see his eyes, relive what it was like to lose all sense of self. It was like the opposite of time travel. No past, no future—there was nothing in those moments with him except for what was happening, sweaty second by sweaty second.

God. We were fucking animals.

I’m still in shock. There’s only the new camera at my side and the sweet stiffness between my legs to tell me that what happened was real.

I was thoroughly fucked by Vicente.

Over and over and over again.

In a way I never imagined.

He made me step away from myself. He pulled me out of that prison. He opened my eyes to a reality I didn’t think I could be a part of.

He made my weaknesses my strengths.

He made them raw and beautiful.

I don’t see how my life can possibly go back to normal after this.

I must have walked up and down the main five blocks of this street a few times before my phone buzzes.

In a stupor I pull it out, half-expecting it to be Ginny following up on her earlier threat (my god was that only today?) but instead it’s Ben. Not exactly who I want to talk to when I’m still recovering from post-coital bliss, but he rarely calls.

I pick it up. “Hey.”

Even though I sound pretty fucking cheerful, he answers with a stiff, “Hey.”

I decide to cross the street at Masonic and head back up the hill. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. I…um,” he clears his throat, “was doing some research on Dad.”

I can feel my orgasmic glow drain out of me and I suddenly stop in my tracks. A man in a dark blue coat who must have been walking closely behind me, bumps into my shoulder, spinning me around.

I grumble at the man who turns to the right and keeps walking down the hill. “Sorry,” I say to Ben. “What did you find?”

Silence fills the line but then I hear him breathing. “Ben?” I prompt. I stand at the corner, wondering if I should head down the street or up. It’s then that I notice the man that bumped into me. He’s stopped, waiting a few stores down, collar up and hat down, partially obscuring a very pale face.

The hairs at the back of my neck rise.

Something’s not right.

“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry. It’s…I found another clip online. Just something short. From 2014. It wasn’t about Dad so much as about something else. He was mentioned at the end as being falsely blamed for the kidnapping of a…of a woman and her three-year-old son. But it wasn’t him, it was these two brothers with ties to the mafia.”

“Mafia?” First Mexican gangs, now Italian ones.

I’m aware that people are starting to crowd around me waiting for the lights, so I decide to cross with them and back across the street again, remembering to lower my voice.

“Yeah. The woman he kidnapped, I mean, who he was blamed for kidnapping. Her name was Sophia.”

“Sophia?” I repeat, walking back up Haight.

I make the mistake of looking over my shoulder and see the pale man in the blue coat running across the street as the traffic starts up, a cab honking for him to get out of the way.

“Does it ring a bell?” Ben asks, but I barely hear him.

The man starts walking a few yards behind me.

My mouth goes dry.

Am I being followed?

“Are you there, Vi?” Ben asks.

“Yeah,” I whisper into the phone, turning back around and quickening my pace. “I think someone might be after me.”

“After you?”

“Following me.”

“Where are you?”

“On Haight. Just about to cross to Club Deluxe.”

“Who’s following you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t recognize him.”

“Cross the street again. Just make sure before you get all paranoid.”

I grumble under my breath and quickly dart across while there’s a gap in the traffic, ignoring the lights. Cars are honking at me now but I don’t care. “Okay.”

“Is he following you still?” he asks.

I look across the street and our eyes meet. His are dark, shadowed, hidden beneath a fedora. It makes his bone-white face look like a skeleton from the Day of the Dead.

I watch as he walks up to the lights at Clayton and waits, wanting to come over to my side. His dark gaze never drops from mine.

The walk signal lights up. He begins to cross.

“Shit,” I swear. “He’s coming across.”

“Go inside somewhere busy,” Ben says.

I start jogging up the street, but it’s late and so many shops are closed. I glance back to see him right behind me, coming up fast.

I could run across the road. I could make a run for it all the way home. But the streets around my house are dark. I’d be safer in public. The man can do nothing to me here, right?

Or can he?

“Vi?” Ben sounds panicked.

“Yeah, going into the Rock Shop,” I tell him, ducking into the massive tourist shop that sells anything to do with San Francisco, drugs, and psychedelic rock. The lights inside are bright fluorescent, the kind that normally hurt my eyes and make me feel sick, but now I welcome them.

It’s not empty either, which is a relief. People are scattered among the racks of t-shirts and posters and glass cases full of patches and bongs.

“What are you doing?” Ben asks.

“Hiding. To see if he’s coming in here,” I whisper.

I head toward the back of the store where the rows of posters are and hide behind them, watching the front door through the cracks.

It opens.

The man in the dark blue wool coat walks in.

I suck in my breath.

In the garish lights I can see him more clearly. The brim of the fedora still casts long shadows over his face, but it’s a face I can’t forget. Pale, like milk, with no eyebrows. He must be albino or wearing white stage makeup. Large swaths of raised scar tissue cover his cheeks and lips.

Even the clerk behind the counter notices him, and that clerk is always stoned out of his mind. His glazed eyes follow the white man as he slowly walks inside, scanning the store.

Looking for me.