“I’m not cutting you yet,” the man called Xavier says. “And I think he’s taking a call.”
Of course. A call. I bite down on my lip, trying to focus somewhere else, trying to pretend the rejection blooming under my skin isn’t really there. Ignacio would call me insolent if I dared to question him. He would pull my hair until chunks came out of my scalp, he would smack my thighs with his leather belt until blisters formed, he would push into my ass with no lubrication until I bled. His love is a cruel love, and I daren’t ask him to sit by me while this strange Doctor puts things in my spine and takes the feeling in my legs away and washes things into my veins that taste like an orgasm.
“What name did your mother give you?” Xavier asks me, flashing his teeth in what I think is supposed to be an attempt at a comforting smile. That’s what they would call it, in the books I’ve read. An attempt to put me at ease. But Xavier doesn’t understand that I was raised in the dark. I am the property of a man who does not give comforting smiles. I was raised by a man who gave teeth-bared smiles only before he sank those teeth into my pale flesh.
I blink rapidly; there are tiny beads of moisture stuck to my eyelashes, from my tears. “My mother didn’t give me a name,” I say. “Ignacio named me. My mother was dead before she could give me a name.”
“I’m sorry,” Xavier says, his smile gone, replaced by pity. He still doesn’t understand. I wasn’t raised on pity, either, and I don’t need his.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, staring at the ceiling, the only ceiling I’ve seen since the day I was born on this very floor. “I’ve never known any different. Ignacio named me Seraphina.”
“That’s a beautiful name, Seraphina,” Xavier says, as if testing it out on his tongue.
“It means fiery,” I say, as another wave of dizziness slams into me. “And Ignacio means ignite. He’s always saying it’ll be us who burn the world down together.”
“Huh,” Xavier says, apparently intrigued by my silly little life. “And do you want to burn the world down, Seraphina?”
I shake my head, my heartbeat picking up to a rattle as I hear Ignacio’s shoes on the steps outside. “I don’t want to burn the world down,” I reply, hoping Ignacio can’t hear me. “But I would like to see it.”
He nods, his face looking… sympathetic. I don’t need that, either. His emotions are useless to me, but I can’t pretend that I don’t like watching him as he tries to fit his expressions to my words. I’m about to open my mouth and ask him another question when a plastic mask appears in his hand, sweet-smelling air wafting from it as he places it over my mouth and nose.
“First things first,” he says, and I almost believe the kindness in his eyes is real and not a trick of the blinding light. “I want you to count back from one hundred. Let me fix you up. Then we can talk about seeing the world.”
I want to ask him if he’ll show it to me, but the world goes black. I don’t even get to 99 before I’m weighted down, a heavy stone at the bottom of a raging river.
XAVIER
It was when I saw her hip bones that I decided I wasn’t leaving without her.
She was unconscious, when I arrived. Tucked up in her bed, a cold cloth on her forehead that was rapidly turning as hot as the fever that raged within her veins. Her hair was impossible; hanging loose, it ran across her pillow, over the edge of the bed, and pooled on the floor as if it had been spun from gold right then and there.
The girl with the golden hair. The girl I fixed when she fell from a window.
The girl Ignacio told me was dead, all those years ago.
She wasn’t dead. She’s been here, in this tower, now a woman but still trapped in the body of a child. Malnourished, barely five foot tall by my quick estimations, her cheekbones almost as severe as her hips. This girl has been starved. This girl has been held prisoner. This girl has been in my nightmares since the day I flew out of the Sierra Madre mountains ten years ago, thinking I’d saved her life after her horrific fall, only to get a call when I landed in Chicago telling me she had died, and that it was my fault.
Ignacio enters the room just as Seraphina’s eyes are fluttering shut, the gas doing its job of sending her off into a twilight sleep so I can operate on her. I’m so used to working as a duo with my brother, that I’m noticing Liam’s absence acutely. It’s a juggle, making sure she doesn’t feel pain while I take out her dangerously inflamed appendix.
“Did she wake up?” Ignacio asks. I shake my head. “No.” I don’t want to give him any information. For some selfish, strange reason, I want to keep the conversation I had with Seraphina all to myself. High on pain and drugs and the cusp of death, she somehow managed to bare her soul to me in what probably amounted to three or four sentences we exchanged.
“I heard talking,” he says, his eyes narrowed at me. You were on the fucking phone, I want to say, but I don’t. Ignacio Garcia Hernandez is a cruel man, a vicious man, and just being in his presence dials up the danger that I might earn myself a bullet or two. Of course, if I had a weapon, and he didn’t have two machine-gun-toting thugs following his every move, we’d be able to try to kill each other like civilized men.
But here, I have been stripped of all my weapons—literally, those fuckers took my gun and my knife as soon as I strolled my ass onto the private jet Ignacio chartered from New York. In this apparently disused water tower among fields of illegal opium poppies, I wield nothing mightier than a scalpel.
“I tried to wake her,” I confirm. “You heard me talking to her. She’s out for now.”
Apparently satisfied, Ignacio nods, thrusting his hands into his pant pockets as he paces on the other side of my makeshift operating table. I make the first incision into her flesh, clearing my throat as I suction blood from around Seraphina’s angry, swollen appendix. She’s lucky it hasn’t ruptured already; in a place like this, I doubt very much that I could save her. A ruptured appendix requires a higher level of surgical prowess than I can possess alone, in the dark, without so much as a second pair of eyes to monitor my patient’s vital signs.
Then again, looking at where we are; in the possession of a homicidal drug cultivator, a cartel lackey, a man who purposely locked a girl away for most of her life – I don’t need to draw conclusions about where Seraphina has spent her days; I can see, in the hollows of her cheeks, in her small stature, the way her pupils are permanently inky-black and wide, like a cat’s, and the paleness on her skin.
This girl has lived her life in this tower, a prisoner. Ignacio’s prisoner.
It takes every ounce of strength and self-preservation that I possess to stop myself from launching across this table and embedding my scalpel in Ignacio’s jugular. I’d give anything to watch him bleed out on the dirty floor of this room and take this poor girl away from what must be a living hell.