“What are you doing, motherfuckers?” I yelled.
Both Felipe and Alejandro stopped and turned, throwing me a casual glance, as they put the suitcase into the trunk of their hopped-up Dodge Coronet.
Felipe’s black cat eyes narrowed. “She’s ours now.” His voice was so fucking relaxed, so fucking confident.
“The fuck you say! Inès! What the hell are you doing?”
She only glared at me from a curtain of straightened glossy hair, her face still flushed. “I’ve had enough. Okay?”
“Okay?” I shouted. “Okay?” I stalked toward her, my limbs made of molten iron. I would singe her, burn her, make smoke and ash of her.
Smash her.
Hands shoved me back. “Hey, hey, hey.” Alejandro towered over me. “Stand down, hermano. She came to us, wanted to be our bitch straight off. Felipe and I have what she needs.” He palmed his crotch over his loose low-slung jeans, his tatted arm taut with the action, his jaw jutting out. “How can you compare yourself to the two of us?” He shoved his fingers in my face, grinning. “No way, boy, you can’t.”
But Alejandro was wrong.
Inès wasn’t just my hole, just the girl I shared a crib with, had on my arm at parties, or hung with around the hood. She was my mission. She was a part of me.
“She’s with us now. You understand what that means?” Alejandro said, his head slanting, dark eyes glinting.
Felipe leaned over and licked Inès’s willing lips with a disgusting flutter of his tongue as Alejandro wrapped a hand around her ass and rubbed.
“Time for you to try a gringa, El Hueso. I’m telling you, they come to us like flies.” Alejandro winked. “Wild side, papi.”
I stared at the three of them, my heart chugging in my chest.
Felipe’s eyes narrowed as he threw an arm around my neck. “She’s your cousin, man. You’re not supposed to be fucking your cousin. We saved your soul from purgatorio, for sure, eh?”
They both laughed, but Inès stood still, her hands gripping a leather handbag I didn’t recognize.
I pushed Felipe off me. “You know she’s barely sixteen, right?” I spit out.
Felipe only glared at me, his jaw rigid. But the gleam in Alejandro’s eyes was unmistakable, his tongue dipping against his lower lip. “Sweetest * ever.”
Inès raised a well-groomed eyebrow as she leaned her body into his.
The weeks of worrying about her, wondering what she was up to, who she was with, if she had lost it and was wandering the streets or had gotten raped and was trapped somewhere, her head chopped off, or…
But this? With them?
Felipe and Alejandro constantly dangled the carrots of more money, more responsibility, more advancement, more prestige, yet never delivered because they would hoard it all for themselves and enjoy the power of denial they lorded over the rest of us.
Inès was throwing me away for a joyride with these two? This was what she needed, what made her happy?
What about us?
All the bloodletting, all the beatings, the burning, the carvings, the cleaning—I’d done it all for them. The smell of acid, bleach, and charred flesh filled my nostrils as I gulped for air. All for her, for us. At the end of every single cliff I’d hung from every day, I’d clung to her.
White light exploded in my eyes, and a rush of adrenaline surged from my feet through my middle, boiling in my chest, pounding in my head. I charged through the air, screaming, yelling. Blows of pain shot through me, the smash of cement against my back, a sudden blinding, throbbing sting all through my middle. I gasped for air, and my eyes flared open.
Everything stopped.
Inès leaned over me, her knife in her hand—the one I had bought her, the one I had taught her how to use.
Now, it had my blood on it.
My bleary eyes drowned in her dark pools looming over me.
“Look what you’ve done, Santi! Leave me alone! Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
The blare of sirens rose down the street. Inès pulled her lips together and wiped her knife clean on my ripped shirt. Clutching the blade to her chest, she tumbled into the Calderones’ car, a figure pressing in after her.
A pointy boot end kicked me hard in the ribs, and I coughed up blood and vomit on the pavement, my body coiling at the pain shooting through me. Another boot jammed into my lower back, and my head knocked against the cement.
Suddenly, my body was jerked up, and Alejandro’s voice thundered in my ear. “Don’t you dare come near her again, or I’ll kill you. You will fucking regret the day you were born. I will find you, wherever you go, and you will suffer. I will find ways to make you pay.”
My body slammed into the cement once again, flopping open like a tossed puppet.
Car doors banged, an engine roared, rubber screeched.
A whirlpool of glaring sun and stifling heat enflamed the reek of garbage on the cement where I lay. My blood simmered on the pavement before me. My arms were heavy and wet, glued to my body.