My stomach growls as I gather up as many bags of chips as I can carry. Tipping my purchases onto the counter next to his TV screen, I glance back outside to avoid his glare. There’s no sign of Vi, but another car is pulling up next to the second pump. “How much?” I ask in my shitty Spanish, and he points to the notes in my hand and holds up three fat fingers.
“My language skills must be really bad to get that response,” I say, switching back to English, but he just grunts, pushes my chips away and resumes his favorite pastime.
I’m counting out the notes on the counter when the bell above the door chimes again. The new customer gets more of a greeting than I did, and a couple of gruff Spanish words are exchanged. I watch the old guy nod wearily, and then he’s slipping off his stool and shuffling off into a backroom. I don’t have time to consider the oddness of his actions before cold, hard steel is jabbing into the base of my spine.
Shit shit shit.
“You took a wrong turn into the wrong town, puta,” says a scornful voice. “Gomez might think he runs this territory, but Fernandez doesn't abide by the petty constraints of Los Cinco Grandes anymore. You stray into these lands and you’re ours, little girl.”
His words spark a match to the gunpowder trail of fear in my veins. How much can one woman endure? Still, I chose this path. I chose to walk away from my protector, so I better be fucking convincing in getting myself out of this.
“Is this a robbery, mister?” I whimper, sounding weak and scared. “I’m just a tourist here on vacation… You want my money? Take it!” I lift up my hand to offer him the pesos.
His roar of laughter sounds like his gun went off too early. “It’s not usual for tourists to travel in stolen cartel vehicles with bullet holes, Miss Williams—or is it Jackson?” I go very still. “I have documentation in my possession stating both. Either way, everything about you, including this beautiful body,” he murmurs salaciously, making my skin rash up, “will be buried in a shallow grave by sunset.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a blur of blue as a third vehicle pulls into the forecourt.
“Who are you?” I demand, losing the damsel act.
“Not so sweet and helpless now, are we?” There’s another round of that mocking laughter. “You can call me the middle man. Ah, and thanks for the tip.” He snatches the outstretched pesos from me.
Bastard.
Next, I feel a heavy hand clenching around my shoulder. “Wait—”
“Put your hands on the counter where I can see them, little girl.” He gives me a rough shove and I slam my palms down to save myself. “Those pretty fingers have caused more than enough damage in the last twelve hours, don't you think?” He leans over me, pressing more than just his gun into my body. “Move one single muscle and I’ll be delivering you to Fernandez in pieces.” He picks up a strand of blonde hair resting across my shoulder and rubs it between his fingertips as if it’s a priceless delicacy. “Such a pity he wants you unspoiled...”
Reflected in the security mirror above me I see a woman who’s acted out this scene a million times before. I also see a beast of a man who takes more than a passing pleasure in his work.
Where are you, Vi?
“Are you still protesting your innocence?” He grinds his erection into me with a groan, wanting from me what so many have taken.
“I’m a long way from those days, asshole,” I say through gritted teeth, catching a flash of black in the security mirror. There’s movement in my periphery.
It can’t be.
“Is that so?” He backs off to trace a line up my spine with his gun as I shudder in revulsion.
That’s when I sense him.
Like I’ve sensed him a million times before.
This time it’s different. There’s no anger or detachment. His presence is sunshine and welcome. It’s South Beach in the fall, when the new school term starts. It’s gratitude that I’m still alive.
I brace myself, bending low over the counter, and when the shot rings out and the sticky warmth coats the back of my neck, a strange emotion tilts my lips.
The beast’s dead body drops to the ground; the metallic scent of blood streaks the air.
“You promised to stay away from me, Joseph,” I chide softly, turning around to greet the man whose name is beginning to outline something in my chest.
“Do you love trouble, Anna?” he growls. “Or does it just have a fucking hard-on for you, too?”
He’s standing a couple of yards away, and crowding up the small store with his massive frame. Same black jeans and stained white T-shirt. He’s still Captain America gone rogue. This is how I’ll always picture him now. It’s an unfiltered Polaroid of a beautifully damaged man who endures an endless field of landmines to protect me.
“How did you sneak into the store without the bell sounding?”
“Shadows don’t give explanations.” His fires his gray-blues at my face as if he’s firing another round from his gun.
I want them to crystalize again.
I want them to crystalize for me.
“No, they don't,” I argue. “They curse and fight; shield and defend. They take on the darkness to let even the dullest light shine.” I watch his jaw tense up again. “Thank you.” It feels so good to finally articulate the words I’ve had tattooed on my tongue for so long. “I guess we should stop meeting like this, though.”
“I guess we should.” I can tell he’s laughing at me now, and I like it. I like it a lot.
“How did you find me?”
“I put a trace on my—your car.”
Oh. “So, my freedom came with a caveat?”
“I’m not fucking apologizing, if that’s what you’re after… You promised free pussy, and I’m here to collect.”
A dull beat explodes between my thighs as he kicks the dead body away from me. “Free pussy?”
A touch of a smile graces his lips. “The only pussy.” He glances down at the corpse. “This man was Fernandez’s best. We keep firing arrows at him like this, he’ll send in his tanks.
“Do you even know how to apologize?”
“Never apologize, never explain… Dante taught me that.”
Yeah, I bet he did. “Just because he lives by that code, it doesn’t mean you have to.”
He slides his gun into the waistband of his jeans with an expression that’s set with russet stubble and stillness. “Don’t go thinking there’s some big fucking difference between me and him, Luna. We’re cut from the same red cloth, and we always will be.”
“I don’t agree.” You’re more. You’re so much more. You could be everything.
He grunts and shrugs. “Think what you like. I can shoot sicarios in the head for you, but I can’t protect you from the shit you tell yourself at night.” In one stride, he has his hand locked around my wrist. “Time to go.”
“I don’t think much about anything at night,” I say, trying to ignore the firecrackers go off under my skin. It’s intrinsic. Wanted. “I’m too busy hunting for my moon.”
He stops and turns, his shutters dropping for a split-second.
“What?” I say, but his expression is written in hieroglyphics.
“I don't have time to explain.” Gray-blues have frozen up again as he yanks me toward the back of the store.
“What about the body?”
“Gomez will sort it.”
“Gomez knows you’re here?” I say in surprise.
“The whole of fucking Colombia knows I’m here, thanks to you.” He leads me toward a restroom, through an open door to the side, and then out onto a path that leads us back out front. Stopping next to his car, he opens up the back door with a jerk.
“Get in. We don't have much time.”
“We need to wait for Vi!” I turn in her direction, but the payphone booth is empty.
“Where the fuck is she?” he roars, fists slamming down on the roof of the SUV.
“Here,” she says calmly.
A beat later, a second gunsh
ot is ringing out across the bloody Leticia sky.
22
Anna
My mother once told me that my first memory would have the strongest roots. She was always coming up with weird shit like that. She lived her whole life believing that a single event would have the ability to sprout seedlings when I least expected it—guiding judgements, inciting emotions, warming me with nostalgia in the lonely cold of dawn.
Mine turned out to be a hunting trip to Maryland with my father when I was five years old. Later, I would tell mom that I was the luckiest girl in the world to claim this as my first.
I lied.
I wasn’t lucky, and it wasn't special. It was dark, dirty and damaged, and I would grow to hate it like I did all the men who stole something precious from me. That day, I watched my father kill a stag, but his reckless bullet lodged deep inside me as well.
I can’t recall much of the day leading up to the kill shot, besides the scratchy feeling of his beard against my skin and the way my tiny hand slotted inside his. But when he cocked his Remington, with me hunkered down in the dirt next to him, my mind hit a flashing red record button.
I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be here; I wanted to be making cookies with mom or playing unicorns with Ria from next door. Most of all, I didn’t want my father to kill something that didn’t deserve to die. The stag hadn’t charged us or hurt us. He was targeted simply for being, and this made the memory of my father’s actions even more of a traitorous ruin.
I screamed when the bullet hit home. I cried as the stag circled and folded, as graceful in death as he had been in life— proud and defiant, and fighting the inevitable even as his heart stopped beating. I wanted so badly for him to get up and run. To fight back, even though I knew deep down in my five-year-old brain that some things couldn’t be brought back to life, no matter how badly you wanted it.
The memory isn’t a comfort. It lurks in the corners of my mind during the worst possible times—superseding love, all the Christmases, the trips to Disneyland California. Years later, when I was locked in a basement and forced to fuck five or six men a night, it mocked me like a sick perversion of karma.
Those men deserved to die, but they lived.
The stag deserved to live, and now he’s dying again in my arms.
The memory is all around me. It’s on the back seat of a car in an unfamiliar town, in an unfamiliar country; it’s cradling the head of a man in my lap, and pressing a fist to a wound that won’t stop pumping blood. It’s the surety that nothing is working, and that another is going to die, whether I beg or scream to a God we once both mocked each other for ignoring.
“Faster!” I scream at Vi.
“I’m trying!” she cries, guilt driving her foot to the floor, driving like a maniac.
The car gives another brutal jolt forward, and I hear him groan out. We’re doing sixty on dirt tracks where a slow crawl is a white-knuckled fairground ride. We’re still ten minutes out from her aunt’s place. There’s nowhere else to go. If I take Joseph to the local hospital, I’ll be condemning him to a different kind of death.
“Is there another route?” I say desperately. “A highway or something?”
“This is the fucking Amazon, Anna! It’s not the sunshine coast!” She’s crying as well. My pain is her pain—that’s how much our lives have merged in the last day. Grudges lose their power when their consequences are bleeding out in front of you. “Anna, I’m so sorry. I heard the gun go off in the store. I saw him dragging you into the restroom…”
I don’t blame her. I blame myself. I should have been honest… I shouldn't have been so intimidated by her hate. She wouldn’t have shot him if her process of deduction had been given a little more direction from me.
“This isn’t your fault, Vi.” I cradle his head in my arms, leaning over to check he’s still breathing. My tears rain down onto his bloody skin, their tracks leaving smears across his face. “Please don’t die,” I whisper, pouring what’s left of me into my plea. “I can't live without a shadow. It’s like asking me to live without a soul. Without you, there’s nothing to protect me from the darkness.”
His eyelids flicker. I feel his heavy hand on the back of my head, and then he’s crashing our lips together. He doesn’t taste of whiskey anymore. He tastes of pain, and something similar to that strange emotion I felt in the gas station store.
He breaks away and tries to speak. “Push harder,” he grits out, bringing his hand down on mine, the one that’s trying to stanch the bleeding. My motel towel is his tourniquet now. It’s more red than yellow; our spilled blood is as fused together as the rest of us.
We hit another pothole in the road and he groans in agony again, reeling off words that I don’t understand.
“I heard you, Cash,” he mutters. “I fucking ran like you told me to.”
I cradle him closer, hating how cold his skin feels. “I don’t understand, Joseph. Who’s Cash?”
Is this a relative? An old friend? It seems strange to think he had a life before crime.
His head falls sideways, and I know I’m losing him. I recall another story my mom used to tell me, about how a person’s memory bank is raided in their final moments.
Is that what’s happening here? Are these the names of the people he loved the most in his life? Are these the events that defined him?
I watch his lips part again.
“Caleb…”
Caleb?
“Díaz.”
Shit.
I watch his fingers tug at the silver chain around his neck. I’ve never noticed it before, but it has all of my attention when I see his bloody fist close around two gold wedding rings.
Joseph was married?
My self-control slips, and I let out a piercing, primal scream. I refuse to be this fucking useless to him. I refuse to let him die.
“Stop, Anna!” Vi slams her foot down on the brake and the car skids across the loose stones.
“Don't you fucking die on me, Joseph Grayson!” I scream again, pressing down on his wound so hard he’ll have no option but to feel me at the bottom of the dark well he’s fallen into. “You’re a sinner, but you saved me… You hear that, asshole? You fucking saved me. And I’m not talking about a cage in Amsterdam or a dark alleyway in Miami or a convenience store in Colombia. I’m talking about the fact that you gave a damn enough to be there in the first place. You never gave up on me. Hear that, shadow man? You were the only one, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to do the same to you now. Breathe. Just fucking breathe!” I collapse sobbing into the crook of his neck, willing him to climb back out of the well. At the same time, I feel his hand on the back of my head again before it’s sliding off, helpless.
A loud curse from the front seat has me tearing my eyes away from him.
“What is it?”
“It’s cool, parcera. I can handle it.”
She’s lying. The way she keeps looking in the rear-view mirror is sending a bucket of ice down my spine.
“Tell me!” I beg her.
She blows out a ragged breath and glances in the mirror again. “Okay, we’ve got company.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Swiping at my tears, I turn to see for myself. Three huge jeeps are darkening the horizon like a pack of shiny, black predators.
“Fernandez,” she deduces with a hiss. “They’re gaining on us and we’re still five minutes out.”
“Can we lose them?” I say urgently. “We don't have much time, Vi.”
Everywhere I look is crimson: the gray leather interior, the foot well, my clothes…my bloody handprints on the windows.
“Anna,” he mutters, and then I swear he says the word moon.
I lean over him again, pressing my forehead to his. “Tell me what to do, Joseph. I don’t know what to do.”
“Call him.”
“Not that, anything but that.” I glance at Vi again. I refuse to betray her twice.
“You have to. Don’t trust—” His voice gets swall
owed up by his pain as the first spray of bullets hits the trunk. “None of us are making it out alive otherwise.”
It’s not so much a rock and a hard place as the devil and his hellfire. I hate that man with every smashed-up part of me.
“Hold on!” I hear Vi yell. “I have an idea.”
The Colombian countryside is whizzing past us in a blur of green and brown, and then suddenly it’s gone. It takes me a beat to realize we’re driving through an open field, with the SUV’s suspension creaking and rocking to the uneven terrain.
“Where the hell are we going, Vi? Where the fuck are you taking us?”
“We’re approaching the north side of Emilio Santiago’s former estate… Just trust me, okay? I know what I’m doing.”
Emilio… As in the devil’s dead brother?
I open my mouth to contradict her when a cell phone gets pressed into my hand. It’s slick with sweat and blood. It’s a temptation I never wanted.
“Call him,” coughs Joseph, his face creasing up as he tries to get a handle on the pain. Another spray of bullets peppers the back windshield, leaving ugly pockmarks in the bulletproof glass.
I open up the cell and see a single number saved in the phone book. My finger hovers over the green dial button as Joseph’s head rolls sideways again. I can't believe I’m even considering this. But that’s what happens when someone who breathed life into your soul is fighting like hell to take one breath for himself.
The world tilts.
The black curtain gets tossed aside.
And that decision I thought was so hard…?
It’s turns out to be the easiest one I ever made.
23
Dante
She slices through the water like my blade through bone, her golden skin glistening with sunshine and happiness. She makes me hard just watching her. Who the fuck am I kidding? Everything about her makes me hard, not least her determination and drive. Six months ago, she couldn't swim, and now she’s almost as good as me.
Shadow Man: Grayson Duet: Book One Page 13
