The blow he’d taken to the groin wasn’t helping him recover from his incredulity at Charles’s appearance, either. What the fuck was he doing here?
Ángel watched as Charles tried to draw his gun, only to be thrown off-balance when Jesenia began pelting him with objects from nearby tables—ketchup bottles, saltshakers, sugar canisters. Charles had to lift both hands to protect his face from the constant barrage.
Jesenia’s own gun had gone . . . somewhere. They’d both lost their grip on it when Charles surprised them, but it had to be nearby.
Spotting the familiar shape under one of the tables, Ángel marshaled his strength and shuffled over on his hands and knees, retrieving the Glock with a trembling arm. It didn’t do him much good though—he didn’t have a clear shot at Jesenia, and with his hands in their current state, it was all he could do to hold the goddamn thing anyway.
Charles gave up on his own gun and let out a frustrated shout, rushing forward to close the distance between himself and Jesenia. He grabbed her when she tried to dodge and shoved her up against the edge of a table, getting in a few good blows to her face and stomach, his fists driving into her body with sickening thuds.
Ángel pushed himself onto one knee, but that was as far as he got before a wave of dizziness overtook him. He steadied himself and straightened up, doing his best to wrap his hands properly around the Glock. This was the only way he could help now; he’d be nothing but a liability if he tried to rejoin the fight. But it wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t get his fucking hands to work.
Charles drew his arm back for a game-ending punch. But as his fist flew toward Jesenia’s face, she smacked his arm sideways and darted in the opposite direction to counterattack with a brutal punch to Charles’s cheekbone. She slid smoothly around him, grabbed the nape of his neck, and slammed his forehead into the Formica table.
Ángel flinched at the horrifying crunch that echoed through the diner.
Holding Charles’s stupefied body in place against the table, Jesenia snatched up the metal napkin holder and reared back—God, she was going to smash in Charles’s head—
Ángel raised the gun and fired.
The bullet traveled through Jesenia’s shoulder and cracked into the plate glass window beyond. She screamed, toppling off Charles to collapse on the floor, but her scream was lost in Ángel’s own as the gun recoiled against his damaged hands. He dropped it immediately and hunched forward, clutching his hands to his stomach.
Even as Ángel gasped through the agony, he watched Charles slump to his knees, clinging to the edge of the table. A few seconds later, Charles turned around—wobbling like a drunk, but at least he was conscious.
Charles reached out for Jesenia, who lay sprawled on the floor with her eyes shut, and felt for her pulse. Then he grabbed a pair of handcuffs off his belt and snapped them around her wrists.
Ángel hadn’t killed her, then. Jesenia was still alive—for now.
Charles lurched to his feet, staggered, and made his unsteady way toward Ángel, where he fell onto his knees again. “Ángel,” he said, cupping Ángel’s face with both hands. He wiped the blood away from Ángel’s nose and mouth.
“Charles,” said Ángel.
Wrapping him in a bone-crushing hug, Charles buried his face in the crook of Ángel’s neck. Ángel slumped against him and let Charles take his weight, even though Charles was shaking as badly as he was.
“It’s okay,” Charles said. “I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay.”
Over Charles’s shoulder, Ángel watched the blood pooling from Jesenia’s motionless body seep across the linoleum floor.
“No,” he said quietly. “I won’t.”
“How’s the pain?” asked the resident who was stitching up Ángel’s hands.
“It’s fine,” said Ángel, his blank eyes fixed on the opposite wall.
When the resident shot Charles a concerned glance, he nodded for her to continue and rubbed one hand up and down Ángel’s back. Ángel had refused a local anesthetic, and his terrified reaction to the proffered needle had been his first and only real emotional response since they’d left the diner. Once they’d calmed him down, neither Charles nor the resident had argued with him about it, wary of provoking him again.
The ambulance had whisked them away from the diner to the nearest community hospital, where the ER physician had checked out Charles’s head and concluded that no treatment was necessary, so long as he was monitored closely for the next twenty-four hours. Charles cared little about his own injury—all of his focus was on Ángel, from whom he refused to be separated. None of the hospital staff had objected.
Ángel himself was in better physical condition than Charles had feared. His nose was bruised but not broken, and the scratches on his feet had only needed cleaning and bandaging. His hands were another story though—he’d torn them to shreds on broken glass trying to escape, then ripped the wounds open further with everything he’d done afterward.
Broken glass. Charles was sick with rage just imagining it.
He wasn’t sure he should even be touching Ángel like this, but whenever he backed off, thinking it might be too much, Ángel swayed toward him in silent entreaty. So Charles remained by Ángel’s side, stroking his hair and back, watching with morbid fascination as the resident carefully sewed the horrific gashes in Ángel’s hands back together.
Ángel didn’t so much as flinch throughout the entire procedure. There were moments when Charles doubted Ángel was aware of what was happening at all; he had the same empty, disconnected expression on his face he’d had after they found Warner’s body. From the few jumbled sentences Ángel had spoken in the ambulance, Charles had worked out that Ángel was still under the influence of some kind of drug, which couldn’t be helping his tendency to dissociate in the aftermath of trauma.
Once the resident had finished placing bandages over Ángel’s stitches, she said, “You’re going to have trouble using your hands for a while, and you’ll need to have the sutures removed in about seven to twelve days. Follow-up care for hand injuries like these is really important, okay?”
Ángel didn’t respond. Charles nudged him gently.
“Uh-huh,” Ángel said.
“Go ahead and take these for now,” the resident said, holding out a small plastic cup, “and I’ll write you a—”
“What is that?” Ángel interrupted, snapping to sudden attention. He stared at the cup as if it were a loaded gun.
“Tylenol.”
Ángel jerked backward, the paper beneath him rustling as he pressed himself against Charles. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the same thing you’d get at the drugstore—” the bewildered resident began.
“You could be lying.” His voice ragged with fear, Ángel twisted around to look up at Charles. “That’s how she took me, she tricked me and she knocked me out and—and she had a needle, she said she’d do it again if I didn’t cooperate—”
“Nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” Charles said, holding Ángel by both shoulders and looking him in the eye. “We talked about this before. You know you’re in a hospital, right?”
Ángel nodded tightly. A muscle in his jaw jumped with stress.
“And you remember they can’t force you to accept treatment you don’t want?”
“Yeah,” Ángel said. Some of the panic receded from his face, and his breathing evened out.
“If you don’t want to take the pills, you’re not gonna take them,” said Charles. “That’s all there is to it.”
The last time Charles had genuinely wanted to kill another human being, he’d been a child watching news reports on the arrest and trial of the cokehead gangbangers who’d shot up the convenience store where his parents had been caught in the crossfire. If Jesenia didn’t die from Ángel’s bullet, Charles would be sorely tempted to finish the job himself.
The resident, who’d watched their exchange with wide, sympathetic eyes, said, “What if th
e nurse gave you a sealed bottle from the pharmacy instead?”
“Thank you,” Ángel said, already shutting down again.
“I’ll ask her to bring it in when she goes over your discharge instructions. It shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.” The resident reached out to Ángel, hesitated, and dropped her arm before she made contact. “Take it easy on those hands.”
She slipped through the curtains that partitioned them from the other ER patients. A few minutes in ER lingo could mean a half hour or more, so Charles snagged the rolling stool the resident had been using and wheeled it over beside Ángel to sit on it himself. His headache was starting to get the better of him.
After several moments of silence punctuated only by the background noises of a bustling ER, Ángel said, “Is she dead?”
“I don’t know,” Charles said. Jesenia had still been alive when her ambulance reached the hospital, but that was the last he’d heard.
“Would you tell me if she was?”
“Of course I would. But they won’t tell me; you know that. We’ll have to hear it from Ed.”
“What if she dies?” Ángel said, gazing down at the thick, pure-white bandages swaddling his hands. “I’ve never killed anyone before. What if I have to spend the rest of my life knowing I killed someone I once considered a good friend?”
As harrowing as the stalking and abduction had been, it was Jesenia’s bone-deep betrayal that made her crimes particularly heinous. She’d deceived Ángel completely, cultivated his trust and friendship, and then used those things to harm him. Charles could barely begin to comprehend the monstrosity of it.
“I don’t know what to say,” Charles said, figuring blunt honesty was the best policy. It would be a refreshing change from their usual mode of communication, anyway.
“I do. I know exactly what to say to someone in my situation.” Ángel’s eyes were unfocused, dreamy. “It wasn’t my fault. She was going to kill us both, and I had to shoot her. I couldn’t have known she was the stalker. Nothing I did or didn’t do encouraged her obsession with me, and I’m not responsible for her actions. It’s not my fault.”
Ángel closed his eyes. When he opened them again and looked at Charles, he was abruptly, painfully present.
“I know in my head those things are true,” he said. “But they don’t feel true, Charles. It is my fault. All of the things she did, the people she killed—she did those things because of me. And I had no idea. For two years, I missed every sign there must have been along the way. I trusted her, I . . . I liked her . . .”
Charles squeezed Ángel’s knee, cutting off his distressed rambling. “It isn’t your fault. I know you know that, but I’ll say it as many times as you need to hear it to believe it with more than just your head.”
“If she dies, she’ll have made me a killer,” Ángel said. He looked not one bit reassured. “And if she lives, then one day I’ll have to get up in front of a room full of strangers and tell them what she did to me, with her watching me the whole time. I can’t do that, Charles, I can’t—”
He started shaking, his voice cracking with anxiety. Charles pulled him close and rubbed his back again, letting Ángel lean heavily against him. Because how else could he help, really?
Ángel pulled himself together when the nurse came in with his discharge paperwork, and took the acetaminophen she handed him without complaint—though he did inspect the pills first. Since neither Charles nor Ángel could drive in their conditions, a state police officer had offered to drive them home in Eva’s car and catch a ride back. Charles escorted a listless Ángel out of the hospital and sat in the middle of the backseat so they could stay close.
After half an hour on the road, Ángel fell asleep, slumped on Charles’s shoulder. Charles kept himself awake by picturing all the creative ways he’d enjoy hurting Jesenia for subjecting Ángel to this nightmare.
They pulled up the driveway of Eva’s charming suburban house shortly after sunrise. She waited for them on the porch, wrapped in a thick robe and cradling a mug in her hands.
The state cop stayed in the car while Charles walked Ángel to the door. It would have been more efficient for him to drop Charles off first, because he’d have to bring the car back here later, but Charles hadn’t wanted to leave Ángel alone with a stranger.
“Hey,” Eva said as they climbed the front steps. She smoothed a gentle hand from Ángel’s shoulder to his elbow. “It’s good to have you back.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re going to stay with Eva for a while,” Charles said. Then, realizing how insensitive it was to give orders to someone who’d recently been abducted and held captive, he added, “If that’s okay with you.”
“Yeah, of course,” said Ángel.
“I’ll see you later, then.” Charles turned to step off the porch.
Ángel caught his arm. “You’re not staying too?”
Striving for a lighthearted tone, he said, “Three kids—kind of crowded.”
“You have a concussion,” Ángel said, rallying for the first time in hours. “You can’t be alone; you need somebody to watch you—”
“I’m going to Sakura’s.” Charles pressed a kiss to Ángel’s cheek, lingering for a moment with their faces close together, loath to pull away. “I’ll see you soon. Get some sleep, okay?”
Charles nodded to Eva and hurried down the steps before he could give in to the temptation to insist on staying behind and sitting vigil by Ángel’s bedside.
Ángel woke up in a lush purple room with fairies on the wall.
He blinked a few times, his vision blurred with sleep and confusion, before he remembered that he was in one of Eva’s daughters’ bedrooms. It was decorated with an enchanted woodland theme—very Midsummer Night’s Dream—including a beautiful mural of dancing, smiling fairies that took up an entire wall.
Ángel lay in the small twin bed for a long time just staring at the mural, picking out every detail. Eventually, the pain and itching in his hands grew bothersome enough to force him upright. He reached for the bloodstained clothes he’d dropped on the floor last night—early that morning, rather—only to find them missing.
A fresh set of clothing had been set out on the dresser. They were his own clothes too, ones he’d brought to Charles’s apartment after he’d retrieved them from the moving van with—
Ángel jerked violently away from the memory and heaved himself out of bed.
Dressing was a laborious and painful process, given his fucked-up hands, but he persevered. Relying on his vague recollections from earlier, Ángel shuffled out of the bedroom and down the stairs, making his way to a spacious, airy kitchen with pale-gold walls and white woodwork.
“Good morning,” Eva said from the kitchen table, though the clock on the oven read 12:53.
“Morning.” Ángel hovered behind one of the chairs, feeling awkward. Eva’s kids must have left hours ago for school, her husband for work; he hadn’t met any of them when he came in. He barely knew Eva herself, when it came down to it.
“Do you want some coffee?” Eva asked.
The words struck such a deep nerve that Ángel doubled over, grabbing the back of the chair for support. For a few dizzying seconds, he was back in that motel room, drinking Jesenia’s drugged coffee like a naïve, trusting idiot—
Eva jumped to her feet and rushed to his side, putting a hand on his back. “What’s wrong? Do you feel sick?”
“No, I . . .” Trying for subtlety—and failing miserably—Ángel slipped sideways to evade her touch. “I’m fine. Sorry.”
She backed off, returning to her seat, and studied his face for a moment. “The machine’s over there if you’re interested,” she said. “It takes K-cups, so it shouldn’t be too rough on your hands.”
“Thank you,” Ángel said, grateful that she wasn’t the type to push.
He followed Eva’s directions to make and pour himself a cup of coffee, then joined her at the table. After Ángel had taken a few sips, Eva set her tab
let aside and said, “Ed called me a couple of hours ago.”
Every muscle in Ángel’s body clenched tight. He couldn’t bring himself to look up.
“Jesenia made it through surgery,” said Eva. “She’s in critical condition, but she is stable.”
“Oh,” Ángel said. He traced his thumb around the rim of his mug. “Good.”
He didn’t regret shooting Jesenia, not when the alternative would have been Charles’s death, but he was glad she’d survived—or, more precisely, he was glad he hadn’t killed her.
“You’ll need to go into the office to be debriefed, but you can put that off for a day or two if you’d rather.”
Ángel shook his head and pushed the mug away, no longer able to stomach the coffee. “No, I just want to get it over with. Can we go today?”
“Sure. Let me know when you’re ready.”
It was no surprise to Ángel that Eva and Charles got along so well; they had the same aura of calm, gave the same impression that they couldn’t be flustered or discomposed. Of course, no human being was one hundred percent unflappable—Charles certainly wasn’t—but Ángel found that steady presence reassuring nonetheless.
Eva drove Ángel to the office shortly afterward and walked with him to Ed Campos’s office, her icy glare fending off well-wishers and nosy busybodies alike. She left him at the door with a murmured, “Good luck,” and Ángel breathed deeply before letting himself inside.
“Ángel,” Campos said, greeting him with a broad smile. “Come on in.”
“I need to take a leave of absence,” Ángel said. He couldn’t take one more step without making that clear.
Campos nodded and gestured to the empty chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat. Let’s talk.”
Ángel emerged from the building a few hours later. He paused at the top of the steps, bandaged hands shoved into his pockets, and realized that he had no idea what to do next.
He had no home base, no job demanding his presence, no family he had any desire to speak to again. No commitments, zero obligations.
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