by Kieran Scott
“I got dibs!” she announced, and closed the door.
I collapsed facedown on the nearest bed, then smelled the comforter, and rolled onto my back, coughing out the stench. Marco stared at me.
“So, what’re your intentions with my niece?”
My heart thumped. The water turned on inside the bathroom, so at least Kaia couldn’t hear this conversation. “My intentions? At this point? To keep her alive.”
“What about after that?” Marco asked, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“What do you mean? Like, am I going to marry her?” I asked. “We’re seventeen.”
Obviously I’m going to marry her.
“Look, kid. Her heart’s already been broken wide open, so I wanna know if you’re gonna break it even more.”
“No. Are you kidding? If anything, she’s gonna break mine,” I said.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could swallow them back. This was what came of total exhaustion—my brain was having a hard time keeping up with my mouth.
“What makes you say that?” Marco asked.
I pushed myself off the mattress and walked toward the window, my leg muscles screaming. The parking lot was full of cars, but there was no one in sight. “Look, man. We’re going to find her mom. Once they’re reunited, the two of them will go off together, right? Back to Houston or somewhere else. Where am I supposed to fit in to that picture?”
“Hey. I heard the girl promise she’d never leave your sorry ass. You think she’s gonna abandon you after that?” Marco asked, sounding offended. “You think she’d renege on a promise? It’s not in her DNA.”
I looked down at the floor, and my heart felt heavy. Kaia and I could make all the romantic promises to each other that we wanted, but it didn’t change reality. What was I going to do? Go live with Kaia and her mom wherever they settled down? Somehow I had a feeling that wasn’t going to fly. Whose parents wanted their daughter to have a live-in boyfriend?
“I’m not sure she’s gonna have a choice,” I said.
chapter 30
KAIA
When I woke up, the leather glove over my mouth was also covering my nostrils. I tried to drag in a breath, but no air would come. The man’s scar gleamed in the moonlight, exactly as it had in my dreams.
“Shhhhh!” he whispered, bringing his face so close to mine I could count his eyelashes. “You make a noise, and the boys are dead.”
His eyes trailed to my left. I turned my head, his hand still smothering me, to see that his friend—the same man Oliver had leveled at the gas station on Friday night—had a nasty semi-automatic trained on Oliver’s chest. My vision blurred with tears, and my body started to convulse. Scarface took his hand away and I sucked in oxygen as quietly as possible.
“Now let’s go,” Scarface whispered.
He grabbed the back of my shirt at the neckline and dragged me out of bed. My bad foot touched the ground, sending a bolt of pain up my leg. I had to bite my tongue to keep from crying out. I cast one desperate look back at Oliver and Marco as Scarface shoved me outside. They were both sleeping soundly. Scarface’s thug closed the door with a quiet click and I was flung toward the parking lot.
“Move,” Scarface said, drawing out his own gun and pointing it at my feet, one of which I held off the ground.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“My name is Tomas,” he said. “I am a friend of your mother’s. Now move, before you lose a toe.”
I turned and started limping. The air was cool, but adrenaline was making me sweat even in nothing but my socks, shorts, and T-shirt. Up ahead, his buddy opened the door of a black Audi and got behind the wheel.
“You’re no friend of my mother’s,” I spat, my uncertainty bitter on my tongue. What the hell did I know about my mother? At this point, I would have believed almost anything about her.
The man smirked. “All right, if I’m being truthful, I’m more of a friend of her husband, Hector Tinquera. He is the man who hired me to bring you home to her.”
“What?” I asked breathlessly, whirling to face him. “You know where my mother is?”
He snorted. “You don’t understand anything, do you? I’m the one who brought her to Hector.”
“Wait. Wait!” I shouted as we reached the trunk of his car. His friend got out again, sensing trouble I’m sure, and I balanced on my good leg, stalling as best I could. “Why would you bring me to my mother? She doesn’t want to be found.”
Scarface’s dark eyes flashed, and I knew I’d revealed too much.
“Hector T. wants you dead,” Scarface said. “You’re the illegitimate daughter from an illegitimate marriage. But he loves his wife, and he thought he might give Marissa one last chance to see you, one last chance to say good-bye—before he slits your throat.”
The truth hit me like a punch to the gut, and I choked on my own breath. This was why my mother didn’t want me to come after her. Because she knew what Hector Tinquera wanted to do to me. She was trying to protect me. And I’d ignored her, playing right into his hands.
Mom. Mom, I’m so sorry.
“Now. Get. In. The. Car.”
I pulled back and spat in the man’s face as hard and as messily as I could. The man drew a knife on me so quickly I barely had time to flinch before the blade was digging into my stomach.
“Or maybe I will gut you now…”
A shot rang out. Scarface flinched, and then Oliver barreled in out of nowhere, tackling him to the ground with a growl so fierce I couldn’t believe it had come from him.
“Oliver!” I screamed.
Scarface kneed Oliver in the gut and Oliver fell sideways onto the asphalt. The man reached for his knife, which had fallen aside on impact, but I gripped the side mirror to keep my balance and kicked it under the car away from him.
“Bitch!” Scarface spat. “You’re going to wish you were never born!”
Oliver sprung up behind him. Scarface turned and Oliver backhanded him across the cheek. The man retaliated by slamming Oliver against the next car. He pulled back a fist, and I lunged at him, grabbing his arm, and tried to pull him away from Oliver, but he simply elbowed me in the nose. I heard a crunch, and my vision blurred.
“Kaia!” Oliver shouted, as I went down—hard—on my ass. I pulled my hands away from my face. They were dripping with blood and I couldn’t breathe through my nostrils.
“You sonofa—”
Scarface laughed at me, then tilted his head, just in time to see Oliver jump up and pile drive him, crashing an elbow into his jaw from above. Scarface’s eyes rolled back in his skull as he fell. His cheek hit the curb between the cars with a sickening crack. His body slumped at an unnatural angle, his neck snapped.
Scarface was dead.
“Oliver!” I pushed my battered body off the ground and flung myself into his arms. He held me so tightly I could feel his ribs pressed against mine.
“I thought you promised never to leave me again,” he joked, pushing my hair back from my face. He winced at the sight of all the blood. “Damn. Is it broken?”
“My nose? Who cares about my nose? You saved my life!”
Oliver swallowed hard and looked down at the corpse of the man who had haunted my dreams for a year.
“I owed you one,” he said bravely, though I could see the terror in his eyes as the reality sunk in.
“Kids?”
We both looked over the top of the car. Marco was barely holding the half-dead weight of Scarface’s driver. Blood poured out of a bullet wound in his chest, near his shoulder.
The gunshot. I’d heard a gunshot right before Oliver had taken Scarface down. Marco must have shot the driver. Behind him, lights were flicking on in some of the motel windows, and an elderly man poked his head out, as if checking to see if the coast was clear.
“We gotta move,” Marco said.
Oliver and I locked gazes. I could see the adrenaline overcoming his uncertainty.
“I’ll get our stuff,” he said.
“I’ll help Marco,” I replied.
“No.” Oliver squeezed my shoulder. “You’re half-dressed with a twisted ankle and possibly a broken nose. Get in the backseat and put your foot up. I’ll take care of everything.”
It was against my nature to let other people do things for me, but for once, I realized I was useless. Blood was dripping all over my shirt, and my ankle felt like every tendon inside of it had been torn free. I opened the car door and crawled into the backseat. There was a sweatshirt on the floor, which I balled up under my nose.
In moments, Oliver was back with our bags and a plastic cup filled with ice. Marco had managed to maneuver Scarface’s partner—whom we were apparently kidnapping—into the front seat. I cast one mournful look out the window at Big Betty and Bettina, hoping that I’d get back to reclaim them before they were stolen or impounded. But even if I didn’t, they’d done us proud. And if there was one thing I’d learned from a life on the road, it was not to get attached to material things. I reached up and touched my mom’s locket. I had everything that truly mattered in my heart.
Oliver climbed in the backseat and used what looked like a pillowcase to gingerly clean up my nose.
“Ow,” I muttered.
He winced. “Sorry.”
Marco got behind the wheel and peeled out of the parking lot. I stared at Scarface’s limp body as we pulled away. A few motel patrons stood outside their rooms now, and I saw one with a phone to her ear. I just hoped the cops in this town weren't too quick on the uptake.
“I can’t even imagine what I look like,” I said to Oliver, trying to focus on anything other than what had happened out there.
“You’re beautiful,” he replied.
Yeah, right, I thought.
Oliver looked out the window. “You’re alive,” he said. “And that’s all that matters.”
18 MONTHS AGO
I wrapped my last fake passport in an old T-shirt and shoved it deep into the garbage can inside the airport bathroom in Charleston, South Carolina. Outside, the sky was gray, the air thick with humidity. The cab driver gave me an odd look as I got into the back of his car and rested Sophia across my lap, but I didn’t bother to wonder why. Maybe he simply knew sorrow when he saw it.
Outside the window, everything blurred. How was it possible that I was in a world without my parents? Where were they? Was there any chance they were alive? I reached up and touched my mother’s locket. I had to hold on to hope. Someday I would see my parents again. I had to believe or I wouldn’t survive.
Ten minutes or an hour later, the car pulled up in front of a small, blue house with a big, white porch. In the distance, the Atlantic Ocean rippled in the sun. I shouldered my bag and paid the driver. I stared at the front door. Nothing had ever seemed so foreign to me. This was my new home.
I pushed open the gate and slowly walked up the steps to the porch. The door creaked open before I could knock or ring the bell. A woman of about sixty with grayish-brown hair and a yellow sweater smiled kindly at me.
“You must be Kaia. I’m Bess.”
A man stepped up behind her. He was tall, with a paunch of a belly and a sharp look in his eye.
“This is Henry,” she said.
“Hello,” he said. I recognized his voice. I’d heard it over the line from the pay phone in Oaxaca.
“Hi,” I replied.
“Oh, hon,” Bess said. “Welcome home.”
She enveloped me in her arms. She smelled of roses and freshly kneaded dough. I hugged her back and tried to feel a connection, tried to feel relief, tried to feel safe.
But the only thing I was, the only thing I’d ever be, was numb.
chapter 31
OLIVER
“Pull over here,” Marco demanded, as we passed by a sign for the Joshua Tree National Park. He was sitting in the back seat with Scarface’s partner slumped next to him groaning intermittently.
“What? Why?” I asked.
“It’s time I interrogate our prisoner here,” Marco answered, “before he passes out for good.”
I glanced at Kaia, a chill rushing down my arms. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but she’d sprouted yellow bruises under her eyes, which seemed both tired and alarmed. Marco had already explained that we’d taken Scarface’s sidekick to keep the authorities off our tails and to get some info out of him about the security at Hector Tinquera’s place. What Marco hadn’t explained was what he intended to do with the man after he got said information.
This was something I’d spent the last eight hours or so trying not to think about.
I found a parking space as far away from the visitor’s center as possible. When I killed the engine, the only sound was the man panting for breath.
“Why don’t you two go get him some water?” Marco suggested gruffly. “And take the scenic route.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means give me at least fifteen minutes,” Marco snapped. “Now go!”
I shoved open the door and practically fell out onto the hot blacktop. Maybe I was a coward, but I didn’t want to know what Marco was about to do, and I definitely didn’t want to be around to witness it. Kaia limped around the front of the car and into my waiting arms. I kissed the top of her head and held her, feeling her exhaustion meld with mine. Then we heard the man in the car moan loudly and we pulled apart.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked.
Kaia looked green, but nodded. “We have to know what we’re getting into.”
There was a thump and a whimper. “No, no! Don’t!”
My stomach turned. If I stayed one second longer, I was going to try to stop Marco, which would probably result in a scene, which wouldn’t be good for any of us.
“Let’s go.”
We turned away from the car and, with our arms around each other’s backs, walked over to the visitor’s center. It looked like a hacienda, with stucco walls and western sculptures, surrounded by cacti and palm trees. Kaia and I navigated the crowds of happy families, keeping our heads down. We caught some curious and disturbed glances, Kaia with her facial bruising and limp, me with her blood down the front of my shirt, but no one held eye contact for long. After grabbing a few bottles of cold water from a vending machine, we wandered back outside and up a slight, dusty slope. The sun was high in the sky, beating down on the desert terrain and the blue mountains in the distance.
Kaia opened one of the water bottles, and sat down on a wide, flat rock. I settled in next to her as she took a sip, then passed me the bottle.
“So…how are you feeling?” she asked.
“Me? What about you?” I looked at her nose and scrunched my own. “That looks like it hurts.”
“Only in the most literal sense of the word,” she joked, taking the bottle back when I offered it. “But seriously, you…you killed someone. You killed Scarface.”
My stomach turned and I looked away, staring at a particularly gnarly cactus a few yards off.
“Yeah, I guess I did.” A lump formed in my throat and I quickly swallowed it down. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Not remorse. Not sympathy. The man was scum, and he’d been trying to kidnap the love of my life. “You saved my life, so I saved yours. Even Stephen.”
Kaia looked down at her water bottle.
“That’s all you were doing that day in Oaxaca, Kaia,” I said. “You were saving your life. And your mom’s.”
“Yeah, but it turns out I wasn’t. It turns out the guys who were after us wanted her alive all along.”
“They clearly didn’t care that much if they shot the hell out of your room without knowing where you guys were inside of it,” I pointed
out. I reached for the bottle and took another swig. “This Hector T. guy claims to love your mother? He sure has a funny way of showing it.”
Kaia sighed and leaned back on her hands. “This is true. I kind of can’t wait to meet the guy.”
Something inside me snapped at her casual tone. “You do realize how insane this is, right? The guy wants you dead and we’re going to…what? Walk up to his front door and ring the bell?”
“No. Hopefully we’ll have a better plan once Marco is done with his interrogation.”
We both looked off in the direction of our vehicle—Scarface’s Audi. It looked so normal there in the parking lot. Like nothing out of the ordinary was going on in the backseat.
“This is crazy. Up until a week ago, I’d never broken a single law in my life,” I said, trying to tamp down the tentacles of unease and disgust snaking their way through my chest. “Now I’ve shoplifted and killed a guy. Also I think we may be aiding and abetting torture, just FYI.”
As if she didn’t know. But I felt like someone needed to actually say it.
Kaia reached for my hand and squeezed. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“I really don’t see how.” I put the bottle aside and drew her hand into my lap. “Forget about everything we’ve already done; we’re going up against a career criminal. What if he hurts you? What if he—”
“Oliver, I know he’s a bad guy,” Kaia said. “But he has my mother. And I know she’s not there because she wants to be. She’s being held hostage. That’s the only explanation. We have to get her out of there.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. It was fear. No, terror. Terror that this adventure of ours was not going to end well. That this—right here, on this stupid rock with the sun blaring down—might be the last time Kaia and I would ever be alone together.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you,” I said. “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t.”
