A Broken Vow: Inked Angels MC

by Zoey Parker

  Until the knock at the door.

  I hurl myself away at the fist pounding on the other side of the rickety wood. The voice coming through is too muffled to identify. My skin is crawling with anxiety. There’s nothing as horrifying as being unpleasantly surprised right when you thought you were beginning to calm down.

  “Who is it?” I yelp through a throat choked and dry. “Leave me alone!” I can feel my hands trembling.

  More indistinct mumbling.

  “Go away!” I repeat. “I don’t want to talk to anyone!”

  My heart is pummeling my sternum. Boom, boom, pumping fight or flight chemicals through my bloodstream like flocks of frightened birds. Every muscle in me wants to spring away, to jump through the window or bust clean through the far wall and run until I can’t run anymore. But my brain knows full well that I’m trapped in here. Whoever it is, they aren’t leaving.

  I force myself to take a deep inhale and let the oxygen rush through my body. The tremors ease slightly. I steel myself, stand up, and walk over to the door. Pressing my eye against the peephole, I look out into the distorted world beyond. When I see who it is, the tension seeps out of my body. I quickly wipe the stained tears from my face and try to rub the red out of my eyes.

  I slide the deadbolt free, unhook the chain, and open the door. A hunched, frail old man is standing on the doorstep with a friendly smile beaming from his face. “Come in, Señor Ramon,” I say. My voice is crackling with exhaustion. He shuffles in. When he’s all the way inside, I shut the door and lock it again.

  Ramon cups my hand between his. “Rose, how are you, cariño?” he asks in a soft, lisped tone. His hands on mine are warm and wrinkled.

  I lean down and kiss him on the cheek. “I’m okay, Ramon. Can I get you anything?”

  “No, no, por favor, no,” he says, wriggling his jowls adorably. He’s a cute old man if I’ve ever seen one.

  “You look thirsty,” I insist. “Let me grab you a glass of water.” Ignoring his protests, I pace to the cramped kitchenette and fill a cup with water from the sink. I press it into his hands as I pull out a chair from the desk and indicate for him to sit. He sighs, groaning as he eases into the seat.

  “This body does not work as well as it once did,” he says with a laugh. His eyes are rich with a jovial twinkle. In all the years he has been my landlord, I’ve never seen him without a smile.

  “You don’t look a day over twenty,” I tell him, trying my best to joke and be normal, despite the quaking fear that even now is curdling in my stomach. I can’t seem to shake it.

  Ramon clutches his belly as he chuckles. “Too sweet, dear,” he says. “Sit, won’t you?” He pats the bed next to him.

  I look around the apartment. It’s tiny, hardly enough for one person to move around in comfortably. Meager kitchenette in one corner, shower in the other, a rickety desk shoved against the wall, with barely enough room between it and the bed to wedge a salvaged chair. The few things I own are scattered around the floor or draped over the furniture. I flush slightly, embarrassed for someone else to see how little I have, even if it is only Ramon.

  I focus my eyes on him and try to smile, but I can’t quite get it right. The smile feels clumsy, like it’s a motion I’ve never tried before. I can see in the worried flash of his eyes that he knows something is wrong.

  “Let me get you the rent,” I tell him. I should have known he would come here today. He’s never late. I turn around and pick up my purse from the floor where I had dropped it. Plucking my wallet from inside, I count out the cash I owe for the apartment. There’s not much left when I’m finished.

  I spin back towards Ramon. I don’t want to look at him, don’t want him to see the unhappiness brewing in my eyes. My eyes stay fixed on the floor at his feet as I offer him the cash in my hand.

  The sound of the bills crinkling lightly against each other seems so loud and obvious. My hands are shaking wildly, uncontrollably.

  Ramon reaches for the bills, but instead of taking them, he takes hold of my hand again. “Rose,” he says in his velvet voice. “Is everything okay?” His brows are knitted together in concern.

  I pause just a moment too long while I try to come up with an excuse. I open my mouth, but no words come out. The wrinkles on Ramon’s forehead deepen.

  “Rose, amor, please sit.” He takes my hand into his lap as I collapse on the bed next to him.

  I can’t help it—the tears come back, as thick and relentless as they were before. Ramon says nothing, just holds my hand between his own and waits patiently for the storm to subside. I hiccup and sob, my whole body racking with the remnant fear forcing its way out of my nostrils. It takes a long time, but this second panic attack passes, leaving me just as whimpering and wrecked as the first.

  “Is it Carlos?” Ramon asks quietly.

  Carlos. It’s funny how, for someone I haven’t heard from nor seen in over two years, he comes up so often. Everyone in El Cruce reminds me of him. They all have the same dark shadow flitting across their face if you sneak a peek at them when their guard is down. Like looking inside a haunted house when the wind blows the curtain open, only to see scary, broken things. The only difference between Carlos and the run-of-the-mill gangsters in El Cruce is that his shadow was magnitudes darker.

  I think about the last time I saw him. There was not a single remarkable thing about that day. He had dropped me off at work, too distracted to even say goodbye. I’d climbed out of the car, he’d peeled off. And that was that. Neither hide nor hair of him since. Such an inscrutable end to an inscrutable marriage. He was not a good husband, to say the least.

  “No. I haven’t seen Carlos in more than twelve months,” I tell Ramon.

  “He was hanging with men he should not have been around,” Ramon says. For such a kind man, his voice is stern. He’s right, of course. Carlos was a bartender, nothing more. He told me he came from a small town to the west and that his parents were dead. He didn’t like to talk about them very much. He didn’t like to talk about anything from the past, really. Carlos preferred to do simple things, like watch soccer on TV or borrow a bike from the neighbor and take a long ride on the outskirts of town when his shifts at the bar had been long and hard on him.

  But he’d had his weird habits, too, things that didn’t click with the mundanity of his day-to-day existence, with the normal, simple man that he was. He disappeared once, about six months after we’d been married. He was supposed to pick me up from work but never showed. It wasn’t like him to simply not come. He was as dependable as clockwork. Until he wasn’t.

  Two days went by without a peep from him. No one knew where he’d gone, not his boss at the bar nor Ramon. He’d quietly traded away his shifts to a fellow bartender and vanished into thin air. I was dumbfounded at the time. It was hard to even be upset, because it was just so unlike him. It didn’t fit with what I knew about Carlos.

  So, when he’d returned just as suddenly as he disappeared two days earlier and refused to talk about it, the only logical thing to do had been to forget the whole thing. I did exactly that. Just let it go. We never discussed it again.

  That came easier for me than it would for people who didn’t understand my hometown. In El Cruce, girls like me don’t ask questions. It never leads to anything good. We keep our heads down, smile, and try to stay away from the men who wield the guns. That is best for everyone. It minimizes the bloodshed.

  Forgetting where Carlos had gone was natural. I didn’t ask, he didn’t tell, and that was the end of it.

  But I couldn’t help noticing that something about him had changed. He had always been a guarded man, ever since the day he had first wandered into the bar I used to work at and asked about getting a job. He kept his emotions to himself, offering little and demurring when asked. “I’m here now,” he would say. “What does the past matter?” As if it didn’t make a difference what happened to a person to bring them to a place like this.

  When he returned, though, I saw it: that shad
ow passing across his face. It only came when he thought I wasn’t looking, when he thought he was alone. I took to peeking into rooms before I entered them in the hopes of catching that look and trying to figure it out. It wasn’t a look of anger or of fear, though there was some of each in it. It wasn’t the vacancy that accompanies a daydream, either. It had all of those elements on its surface but only in the way that part of an iceberg is above the surface. The rest of it—the heart of it—was something deeper and darker than I had ever seen. It was more than I could understand, too. I did with that look the same thing that I did with everything else I had ever seen in El Cruce that puzzled me: I buried it.

  “You’re probably right.” I sigh. “I don’t know how or why he got involved with those guys. I never asked. Maybe I should have.”

  “No, no,” he tuts. “It is not your fault, Rose. He was a man who did what he wanted.”

  I wonder how true of a statement that was. To be sure, Carlos never asked me what I thought about his life or his choices. In his defense, though, there was never much to ask. His life was as unadorned and uncomplicated as his pale skin. Work, television, those long bike rides. We were just two people huddling together and trying to drag ourselves through the muck of survival. We didn’t have pretensions, goals, or ambitions. We had each other. That was about it.

  At least, that’s what I used to think. But when he returned from his vanishing act, everything was different. Carlos started working less and less. Instead of coming home, he began going to a bar on the bad side of town. There were worse, more violent bars, but the one he chose was known for being a meeting point for all kinds of people with business that didn’t exactly conform to the letter of the law.

  From what I heard, he hadn’t taken up with any of the more notorious cartel members who frequented the place. It was crawling with sicarios, halcones, and capos, not to mention the regular thieves and enforcers—all the various species of predators that populate the Mexican underworld. But everyone I talked to said Carlos merely sat in a dimly lit corner booth, smoking a cigarette and keeping to himself. Strange.

  He never told me where he was, of course. Nothing outward had changed between us. In fact, I didn’t hear about any of it until after he disappeared the second time. Even then, it was just a whisper, a half-heard mutter that few dared to voice. No questions, I had to remember, that was the code.

  Had I loved him? I’m not sure. If I was pressed to answer, I guess I would have to say that I didn’t. We didn’t have any kind of a fiery romance. If anything, it was more like an awkward bump of two strangers in the night than it was a process of falling for each other. We’d hardly even had sex after the wedding. Carlos never seemed to have the appetite for it. I might have wondered if he was cheating on me, if I’d cared to ask or he’d cared to answer. But neither one of those things happened.

  “Who knows who he was,” I murmur, as much to myself as to Ramon. “It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s gone. And he’s not coming back.”

  That much seemed to be true. Carlos dropped me off that day over two years ago. Didn’t look back as he drove away. Wasn’t home that night. Never came home again.

  After a few weeks had passed, I asked around very hesitantly, but no one knew much of anything. My questions were met with shrugs. The only real piece of information came from the bartender at the place Carlos had liked to drink.

  The night before he’d left, “he was talking to someone for a change,” she told me. “That’s the only reason I remember it is because of how weird that was for him. Three months of not saying a word to nobody, then all of the sudden he was talking to some man.”

  “What did the man look like?” I’d pressed, against my better instincts.

  She shrugged. “Wore all black. That’s all I remember.”

  My husband talks to a man in all black who was never seen at that bar before or since, then he disappears the next day. It’s a bizarre scenario, and if I were anywhere else, I might have followed up, searched harder, dug deeper.

  But I’m from El Cruce. Here, when you dig deeper, you find bodies.

  I’m calm now, or as calm as I will be until I manage to get some sleep. My breath is coming in easy flows instead of panicked spurting. Ramon’s brown eyes are fixed on mine, gentle and absorbing. “You are right; it does not matter,” he says. “Enough of Carlos.” He shifts his weight to cross one knee over the other. His thumb drags tenderly on the back of my hand. “Is everything else okay?”

  Such a caring man. I want to plant a big kiss on his forehead and squeeze him to let him know how much I appreciate his warmth when I need it. I look down at his hand holding mine. The skin there is velvety, worn down by age and decorated with liver spots wherever the skin shows below his cuff. I can see the peaks and valleys of the bone poking against the underside of his flesh. It looks so fragile.

  I bite my lip and decide not to tell him about Lucila or the men in black who attacked me. Ramon has been here for a long time, and he knows as well as I do what kinds of things happen here, but I just can’t bring myself to lay all that worry on his shoulders. He sees my hesitation and raises an eyebrow.

  “Well?”

  “Yes, Ramon, everything else is just fine. I had a weird interaction with someone today.”

  “Who? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “A, um…a man. A biker. On my way home. It was nothing, though. Just rattled me a little.”

  Ramon leans forward and presses his lips against my forehead like a grandfather would. “Be careful about who you get involved with, mi amor,” he warns. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. You are a treasure.” He sets my hand gently in my own lap. “I will get out of your way now. Have a good night, Rose.”

  He shuffles to the door and leaves, pulling it shut behind him with a quiet click. I don’t move for a while after he has gone. The warmth of his lips hums on my forehead where he kissed me good night.

  Ramon’s warning isn’t exactly unheeded. I know to be careful, and I certainly know better than to kiss strangers in a parking lot. That never led to anything good for a girl like me. But the biker had been something else, a whole new breed, unlike anyone else I’d ever met.

  Those eyes. That body. That fierce scowl. Part of it scared me, but there was no denying how badly I’d wanted him to kiss me. And not just to kiss me, but to throw me over the back of his motorcycle and take me somewhere far away from here. Who the hell was he? More importantly, what the hell was he? I’d never met a man who stirred those kinds of feelings in me before. I didn’t even know I had those kinds of feelings.

  Even now, beneath the exhaustion and the dregs of the fear that has gripped me since the moment I walked in on Lucila, I feel a smoldering heat. As bruised as my lips are, they’re still ringing from his touch.

  I get up and wash my face in the sink. Shucking off my work clothes and unhooking my bra with a relieved sigh, I brush my teeth and clamber into bed. After extinguishing the lights, I curl up under the covers and close my eyes. Immediately, thoughts of the biker rush in. His energy is still writhing over my skin like electricity, refusing to discharge. I fight off the memories of his lips brushing against mine and force myself to count sheep.

  But when sleep finally comes, it brings dreams.

  I’m in the middle of the desert. Rocky cliffs range around me, high and foreboding. The sun has just set. Purple light swoons down into the canyon crevices. I see a lizard scamper across the soil.

  I look down at myself. I don’t recognize what I’m wearing. It’s a white cotton dress. Looks homemade. My hair is long and blows loosely in the evening breeze. Beneath the hem of the dress, my legs are tan and smooth.

  I hear footsteps approaching from around the corner of a cliff up ahead. The crunch of gravel, the scuff of boots on pebbles. A man emerges. It’s him. The biker.

  Instead of being surprised, I am calm, accepting. Of course it is him. That is who is supposed to come. That is why I am here. For him.

 
He crosses the distance between us and stops an arm’s length away. I see his mouth open and his tongue move, but I cannot hear the words he is saying. All I can hear is the thrum of the desert at night. Sand swishes. Wind sighs.

  He steps closer. Now, I can feel my heartbeat begin to pick up, halfway between fear and desire. He is such a big man, so broad and muscular, so rippling with tattoos I don’t understand but that entrance me nonetheless. His chin is set in such an angry scowl, but the softness in his eyes belies it, counteracts it.

  He is inches away. The night holds its breath.

  I feel afraid. I step back away from him. My back bumps into the cliff. “I’m scared of you,” I try to tell him, but my throat won’t work. I can’t remember how to speak.

  The biker reaches up towards me. I flinch. He pauses in mid-air, looking at me. His eyes are searching mine. I want to ask him what he wants, but still, no words come. Besides, I know the answer to that question.

  Me. He wants me.