Hard Candy

by Francesca Baez

  “I said, don’t fucking speak.”

  This close, I can see past the mirrors of his eyes even in the darkness. Yes, he’s full of righteous anger and vengeful darkness again, but there’s something soft running under it, something he’s forcing down. If I do speak, maybe I could draw it out. Or maybe it would make him snap faster.

  He uses the hunting knife, still shiny and new, to cut through the rope tying me to the rafter. My pulse is an ocean roaring in my ears. That means he’s done here, he won’t be putting me back. One way or another, this is our last night here.

  I have to remind myself how to breathe. I’ve gotten comfortable around him, let my guard down. Forgotten all the ways I should be protecting myself, fighting against him. Now instinct takes over, my body lashing out even in its bindings, my eyes darting wildly, trying to find assistance in the dark.

  Andrews hauls me against him, wrapping my back to his chest in a position we’ve been in before, but it’s wrong. It’s all wrong. I can smell the rum on his breath, thick and fresh. That means his reaction time is impaired, but it also means there will be no reasoning with him. He got drunk for a reason. He got drunk because last time he tried this, his tendency to overthink wouldn’t let him follow through, and he’s not making that mistake again.

  He’s finally here to kill me.

  “Andrews,” I squeak out, trying to reach the man behind the liquor and hate, the man who fed me when I was hungry and brushed my hair back when I couldn’t move. The man who almost fucking had me, the man who worked himself deep under my skin without even trying. Maybe I should be using his first name, but that wouldn’t be any more intimate, not between us. We aren’t friends, we aren’t lovers. I’m the woman who tried to kill him, and he’s the man who wants revenge. The connection between us runs deep, cuts to the bone. We’ve inflicted just as much pain on each other as we have pleasure. We saw the most hideous parts of each other and didn’t turn away.

  Until now.

  Holding me in place with one arm, he presses the other across my throat. He can’t even do me with his bare hands, can’t look me in the eyes as I go. Fuck that. Fuck him. My vision starts to fade out around the edges, or maybe it’s just the night’s darkness creeping in. I stop letting my treacherous mind think its way out of this, and turn to my body. My body keeps the score, my body remembers all the pain and hunger and heartbreak that Andrews almost makes me forget. She’s the one who will save me.

  In my limited mobility, I manage to throw my head back as hard as I can, and I feel the impact, hear his surprised grunt. His grip loosens just enough for me to tear out of it and spin around. I register that his nose is bloody, and I’m already kicking my knee up, hitting him between the legs with enough force to cause lasting damage. As he doubles over, I use the momentum to throw him against the nearest pillar as hard as I can with my wrists still loosely bound together. His head cracks against the concrete, and he crumples to the floor, unconscious.

  I hate that my first action is to check his pulse, make sure the blow didn’t kill him. He’s fine, no telling how long he’ll be knocked out. I scramble in the darkness and find his knife, sawing through the ropes binding my wrists as fast as I can. A few nicks later, I’m jerking the last loops of rope off. I’m still completely naked aside from the cotton briefs, so I grab the lamp and find one of Andrews’s discarded shirts, and pull it on. Damn, it smells like him, like sea salt and the warmth of the sun.

  Fuck him, and fuck me for even noticing.

  The oversized shirt hangs just past my ass, giving me enough coverage to walk through a Miami night without catching any more attention than the hot girls out clubbing or the cool girls ready to dive right back into the water. I don’t waste any more time looking for shoes, or a hair tie, or a bra. I grab the nearest half-empty bottle of water and book it.

  Break

  The Breaker met Javier Vega the way he met most people. In the middle of the night, shrouded in darkness, and at gunpoint. He’d almost killed the smaller stranger on sight, but curiosity had gotten the best of him. He knew every single one of Miami’s creatures of the night. No one got to walk these streets without first going through King, and as such, going through The Breaker. So he gave the man a chance to talk.

  He’d claimed to know the newest manager of Hard Candy, said they were practically family. The Breaker hadn’t known Miel Conde back then, no more than any other person in the blur of bodies he collected money from. But Javier Vega had offered him an ungodly sum to take notice of the woman. He just wanted someone to have her back, he’d said.

  The Breaker couldn’t accept the money without King finding out, and in truth, he shouldn’t have taken the deal at all without King’s knowledge. But he did. Instead of cash, Javier Vega gave him a beachfront property, a quiet spot in La Gorce. And in turn, The Breaker had kept an eye on Miel Conde.

  The job was easy enough; the woman in question could more than take care of herself. The Breaker had only been inside his beach house once, only allowed himself to drive by once a month since to check on the property. He didn’t know yet why he’d asked for the off-books property, what he would ever need it for. But somehow, he just knew he’d want it some day.

  It had been easy money, until Miel Conde disappeared ten days ago. Here one day and gone the next, leaving nothing but a mess of candy wrappers behind. Tracking down a woman who didn’t exist in the first place had seemed impossible, but in the end, that assumption was exactly what gave her captor away. Reggie Andrews, former APD detective, had gotten cocky, revisiting her old haunts, confident that no one would be looking for his prisoner. But the only person better at being a ghost than Miel Conde was The Breaker himself. Locating exactly where Andrews had been keeping the woman had chewed into his time, left him jumping through hoops to avoid drawing King’s attention to his extracurriculars. But The Breaker was a man of his word. He may have been incapable of caring what did or did not happen to Conde, but he’d made a deal. He’d already accepted payment, and now it was time to do the work.

  And his mission was almost complete.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Miel

  The asphalt is rough under my bare feet, but at least the heat of today’s sun has seeped out of it. I stick to shadows and back streets, but the few people I come across don’t seem to notice me anyway. I’ve always been invisible, and I always will be. I keep up a steady pace in the general direction of “away,” waiting desperately for the muggy night air to clear my mind. I feel fully strung out, high on the bizarre emotionality of the past week, cut low by Andrews’s ultimate betrayal. Was it really a betrayal, if he was just doing what he’d promised all along? Confusion, self-hatred, and the all-too-familiar dull pain of loss cloud my head, making it difficult to formulate an escape plan. I don’t know where I’m going, or what I’ll do once I get there. The last time I felt this way was when Javier told me to leave Atlanta. I had sworn to myself I’d never allow myself to be in this situation again, never give anyone else the power to strip me of my survival instinct. But here I fucking am, and the worst part is, I let Reggie Andrews be the one to get to me. A man I knew was my natural enemy, a cop who’d made his hatred of me crystal clear. How could I have been so stupid? I almost deserved his stab to the back, for ever letting myself be blinded by his beautiful body and the delectable pain he’s so skilled at inflicting. I rolled onto my back and showed my soft underbelly, then acted surprised when the predator came in for the kill. Even when I was a child, I wasn’t that fucking foolish.

  Andrews trapped me when I was in a low spot, the way all men do. I was tired of running, tired of fighting, tired of being the only one who had my back. First, I was ready to go down without a fight; then, I was ready to let myself believe the impossible. That I didn’t have to be alone, that I could put my glass heart in someone else’s hands and trust them to not drop it. But I’m not feeling low anymore. I’m fucking pissed, my bones made of fire, my blood thick with spite. This is how I survived this long,
how I picked myself back up over and over again, even when the sweet promise of death’s door was just within reach. It pushed people away, it kept me alone, but it kept me alive. Angry, vindictive, violent, hateful. I crawl back into the familiar shell and find it still fits perfectly. Beneath the ice and vulgarity, I’m ugly, untouchable, safe. I don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow, or the next day, or however many days I can steal after that. But right now, I refuse to die, I refuse to be quiet and vulnerable. He doesn’t get to win.

  Not El Sombrerón, not Javier, not Andrews. Not every fucking monster who came in between. They can’t hurt me if I don’t let them. If I decide to crawl back to my feet and come back twice as mean, it means their filthy hands can’t break me. It means I fucking win. I may be bloodied, and bruised, and shattered to pieces, but I’m

  not

  fucking

  dead.

  Not yet.

  My feet carry me down empty streets until I reach Allapattah. This would be a good enough place to hide until I figure out what my next move is. Andrews’s holier-than-thou ass would never make it down here, not even looking for me. Me, the one he left a whole life behind to chase. The one he crossed every line to punish. The one he intended to kill, right from the start.

  “Stupid bitch.”

  The thought is on repeat in my head, but it echoes in a southern twang, the trashy kind. I follow the sound to its source, a too-skinny white woman teetering on purple stilettos across the street, lighting a new cigarette while the last one still glows at her feet. She isn’t looking at me, so she must have been yelling at one of the half dozen other stupid bitches peppered down the sidewalk. I recognize their vacant eyes, their boneless posture, and I also don’t. These women aren’t here at gunpoint, aren’t any higher than they need to be, are waiting for johns to come to them instead of being thrown at anyone with a pulse. These women might walk away with some cash, even if it’s just a fraction of what they earn. And they’ll be earning it, I’m sure. It must be hard work, when they want you to pretend you want this too, when they want more than just a rag doll they can use and walk away from. I guess the illusion of choice comes at a cost.

  A sensible tan minivan pulls up, and another girl steps out, wiping at her mouth. This one is younger than the rest, prettier, in the way people just are before they’ve had to spend half a lifetime scrambling at survival. From the nasty glares the other women cast her way as she pulls a tiny compact out of her shorts pocket and fixes her lipstick, she must be getting the bulk of the work tonight. The reigning stupid bitch.

  The van heads back toward its adequate but insufficient life, and I cross the street. Perhaps it’s just the natural buoyancy of her face, but the younger girl seems softer than the rest, so I head her way.

  “Hi,” she says sweetly, looking me up and down. She can see that I don’t belong here, but I don’t not belong here, either. My hair must be a mess, and I can barely stand to be within range of my own body odor, but I know I have a conventionally attractive face and body that a little dirt can’t hide. It always felt like something to be destroyed, something that made me desirable when I did not want to be. There was a time I thought about scarring my own face, just to keep men from looking at me, from giving me more than a second’s attention, but Selina talked me out of it. She said the stupid symmetry of my face and the ways my body naturally curves could be a weapon, something I could actually use against men, if I knew how to wield it right. I’d think she was full of shit if I hadn’t seen her use the same trick time and time again. Hell, it’s what landed Andrews in that wine cellar with me, way back when.

  I can see the girl’s shrewd eyes taking me in, assessing my value against my desperation. I hope Selina was right. I hope this girl falls into my snare, because somewhere along the way, my barely contained rage found a new purpose. I know what I want to do tonight. I know what I want to do with my broken, unbreakable body.

  “You ever trap?” she asks me at last, shifting on her heels. I nod once. “You got someone looking out for you?”

  This time, I shake my head. She’s asking me if I have a pimp, but the answer is no for any interpretation of the question. There’s not a single person left in the world who cares if I live or die.

  The girl pulls a phone out of her neon pink bra and begins typing.

  “My daddy’s about to come pick me up,” she says, flashing a wad of cash at me. “If you want a place to clean up and crash, and maybe even a little cash, he can take care of you, too.”

  She looks at me expectantly, her eyelids sagging a bit under the weight of her heavy lashes. I wonder if she thinks she’s doing me a genuine favor, or if she understands exactly what she’s leading me into. I can’t tell. I don’t think she can, either.

  “Okay,” I say, in the timid voice of a girl who would fall for this kind of shit. It’s not as hard to put on as it should be. “That sounds nice.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Andrews

  When I come to, my head is pounding, and Miel, my buzz, and my pride have all disappeared without a trace. Fucking women. Every time I think I’ve got the upper hand, I wind up on my ass. I’m gonna have lasting brain damage if I don’t get my masculine braggadocio under control soon.

  This is the part where I’m supposed to feel humiliated, angry, vindictive. But all I feel is hollow. I failed. I captured Miel, tortured her, but I couldn’t kill her. Which means it was all for nothing. Every sin, every crime, every stolen kiss. In the end, it wasn’t worth a fucking thing. And now, neither am I.

  Just like that, I can no longer justify my actions over the past year. I wasn’t giving Miel Conde exactly what she deserved. I was ruining myself, destroying the integrity I’d spent a lifetime trying to build. All I ever wanted was to be the good guy. The guy who didn’t get dirty looks, didn’t get nervous smiles, didn’t make his mother cry. And then I threw it all away, on something as petty as revenge. It would have been different if I had succeeded. If I had properly dealt justice where it was due. But now all I’ve done is kidnap a woman and taken advantage of her dubious consent.

  I’ve never felt anything halfway, good or bad. When I’m in, I’m all the way in. And when I fuck up, I’m all the way fucked up. It damn near brings me to my knees, the overwhelming weight of my regret. I feel the guilt of what I’ve done with just as much intensity as I felt my obsession as I was doing it. I can barely breathe through it. Can’t think through it.

  All I know anymore is that I’m not a good guy. I’m worse than most of the guys I’ve put behind bars.

  And that’s exactly where I belong now, too. In a cage, separated from the rest of society, where I can’t hurt anyone else. I find my phone and dial Lou Esposito’s number. When he picks up, I can hear my mother’s heart shatter hundreds of miles away.

  “Hey man, I fucked up. I need you to come arrest me.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Miel

  The girl—Dana, she says—sits beside me on the rideshare home and peppers the silence with bright words neither of us cares about. The driver, a middle-aged brown guy with an ambiguous accent, eyes us suspiciously through the rearview but says nothing. He won’t make any calls after he drops us off, either. No one has time for more shit than is already their own.

  We pull up to a small but flashy house almost to Spring Garden, and I follow Dana down the narrow pathway to the front door. She doesn’t have a key, but the door opens only a few seconds after she rings the bell.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she chirps, and I quickly take in the white guy in front of us. He’s in his early thirties, probably, with a friendly dad bod and a face just attractive enough to be trustworthy without being distracting. “I brought you a present. Isn’t she perfect?”

  “Daddy” eyes me up and down with much less subtlety than I just displayed. I hide my fists behind my back and manage not to flinch as his greedy gaze rakes over my bare legs and lingers on my braless chest.

  “Yeah, she alright,” Daddy says, with the
bored tone of a father telling a toddler her messy finger-painting is a spot-on rendition of their family. He’s forcing the nonchalance, though, I can tell. The dollar signs that flash in his eyes at the sight of me are too bright to disguise. “Get her cleaned up and bring her back to me, okay, baby?”

  Dana says something to the affirmative, and I follow her toward the staircase. Daddy gives her a possessive slap on the ass as we pass by, but luckily for him, he doesn’t try any shit on me. Yet.

  Upstairs, I hear feminine voices chattering behind closed doors, and Dana leads me to the closest one on the left. Voices hush as the door opens, and inside, four other girls that look as barely-legal as Dana herself sit on a twin bed in a cheap frame and a full-sized mattress on the floor. Compared to the gaudy decor I got a glimpse of downstairs, this room is barren, aside from the sparkly clothes and shoes scattered in piles every few feet.

  “Girls, this is Mel,” Dana says, gesturing at me. I did tell her my real name, but I guess it’s for the best she misheard me, or just didn’t care to try harder. “She might be staying with us for a bit.”

  No one says anything in response, and I can tell from the darkness in the other girls’ eyes that they don’t love their Daddy as much as Dana seems to. I can’t really blame the girl, though. Sometimes, it’s easiest to take the path of least resistance, easiest not to put yourself through the pain of reality, if you can help it.

  There’s a small bathroom attached to the room, with another door across it that must lead to a second bedroom. I notice that neither door has the kind of knob that locks. Dana sets me up with a lukewarm shower and warns me not to take too long, promising to return with clean clothes in a moment. I can’t remember the last time I took a real shower, and I’m desperate to luxuriate in it, but there are so many reasons I can’t. I quickly wash my hair with the 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner that sits on the lip of the tub, and use the same bottle to scrub down my body until the water runs clean. When I’m done, the towel awaiting me is big and plush, and there’s a pile of clothes stacked on top of the closed toilet lid. I find a few loose hair ties under the sink, and in just a few minutes I’m returning to the shared bedroom.