“Perfect, I knew you were Carmen’s size,” Dana says while I try to inconspicuously pull the tiny booty shorts out of my ass crack. I would argue that this outfit is neither my nor Carmen’s size at all, but it seems pointless. “Come on, let’s take you back to Daddy.”
I slip into the pair of red rubber flipflops she hands me, and I hear the chatter in the bedroom start up again as soon as the door closes behind us.
We find Daddy in the living room, a space crowded with a sleek black furniture set straight out of the catalog. I’ve been in enough billionaires’ homes to recognize trashy new money when I see it. This is the type of overcompensating display that would make Javier say, “sorry about your dick, bro.” Daddy clicks the football game he’s watching to mute, and gestures for me to come closer, and for Dana to leave us. We obey, though I pause a few feet farther back from him than I know he wanted. He empties his glass of dark liquor and sets it on the coffee table, then grabs my hand and pulls me into his orbit.
I nearly fall from the wall of memories and fear that slams into me. It’s not even his touch, or his rough treatment. It’s his smell, the rich sting of expensive cologne, the creamy cedar and the peppery bergamot, slicing me to shreds from the inside out.
I’m fifteen… I’ve never… boney hands… blood… laughter… I don’t… I can’t…
He’s asking me something, pulling me down into his lap, putting his hands on my body like it’s his for the taking.
A thousand deaths, each longer and more painful than the last, delivered with glee. The harder I cry, the harder he gets. The more I fight, the more he likes it. When I beg him to stop, he just—
Something inside me snaps, but it’s nothing like what happened with Andrews last week. I don’t black out, don’t fold into myself, don’t fall into paranoid paralysis. I break the way you break a bottle against the bar or a pool cue across your knee. I break into something sharper, deadlier. Into something desperate and primitive and unintentional. I am my own weapon. I am violence, untethered and unstoppable. I’m a knife in a gunfight, but Daddy is caught so completely off guard that by the time he gains the composure to defend himself, it’s too late. With nothing but my own two hands at my disposal, and a surge of strength gifted to my underfed body by adrenaline, I take the most charitable route and snap his neck with a quick, decisive motion. The sound is hideous, always louder than I expect it to be, but not enough to draw anyone’s attention. I kneel on his still chest for a moment longer, my body vibrating with what happened just now, what happened over the past ten days, what happened every single day since I was eight years old. Then I push it all back down into its box and run.
Now that I have a plan of sorts, I head directly down to Overtown. I wish I had better footwear than the flipflops slapping against the pavement beneath me, but it’s better than nothing. I’m barely in my body, anyway. I’m losing time, alternately traveling half a dozen blocks every time I close my eyes and pacing in place for what feels like hours. My hands aren’t bloody, but they feel that way. Sticky, thick heat drips down my spine, off my fingertips. It’s the high of the kill, but this feels like a bad trip. I don’t feel bad about what I just did. I’m not worried about any sort of consequence. But I don’t feel right, either. There is still so much storming inside of me, there isn’t room to draw a full breath. I need, I need, I need, but I don’t know what I need. I’m consumed by it, but I can’t give it a name.
It’s easy to get another girl to take me to her pimp. I just tell her I’m new in town, say I’m looking to trick, and she’s serving me up to her guy on a silver platter. This one has a name, Malik, and a lot more sense than Daddy. He doesn’t take from me greedily, or take my submission for granted, but I still strike as soon as we’re left alone together. He’s bigger than me, and stronger, and faster to recover from the initial surprise of my attack. He slams me against a wall, knocking the wind out of me, a decorative mirror shattering against my back. I don’t have time to catch my breath, don’t have time to wince at the glass slicing my palm. With the biggest shard in hand, I jump onto the back Malik already turned to me, assuming he’d won his battle. The unexpected momentum pushes him to his knees, and I bring the sharp glass to his throat. It’s already red with my own blood, reflecting a shuddering image of me and my victim as I grit my teeth against the pain and push harder at the makeshift blade. This is the part where the adrenaline should be overpowering the pain, where my body should be operating on instinct while my mind blissfully blanks out. This is the part that makes Andrews call me a monster, that makes me the kind of fucked up you can never come back from. This is the part that, for a moment, should be making me feel like I’ve got the power to give as good as I’ve taken. But instead it just feels like I’m desperately trying to kill a man way bigger than me, with a weapon that is hurting me as much as it hurts him. It feels hard, and painful, and pointless.
I must loosen my grip for a moment in my contemplation, and Malik quickly grabs my wrist and twists it. I cry out in pain and drop the shard of glass, which breaks down the middle on impact. I fall on my ass beside it, and Malik is on me in a second, slamming my skull onto the hardwood floor, one hand tightening around my throat while blood drips onto my face from his.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. I can barely move my right wrist, and in this position, my legs are pinned and out of commission. I grab around with my left hand, hoping to find another piece of the broken mirror. Fuck fuck fuck. Have I finally run out of lives? Am I going to die tonight after all, and get exactly what I’ve always deserved? Andrews will be thrilled, at least.
But then, Malik is being lifted off of me, his grip easily torn away from my throat. I scramble into a sitting position, kicking myself backward until I hit a wall. There’s a slab of man standing over Malik’s lifeless body, with a posture that reads more of annoyance than of having just killed a man in the blink of an eye.
He turns to me, and I think I recognize him in the dim light, though there isn’t a single emotion on his face, nor a name on my tongue.
“You’re a goddamn pain in the ass,” The Breaker growls down at me.
Chapter Forty-Five
Andrews
I’ve only been in the holding cell for an hour before I realize what a colossally stupid mistake I just made.
At least I haven’t been processed yet. After I told Lou all about what I did to Miel, and showed him the scene of the crime, he just shook his head and said it was way too late for this shit. At my insistence, he tossed me in lockup for the night, saying he’d deal with me in the morning. And then I sat on this metal bench until my ass fell asleep and my brain jolted out of its guilt-drunk haze. What the fuck am I doing? Miel would never put me here for what I did to her. She’d kick my ass, maybe break out the knives, but she’d never leave it up to a bunch of strangers to interpret and pass judgment on something they had nothing to do with, something they could never understand. Now that I’m the one behind bars, I fully understand their uselessness for the first time. Maybe this is where I belong, this is what I deserve, but I’m not sure I care about that shit anymore. I care about my mother, and my sisters and nieces, and not abandoning them. I care about Miel and not letting her escape so easily. I care about myself, not the me that called Lou and begged him to lock me up, but the me that I’ve only just discovered, the me that revels in the darkness, the me that comes alive when he’s out of control. I meant to break Miel, but she’s the one who broke into me, kicked open my cages and freed all the parts of myself I’d been afraid to acknowledge. She made me the bad guy, the villain, but she didn’t turn away. She didn’t crumble under the intensity of my obsession, of my cruel attention. She flourished in it. In a way, maybe I freed something new inside her, too.
And then I crushed it under my moralistic heel. I remember the look on her face just a few hours ago, when she realized what I intended to do to her. All the doors she’d opened for me slammed shut, the brand-new light in her eyes flickered out in an instant. She ma
y have evaded literal death at my hands yet again, but I killed her all the same.
Fuck. A thousand days away from her couldn’t break the hold she has over me. What began as an obsession has become an addiction, the kind you don’t get clean from. You either spend the rest of your life chasing the high, or you die cold and alone.
Without Miel Conde, without the delectable purr of pain she makes under my hand, without the way she curls into my touch even when she wants to resist it, I won’t survive. No other woman could ever do, and even my comfortable old life would cave in on me. Now that I’ve had her, I can’t live without her. And instead of chasing her down and punishing her for her escape, in all the ways we both lose ourselves in, I put myself in a fucking cage. With every moment I’m trapped in this prison of my own creation, she’s probably moving farther and farther from Miami. It took me a year to find her last time. Now that she knows I’ll make chase, she might disappear for good. Fuck, that hit my skull took at her hand must have really shaken my brain up, but I’m thinking halfway straight now. I’m ready to get my woman back. And if I have to keep her chained up for the rest of our lives, well, so be it.
“Hey,” I call out to the officer on duty, who’s been absorbed into some game on his phone since I arrived. “Hey, I need to make a call.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Miel
“How did you find me?” I ask The Breaker for the umpteenth time, chasing after him. I’m tall, but trying to keep up with the mountain of a man, especially in these cheap flipflops, is damn near impossible. The injured hand I’m clutching against my chest doesn’t help. “Why did you find me?”
No answer. He merely adjusts the load on his shoulder—the barely concealed body of Malik—and grunts in irritation.
“I won’t stop asking until you tell me,” I threaten. We take another turn down an alley so dark I might not have known it was there had I been alone. I don’t know where we’re going, and I don’t know how we’ve gotten this far without being caught. There’s something about this man, it’s like a force field around us. Eyes slide right off him; the shadows swallow him up like an old friend. “You know I mean it.”
Another grunt. “I did it for your friend.”
I frown. I don’t have any friends. Certainly not the kind who would risk this much to get me back.
“What?”
“Short guy, Latin, not from around here,” he goes on, and something inside me shrivels into a speck. No. There’s no way. I hold down my stupid, unkillable hope with both hands. I’m not doing this again.
“Javier,” I breathe, barely audible even to myself, but The Breaker grunts in affirmation.
What the fuck? My heart isn’t beating right, and I don’t know how to jolt it back into rhythm.
“That’s impossible,” I say. Javier practically disowned me after what happened with Selina. It wasn’t my fault, but in the depth of his despair, he’d made his feelings very clear. Fuck, he threatened to kill me if he ever saw me again.
“Showed up about five months ago,” The Breaker says. Another turn, another invisible strip of night. “Paid me to look after you. Said you were his little cousin or something.”
“I don’t need anyone to fucking look after me,” I growl automatically. “I can take care of myself.”
“That’s what he said, too,” The Breaker says, with something dangerously close to a chuckle in his gruff voice. “You’re lucky he gave you a safety net, anyway. The way you’ve been running around tonight, it’s like you’re trying to get yourself killed.”
“I had it handled,” I insist, but my head isn’t here anymore. Maybe I’ve been playing a little fast and loose with my life since I got to Miami, but if I’m going down, I’m taking down as many motherfuckers with me as I can. That’s just how I do.
But this revelation changes everything. After Javi abandoned me in Atlanta, after the only family I’ve ever known turned on me like it was nothing, something broke inside me. It was a precarious situation in there to begin with, but after losing Javier and Selina, I lost any last crumbs of trust I had left. That betrayal redefined me in every way. If that hadn’t happened, maybe I wouldn’t have been so reckless recently. Maybe I would have let myself believe in Andrews when every cell inside me wanted to. It’s a psychotic thing to say about a man who tried to kill me just a few hours ago, but I still want to believe him. I believe the tenderness of his lips as he kisses all the places he just bruised me. I believe the cleverness of his fingers as he unwraps my shattered soul and caresses all my edges, even the ones that cut. I believe the look in his eyes just a few days ago, when I knew in my gut he didn’t hate me anymore. When I knew that he saw every fucked-up piece of me and held me close anyway. And suddenly what I’ve known all along matters. Ten minutes ago, such beliefs would have been meaningless, but now, everything inside me sparks back to life.
Because if Javier could break my heart and then change his mind, save my life, maybe Andrews can too. And maybe it’s fucked up, but I could forget about tonight’s little mishap, I know it. I’m the only person in the world who could shrug off a murder attempt. Because I get it. Because even if Andrews spends the rest of his life denying it, we both know our souls are mirror twins. Our darkness blooms out like a Rorschach test, different and the same and charged with a thousand meanings.
We can choose whichever one we want.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Andrews
The line rings one too many times, and I begin to panic. No one has landlines anymore, not even businesses. One ring away from the dial tone, a familiar raspy feminine voice picks up.
“Hard Candy?” There’s a question mark in the greeting, as if she didn’t even know this phone existed until it rang just now.
“Lucia,” I say, and I can almost hear her tensing at the unexpected familiarity. “It’s me, Reggie Andrews. Uh, the guy Miel Conde had you throw out a bunch of times a few weeks ago.”
A pause. “Big, Black guy?”
“Yep, that’s me,” I breathe out in relief. Her voice remains icy, though.
“Miel’s been missing for over a week,” she says, not bothering to hide her suspicion. “You know anything about that?”
I wince, but luckily the truth is in my favor tonight. “Listen, I’m looking for her too, but I ran into some trouble and need a little help.”
Ran headfirst into trouble, screaming my arrival to anyone who would listen, but that’s neither here nor there.
“So, naturally, you called a strip club.”
God, she reminds me of my sister Alexis, when she was younger. A sarcastic little bitch.
“You’re the only people I know in Miami.” Aside from the guy I called to put me into this mess in the first place.
“I don’t know you,” she says. It’s a miracle from above that she hasn’t just hung up on me yet. My mother must still be praying for me, after all. “No one here does.”
“Okay, yeah,” I say. “But we have a mutual acquaintance. Dixon Alvarado?”
Silence. Fuck, I don’t want her to think I’m one of his friends, making a threat.
“Skinny piece of shit, I, uh…” I remember we’re being recorded and avoid further self-incrimination at the last second. “I paid him a visit last week.”
Another pause. All I can do is hope she somehow knows that Dixon got the everloving fuck kicked out of him recently, and puts the pieces together.
“Yeah, he came around a few days ago,” Lucia answers coldly. “All threatening-like, warned us to stay the fuck away from him.”
This couldn’t be going any worse. I’m going to rot in prison.
“That’s my bad, I should’ve finished the job,” I mutter, and I find I genuinely believe that. “But I will, if you help me out here.”
“If you could finish the job, you would have finished the job,” Lucia says, hitting the innuendos a little too sarcastically. She’s not wrong to doubt me, but I still take offense. She doesn’t even know me.
&nb
sp; “Okay, but Miel can, and you know it,” I counter. I fucking hate arguing with teenagers. “You help me out, I find her, she helps me with… your situation.”
She snorts a little, but doesn’t hang up yet.
“Why do you want to find Miel?”
A question with a thousand answers. Every moment a new one, like a Rolodex on a windy day. I know the ones that will most likely satisfy Lucia, but I’m not stupid enough to believe I’m in love with Miel Conde. Part of me thinks you can’t ever truly love a woman like that. You can worship her, you can sacrifice yourself fully to her, but she wasn’t made for loving. Love implies a chance at reciprocity. I could say she’s my soulmate, which might be true in the darkest of ways, but it sounds trite as hell. I can’t lie to Lucia, so in the end, I just open my mouth and let the truth fall out as it will.
“Because I need her,” I say simply, and there must be something in my voice that conveys everything I mean by that, every subliminal detail, because the answer seems to satisfy Lucia.
“Fine. Where the hell are you?”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Hard Candy Page 14
