Scorched

by Jadyn Chase

  I cracked another grin. “What team I’m working for is my business. Now eat your breakfast and I’ll take you to see El Jefe—The Boss.”

  She stiffened in her seat and lowered her voice to a snarl. “I’m not going to see The Boss.”

  I strolled back to the kitchen and started making my own breakfast. “You have to. You can’t stay in Los Diablos territory under the circumstances. La Muerta will demand we return you. Whether you go back to your shithead boyfriend is between you and your own club.”

  “I’m not going back to La Muerta,” she growled.

  I pivoted around to stare at her. “You have to. You’re marked. You’re wearing their brand. It doesn’t matter where you go. They’ll come after you. They’ll take you back by force if necessary.”

  She shook her head. “I’m going to stay with my friend. I’ll get in touch with Mario. He’s El Jefe of La Muerta. I’ll talk to him about getting out. He’ll understand when I tell him about Diego. I’ve shown up to parties and events with bruises before—nothing as bad as this, but he knows the story. He’ll let me go. He’ll make sure no one comes after me.”

  I leaned on the counter and listened to this fairy tale. So that was the bastard’s name—Diego. “Are you sure about this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “And what about Diego?” I asked. “He followed you here last night. When he wakes up, he’ll come after you again no matter what Mario says. Guys like him never quit.”

  She looked away and said nothing.

  I shrugged and bent over the stove. Whatever. That was her business. If she thought staying with her friend could save her from Diego’s wrath, more power to her.

  He attacked me last night. When I found her, he came after me, not her. That meant that he, in his demented state, got the wild idea I was some threat to him. He thought I was moving in on his woman. That would make him a hundred times more dangerous.

  The next time I stole a peek over my shoulder, she was sipping her coffee and munching her eggs. Good. She wasn’t dead yet.

  I ate at the table well away from her. I wolfed my food and tinkered with my bike in the garage for a while to give her time to get her head screwed on straight. When I came into the kitchen to get a roll of duct tape, I heard the shower running. So much the better.

  At about nine in the morning, she wandered into the garage. She stood aside watching me. I pretended not to notice her and kept working until my wrench slipped. I banged my knuckles against the muffler and howled. “Aargh!”

  I hopped to my feet and shook out my hand. Then I glanced at her and laughed. She made a half-hearted attempt to smile. “Be careful.”

  “I don’t seem to be able to do that to save my life,” I joked. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Do you mind if I use your phone to call my friend?” she asked. “I left mine at the apartment last night. I don’t have any other way to call.”

  “Sure.” I handed her my phone and she took it inside.

  She came back five minutes later and returned it. “I’m ready now.”

  “Good.” I tied on my bandana and mounted up.

  She climbed on the back and put her feet on the footrests. She knew the drill. I guess she must know it if she was part of La Muerta. She must have been riding behind dipshit’s bike for ages.

  A queer little blast of heat burned through my veins when she slipped her delicate arms around my waist. She fit against my back like she belonged there, but she didn’t. She wasn’t mine. She belonged to some other vato across town. I had to remember that.

  I slipped on my shades and steered out of the garage. She called the address into my ear and I hit the highway. The wind slapped my cheeks and the hog vibrated between my legs like it always did, but something was different.

  I gave women rides all the time. I drove Tina to work almost every day for over a year before she hooked up with Martín. Hell, even Christina still called me up every now and then when she needed a lift.

  Having a woman hugging me from behind and resting her precious little head against my neck was nothing new to me. None of them ever gave me this feeling, though. What would it be like to have a woman of my own?

  I went out with Christina for three years before she got with Logan. I kissed her and even did it with her countless times. None of it meant a thing. For some reason, I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know it until right now.

  Maybe that was why I didn’t care that she left me for Logan. Easy come, easy go, you know what I’m saying? I was just as happy without her as I was with her. She came. She went. Se la vie.

  I don’t think I could have coped if I thought Isabel was leaving my house, even after one night, to go back to another man. I couldn’t drive her across town to return her to another man. That would be asking too much and I never so much as laid a finger on her.

  Okay, I cleaned her up but I never kissed her. I never looked sideways at her in that way, but something made her mine. Something made me want to emasculate anyone who got between me and her.

  I drove her to her friend’s house like I was driving to my own funeral. For once in my life, I couldn’t be happy about this even if I thought it was the right thing to do. I wanted to cry. This was the worst disaster of my life.

  She pointed to a boring house in a middle-class neighborhood. I switched off the bike and she climbed down. She fidgeted on the sidewalk and scanned the neighborhood. “Um…thanks for the ride. I mean….” She locked her eyes on me without flinching. “Thank you for everything, Cisco. You saved my life. I won’t forget it.”

  “Don’t worry about it, chica.” I tried to ease the situation by making it into a joke. “I would do the same thing for anybody.”

  She regarded me with those glowing green eyes of hers. She really was stunning underneath the puffy, pulverized flesh. “I know you would. That’s just the kind of guy you are, isn’t it?”

  “You bet it is.” I glanced up at the house. “Are you sure you’re gonna be all right here? Are you sure you don’t want me to tell my Boss about this?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll be fine. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll handle it.”

  Like Hell, she would. That girl couldn’t handle a peeled grape if I skinned her one. I slung my leg over the bike. “I’ll walk you up to the house just in case. Your friend might not be home and then you’d need a ride back.”

  She shrugged but she didn’t argue when I escorted her up the steps. We waited on the porch while she knocked. In a minute, another young woman answered it. Her long brown hair swept to her waist and her deep dark eyes sparkled. She frowned when she saw me. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Cisco,” Isabel told her. “He’s the one I told you about. He just gave me a ride over.”

  The friend’s eyes darted down to my vest, my colors, and the tat on my arm. I observed the realization dawn on her that I was another gang banger like Isabel’s shit-eating homeboy.

  Isabel waved from her to me. “Cisco, this is Teresa.”

  I nodded but I didn’t offer to shake hands. She knew with one glance exactly what I was and she didn’t like it. She must know every chapter and verse about Diego and his antics. This woman already made up her mind about biker dudes and she might be right. Either way, who was I to argue?

  Her mouth said, “Nice to meet you,” but her voice and her features said the opposite.

  I took that as my cue and turned to Isabel. “I’ll get out of here, then. Here. Take my number just in case you need it.”

  I handed her a slip of paper I prepared in the garage for exactly this moment. She took it and looked at it. “I don’t have a phone.”

  “Just take it,” I insisted. “Call me if you need anything—anything at all.”

  I didn’t wait around. I spun on my heel and strode back to the bike. If she watched me walking out of sight, I never knew. I fired that baby up and drove back to the warehouse.

  When I rolled through the entrance door, I spotted The Boss,
Carlos, Logan, Kane, and seven other vatos standing around the table near the office. I parked in my usual spot and took off my shades. I marched right up to The Boss and gave him a clipped nod. “We’ve got a big problem.”

  5

  Isabel

  Teresa shut the door, but I didn’t turn around. I gazed through the sun-filled window at the manicured yard behind her house.

  “Did you have to get yourself mixed up with another one of those pigs?” she growled behind me.

  “I’m not involved with him,” I replied, still not turning around. “I wound up outside his house last night and he took me in. He got rid of Diego and cleaned me up. I slept on the couch and he made me breakfast this morning. That’s all. He gave me a ride here. Nothing happened.”

  She sighed. “I don’t see how you can have anything to do with those…. those people. They’re animals.”

  “They aren’t animals.” I said it, but I didn’t really mean it. “They’re not all like Diego.”

  “What difference does it make?” She hustled around me and thrust her face into my sight. “I mean, look at you. What difference does it make if the rest of them are like that if you’re living with him? Jesus, Isabel! He’s gonna kill you one of these days. You know that, don’t you?”

  I muttered under my breath. “I know. Anyway, I’m getting out. I’m going to contact the club leader. He’ll let me go.”

  “You’re delusional,” she snapped. “They’ll never let you go.”

  I couldn’t think like that. I couldn’t face the future if I didn’t believe my own line of bullshit. I moved away from her to the mantle. Pictures lined the shelf. I picked up one of Teresa and me from when we were kids. We wore our hair in matching brown braids like Laura Ingalls, and she was hugging a Cocker Spaniel on her lap.

  I had to smile at the picture. “I’d forgotten about this one. We were so happy then.”

  “Does Diego know where you are?” Teresa asked. “If he followed you to Cisco’s house, what makes you think he won’t follow you here?”

  I fiddled with the photo frame. I couldn’t stop looking at the two happy little girls in the picture. “He doesn’t know where I am. Only Cisco knows, and I didn’t tell him you’re my sister. I told him I was going to stay with a friend.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. I don’t want some organized criminal gang knowing I’m related to you.”

  That hurt. Teresa didn’t want anyone knowing she was related to me. She didn’t want my misfortune to rub off on her, and who could blame her? I wouldn’t wish my life on my worst enemy.

  I migrated down the mantle to another picture. This one depicted a man and a woman with their arms around each other. The woman’s long blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders under a gauzy wedding veil. The man’s dark brown beard covered most of his face, but it didn’t hide his radiant smile that he was holding the woman of his dreams.

  “He misses you,” Teresa offered. “He asks about you every time I talk to him.”

  “I miss him too,” I murmur.

  “You could call him every now and then, you know,” she suggested. “There’s nothing stopping you. You could throw a lonely old man a bone. That would be the compassionate thing to do for your own father.”

  I shrugged. “He doesn’t want to talk to me. He doesn’t want to hear about my life. No one does, not even me.”

  “I see you’re still dyeing your hair the way she did,” she observed. “You always did look more like her than I do.”

  “Is that why Dad wants to see me—because I look like her?” I snorted under my breath. I didn’t like where this conversation was going.

  “Of course not, Isabel,” she chided. “He wants to see you because you’re his daughter and he loves you and misses you. He loves you as much as he loves me, and he would want to hear about your life even if it isn’t going the way you want it to. He would want to hear everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

  “Well, it’s all ugly right now.” I put the picture back and turned away. I didn’t want to look at them anymore. I didn’t want to relive happy memories when my present was so bleak and miserable.

  I crossed the room and sat down by the window. When I looked out it at the beautiful yard, I thought about Francisco. He always thought the world was good. He thought people were good. He thought he was good, even though he was a biker.

  Nothing phased him. Not even the most hardcore gang violence could make him think the world was any less of a paradise. Nothing—not the worst that humanity could dish out—could ever make him love people any less or get him to stop trying his utmost to do them good. That was just the person he was.

  Thinking about him gave me an exquisite pang of longing in the forgotten corners of my heart. I could never be good enough to deserve a guy like him. I could never be happy or positive enough for someone like that to want to be around me. I would only drag him down.

  I was damaged goods. Diego made sure of that. Francisco would want a woman who could bop through life on a cloud. He would want someone to have fun with, someone to laugh with, someone to join him on his mission to spread sunshine and good cheer through the barrios of life.

  That wasn’t me. I didn’t know what my life would become, but it wouldn’t be that. Nothing good could ever come from my existence again.

  I wanted him. That was the truth I didn’t want to admit. I wanted Francisco to want me. I wanted him to see me as good enough for him, but I wasn’t.

  No man ever looked at me with that kind of blank acceptance the way he did. He didn’t ask me to be anything other than what I was. He could see how fucked up I was. He could see it stamped into my face, but he didn’t care. He treated me as though I wasn’t battered or torn up or on the run for my life. He acted like I just strolled in off the street for breakfast.

  When he laughed, he held nothing back. His laughter shook his whole big, strong, body. His smile transformed his features into a brilliant ray of love and happiness for the whole world.

  That laugh and that smile didn’t make him less of a man. They made him more so. They filled his being with irresistible power. They made him magnetically attractive and impossibly sexy.

  I sat closer to him than I’d sat next to any man since I was a little girl. I smelled him. I could have put my arms around him and felt the comforting solidity of his frame under his muscles.

  That could never happen, though. He wouldn’t push me away. He could never reject anybody like that. He would just smile down at me with that tolerant acceptance that said he didn’t feel the same way. He would feel like a big brother or a cousin to me. He could never feel anything more. I knew that at the bottom of my heart.

  Teresa appeared at my side. Her weight sagged the couch cushions next to me, but I didn’t look at her. She couldn’t understand. No one could.

  She broke in on my thoughts. “Dad gave me this. I thought you might be interested.”

  Against my will, I dragged my eyes away from the yard to find her holding out an old photo album. The pages yellowed with age and part of the binding peeled off. I frowned at it. “What is it?”

  “Look.” She turned the first page.

  She laid aside one page after the other and my mind shattered at what I saw. There was my mother as I’d never seen her before. In my early years before she died, she always had blonde hair. She dyed it. She always dyed it. I never saw her with brown hair—ever.

  Now here she was standing with crowds of people, all of them Mexican. Their hawkish features and dark complexions told the whole story. Some of them wore gang colors and patched leather jackets.

  “She kept it hidden from everyone. Dad thinks she must have been ashamed of her upbringing. She told him her parents died in a car accident when she was a baby and that she grew up in a foster home, but that was obviously a lie. Look at this. It’s her father’s birth certificate. I looked him up and he’s still alive somewhere in East LA. He might even still be a member of the gang for all I know.”

>   I blinked down at the page. I couldn’t speak above a whisper. “This is impossible.”

  “Dad thinks this is why you wound up in that gang in the first place. He thinks some kind of cellular memory drew you to it because it was familiar.”

  “If it’s true,” I rasped, “that must mean that we’re…. we’re….”

  She nodded. “We’re Mexican—half, at least. She lied about everything. She lied about being Mexican. She lied about growing in a gang. She never wanted anyone to know her hair was naturally brown. Dad never suspected a thing.”

  I couldn’t stop staring at the pictures. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the woman in the photographs really was my mother. She looked so different I could barely recognize her as the same person. In a way, she wasn’t the same person. My whole life was a lie.

  She went to all that trouble to leave gang life behind. Then along came me and I undid all her work in a few short months by hooking up with Diego. Now I was a marked member of La Muerta. For all I knew, I might belong to the same gang she worked so hard to leave.

  What did it all mean? Did this mean I should be in the club or not? Did it mean I was destined to belong to La Muerta, or did it mean I should repeat what my mother did by getting out of it? Nothing made sense. I didn’t make sense. I didn’t know myself anymore.

  Teresa slid the book onto my lap. “I have to go to work in an hour. I’ll leave this here and you can take a look at it. Make yourself at home, and I’ll see you this evening.”

  After she left, the house fell blissfully quiet. I sat and stared out the window for hours just thinking about everything. Then I stretched out and relaxed. I had nowhere to be and nothing to do.

  I woke up in the late afternoon to the sound of a key grating in the lock. I sat up where I’d been sleeping on the couch. The album lay to one side. I hadn’t looked at it again since Teresa left. I couldn’t bear it.