Rico keeps hitting me. It’s a rhythm now—hammer, cry, brief silence, the rasp of his boot as he shifts position. Each strike lands along the same line. The first blow stole the air, the second rearranged my insides, and the third made me think I’d black out. I learned to count the strikes so I’d know where the next pain would start. It’s not clever. It’s just a way to make the world predictable.
Between blows I hear shouts, the scrape of a bottle across wood, the low, sharp laugh that belongs to Victor. I keep my head up because if I let it drop I’ll see Chloe. God, Chloe.
Rico’s hand, stained dark, slides under the hem of my shirt as if to check what he’s done. He’s always been detached. There’s a look he gets when he’s bored and needs to make something mean something. He wipes his knuckles on his jeans and leans back to take another swing. I brace. Pain blooms and I breathe through it, lungs learning to hate air.
It’s been an hour since the crash. An hour since I found Jamie and nearly lost him. I did what I could on the shoulder of that road, stifling my panic. I knelt on the gravel, hands slick, and begged him to hang on. I called for an ambulance. I called Benny. I called my uncle.
He told me to come to the warehouse.
That is where I had learned that Rico trailed my car last night. Then he had waited and waited and waited. Seeing Chloe in Jamie’s car was the reward he had been waiting on all along.
Rico hits again. This time it steals the air and I think I might leave myself on the concrete. I clamp my teeth, and the taste of ash and grease fills my mouth. I want to beg, but my voice is a rubber band that keeps snapping back. Instead I pray that when the pain fades, something else will be there—some sliver of luck, a seam to pry, anything.
“Enough,” Victor says, and his voice is a slow, iced blade. It walks across me like it knows the exact places to cut. Even with pain, I hear it like thunder. Rico steps back obediently, the hammer lowering like a guilty confession.
Chloe’s voice is small. Something in me makes my head move because I need to know whether she’s all right. Her sobs are thin, soaked-through sounds. I blink and the warehouse tilts.
I try to turn my head and find the rope won’t let me. My shoulders burn. My breath whines low in my throat. This is penance and failure and I have none of the right words for any of it. I should have never let her get near us. I should have never trusted the plan. I should have left her alone. The list of should-haves is a razor I use to carve away the last of my self-respect.
Victor approaches. Even without seeing him, I know the scent. Whisky and cigar smoke and that particular cologne money buys to hide rot. He moves like a man who expects everything to bend. He stands above me, a silhouette of control against the ragged light.
“You did this,” I say. It comes out as a croak. My jaw is raw from clenching. “Jamie, he’s bleeding. He might—”
“He might be dead,” Victor says, and the words fall like a verdict. He doesn’t hurry them. “He might be breathing. What he is, is useless to me if you’d rather tip the balance toward sentimentality. You were supposed to be the brain, Miles. Not the bleeding heart.”
My chest flares. The rope around my wrists cuts through skin in a way that makes it hard to think. “He didn’t—”
“Don’t defend him.” Victor slaps the side of my face with the flat of his hand, not hard enough to break me but hard enough to remind me he can. Heat blooms under skin. I taste copper again. “You failed.”
I go somewhere inside myself that’s smaller than the warehouse and older than the scar on my knee. “Please,” I say. The word is nothing. But I have nothing else. I imagine Jamie’s face, slack and pale, then Chloe’s hair like a damp halo under a streetlight, and the image drives the rest of the world into focus.
Victor crouches, close enough that I can see a thousand small things on him. I can see the vein in his temple that likes to sleep, the manicured cut on his thumbnail, the soft burn in his eyes that must be the thing that never allows him to rest. He looks at me like he’s inspecting a broken watch.
“You want a deal?” he asks. He laughs, soft and awful. “You come crawling, like the little dog I didn’t know had teeth. That’s the thing with you, Miles. You always think we can bargain with blood. But blood is my currency.”
“Take me. Take me instead,” I blurt, voice raw. “Take me—just let her go.”
Chloe’s sob turns into a hiccupped sound. I don’t know if it’s from hope or terror. I would beg for her to go free in a ring of fire if it meant she didn’t have to know a single ounce of what I’vedone. I would barter anything. My universe has been a ledger of debts and this one I want erased.
Victor’s mouth lifts like he’s smelling something sweet. “Anything?”
“Yes. Anything.” My voice is reduced to stitched cloth. I’ll promise him the moon if he’ll let her walk away. I’ll promise him the names of men I don’t have, the access keys I don’t know, the money that only exists in deals we haven’t yet made. Anything.
Rico circles, bored, and Victor watches him with the curious, relaxed attention of a monarch watching a pet. “Romeo and Juliet,” Victor says, almost tenderly. “Two lovers buried in the same grave when fate seems poetic instead of pathetic. You think you’re cleaning up the mess, Miles, but you’re just burying yourself under the weight of your own mistakes.”
I don’t understand at first—the breath leaves me in a soft, incredulous whine. “What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”
Victor leans closer, and the cigar smoke paints his face an ugly orange in the dim light. “You think your story ends with you, with a noble sacrifice that gets you absolution? No. When I get my money, you and your pretty little friend will be placed in the same hole. Convenient. Efficient. And then the world can pretend neither of you ever existed.”
Anger bubbles up hot and stupid. “You can’t—”
He punches me in the ribs then, right where Rico just worked me over—the force is a new kind of pain that makes my vision swim. I yell, which is useless because the warehouse eats sound. He punches me again, a measured, intimate cruelty, like a man who’s been practicing how to hurt exactly where it will leave the longest sting.
“You should have been put up for adoption,” Victor says between blows, as if offering a lecture. “I always knew, Miles. From the moment you were spit out—premature, weak. Not fit to be an heir. I fed you scraps thinking you’d be grateful enough to be hungry for the rest of your life. But you were always a disappointment.” His voice turns to ice. “Traitors are the worst kind of illness.”
My breath comes ragged. “You were mine all along, and you didn’t even know it.”
The floor drops a few inches. My brain scrambles. “You—” My mouth makes a sound like a mistake. “You’re my—”
