ONE
Gael
The room reekedof blood and sweat, a sour-metallic stink that clung to the back of my throat. The man on the chair slumped forward, wrists raw where the rope had bitten into him. His chest rose shallow and uneven—no breaks, no bruising, nothing visible to explain why every breath sounded wrong. His head lolled at an angle, jaw slack, lips split and caked with dried blood. One eye was swollen shut: the other stared glassy and unfocused. Dried streaks of vomit stained his chin, and each inhale rattled as if pulled through water. He was more corpse than man, a shell propped upright, skin carved and ruined, his body kept vertical only by rope and stubborn refusal to die.
“Don’t keep fucking with the product,” someone muttered in badly butchered Spanish, “he’ll die before we take his kidneys.”
“I have a way of keeping him alive.” A shadow moved. Boots scraped across the concrete. Raven’s voice was low, calm. Almost amused. “Gael! Here!”
They shoved me forward; my hands still stained with the iodine I’d been using on my mother an hour ago. Her cracked ribs had barely knit from the last time. Now this. Always this.
“Watch this!” Raven said, pride dripping from his words.
The victim’s eyes rolled white as I pressed fingers to his throat. Pulse—thready. Breath—a wet rattle. Not the chest. His airway. Something inside was swelling, closing, drowning him from the inside out. My stomach clenched. I’d seen this kind of thing before—too many times. Men, women, and kids who’d stood up to Raven and were left hanging by a thread. Some tried to bargain, some sobbed until their voices gave out, and others just went quiet and never spoke again—but all I knew was that life slipped away fast when someone sounded like they were breathing through blood.
I pressed along his neck and jaw, and it felt wrong—spongy, shifting, as if things inside weren’t where they should be. His throat was filling, bruised deep, maybe crushed, maybe torn, choking him slowly. In my head, I begged him—why won’t you just die, don’t make me do this—pleaded with him even as I knew he couldn’t hear, and my hands kept moving even as my heart tried to crawl away.
Raven crouched next to me, smoke from cigars and pungent sweat flooding my nose, staring into the eyes of the dying man. His big hand clamped on my shoulder, hard enough to bruise. I froze. Scared. Alone. With no choice but to obey.
Raven’s other hand toyed with the blade he carried everywhere—a narrow, cruel thing with a carved bone handle worn smooth where his fist rested. The grip was etched with tiny grooves, darkened by years of blood and sweat—the same blade he’d used tonight to carve the victim’s face into ribbons, each slash clean and precise, art to him and horror to everyone else. His grin was too wide, eyes bright with a kind of glee that twisted his face into something unhinged. He grabbed my hand, pushed it to the man’s chest, where his heart beat fast.
“Gael?” he rasped. “Feel him dying? That’s power.”
“Please, Raven,” I begged, my voice breaking.
He chuckled, a dry sound that made the hair on my neck prickle. His fingers dug into my shoulder as if he wanted to leave a mark. “You don’t get to choose,” he whispered, as if sharing a secret. “Your mama’s been useful—keeps her mouth shut, brings food, pays for the quiet. But even she wears out. I take what I want, niño. I make new toys when the old ones stop working.” He smiled then, too wide, and for a second his face softened, like a man humoring a pet. Then the smile snapped back, and the tenderness was gone. “Maybe I’ll bring your sister in next. Fresh meat. New lessons to teach.”
Someone in the small crowd of onlookers chuckled. “Lucía would be tight.”
I whirled on them, leering at me, one man holding his crotch. I tried to lurch for him, but Raven held me tight and shook me.
“You promised you wouldn’t let them touch my sister!” I said, and something inside me cracked, panic hardening into ice.
His thumb pressed into my jaw. “I can’t control my men.” In that moment, Raven was the devil in flesh, a nightmare made real, and he gloried in the way I waited and stared.
“I’ll do it!” I snapped. My voice didn’t shake, although my hands did.
Raven dropped his hand, and his gaze flicked to me, sharp, cold. “All yours.”
I tilted my chin. “Don’t touch my mom for a week.”
He closed his fingers around my throat. “You think you can bargain with me?” He spat the words.
I stared at him as his grip tightened. “I can keep this man alive for whatever you need from him.”God forgive me.
Raven glared at me, fury in his eyes, and then he released his hold, and I nearly fell to the floor.
“Your momma’s too broken to take what I give right now,” he said with a hateful laugh. “You have a deal, El Doctorcito.”
A week would give my mother time to heal. That was all I was asking for. Maybe I could get her and my sister Lucía away in the next seven days. I’d almost saved enough favors to get one of them across the border. I had to hold out a while longer. I focused on the victim as he lifted his head, and I saw a missing eye, the gaping hole, the ribbons of flesh from each cut Raven had made, the terror, the plea in his expression.
Let me die.
I had no gloves. No proper tools. Only a knife wiped once on a dirty rag and a length of tubing ripped from a siphon pump. My stomach churned, but I worked. Hands steady because I’d taught myself they had to be. Cut. Push. Clear the airway—blood and swelling choking him from the inside—until the man could drag in air again.
The man screamed again, then sobbed.
Still breathing.
