Elena kept going.
Her punches were mechanical now. Automatic. Like a machine that didn’t know how to shut itself off. Each strike was fueled by terror, by the image of her grandmother suffocating again and again.
One of Chapo’s men cleared his throat.
“Ninety-eight,” he began, voice flat.
“Ninety-nine.”
“One hundred.”
Elena didn’t stop.
“One hundred and one.”
“One hundred and two.”
The guards shifted uneasily, exchanging glances. This wasn’t what they’d expected. This wasn’t clean. This wasn’t controlled.
At one hundred and fifteen, two of them finally stepped in, grabbing Elena’s arms and hauling her backward.
She fought them at first—wild, feral—then collapsed between them, body folding in on itself. She stared at her fists, slick with blood, shaking uncontrollably as sobs tore out of her.
Amy hung motionless in the chair.
Silent.
Unmoving.
The room felt dead.
The only sounds were Elena’s broken crying and the faint, wet rattle of my own breathing as panic clawed up my throat.
The world ended in that basement.
It didn’t shatter all at once. It collapsed slowly, like a building whose supports had been cut one by one, leaving only the sound of something massive giving way.
Amy sat slumped in the metal chair ten feet away, her body still bound upright as if the ropes were pretending she was alive. Her head lolled forward at an angle no neck should bend. Blood slid from her chin in thick, uneven drops, striking the concrete with soft, obscene little taps—too quiet for something so final.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Her face was no longer a face. It was a ruin—swollen beyond recognition, skin split open in jagged lines, one eye completely lost beneath purple-black flesh.
Teeth glimmered through torn lips where a mouth used to be. The sister I had grown up with, who had laughed too loudly and lived too recklessly, who stole my boots when hers were wet and slept through gunfire like it was rain—
She was gone.
Beaten to death by the fists of someone I had once trusted with my life.
Elena.
The name curdled in my mouth, bitter and toxic.
I didn’t care that she had been coerced. I didn’t care that the oxygen keeping her grandmother alive—each fragile breath tethered to that tube—was being threatened with removal. I didn’t care that she had cried, that she had begged, that she had broken under the weight of it all.
