"Maybe. Gabriel can justify anything if he frames it as sacrifice. It's his superpower. Turning abandonment into nobility."
She makes it to the couch before the tears come. Not sobs, just silent streams down her cheeks, eight years of hurt working its way out. I don't ask permission, just sit beside her and pull her against my chest. I hold her properly, arms wrapping around her shaking form as she struggles with the impossible contradiction of loving and hating the same person.
She's crying against my chest, and I'm the worst kind of bastard because even now, with her breaking apart, I notice how her body fits against mine. The warmth of her breath through my shirt. The way her leg presses against my thigh. I shiftslightly, hoping she doesn't notice my body's traitorous response to her proximity.
"He's my brother," she says against my shoulder, her tears soaking through my shirt. "I hate him and love him and I don't know how to exist in the same city without wanting to scream."
"You don't have to figure it out today."
"What if I never figure it out?"
"Then you don't." I continue to hold her, one hand moving through her hair in gentle strokes meant to soothe. "Some things don't get resolved. You just learn to carry them differently."
She pulls back enough to look at me. "Is that what you did with your sister?"
The name Sofia forms in my mind but I can't say it. She left me too. The pain continues even when I'm holding another broken woman. But the sharp edge has dulled.
"I'm learning."
She studies my face for a long moment, then settles back against my chest. "At least you're here."
"I'm here," I tell her, the word 'always' catching in my throat. Can't make promises I don't know how to keep.
She falls asleep against me within minutes, emotional exhaustion finally winning. Her breathing evens out, warm against my neck, one hand fisted in my shirt like she's afraid I'll disappear if she lets go.
I should move her to bed. Should establish proper boundaries, maintain professional distance. Instead, I stay perfectly still, letting her rest.
20 - Marisol
Iwake on the couch wrapped in Nico, our limbs tangled, late afternoon sun pouring through the windows. He is breathing deeply, evenly, and I realize that for once I have actually caught him sleeping. I was beginning to think the man never rested.
Even as I extricate myself from the knot of our bodies, he doesn't wake. Just stirs, murmurs something incomprehensible, then settles deeper into the couch.
He looks so peaceful. I would give everything I own for one night of dreamless sleep. Well, except my baby blue Manolo Blahniks, they're worth a lifetime of nightmares.
I have plenty of those. Nightmares. Most recently, the pitying look in my brother's eyes, blood soaking through his priestly robes and staining his hands red, and now the penthouse walls are pressing in like they want to suffocate me while Nico slumbers so sweetly it makes me want to scream.
The late afternoon sun blazes through the floor-to-ceiling windows, turning everything gold and merciless.
I'm not okay. I'm the opposite of okay. My skin feels too tight, like it might split at the seams, my thoughts too loud, and if I have to sit in this beautiful prison for one more minute pretending Gabriel didn't crack something open in me, I'll scream until the windows shake.
I need air. I grab my purse from the counter, my fingers trembling slightly.
I escape before his protective instincts wake him, before that tactical brain calculates all the ways Miami could swallow me whole. The elevator feels like decompression, releasing me from the weight of his beautiful, terrible concern.
Three blocks away, I hail a cab, my pulse racing. Give the driver an address I pull from childhood memory, somewhere far from the penthouse's luxury, far from La Sirena's golden cage, far from anyone who knows my name or my disasters.
"Little Havana," I tell him. "Calle Ocho."
My mother used to bring me here before the cancer stole her voice, before everything turned to ash. Saturday mornings buying mangoes from vendors who called her "la italiana bonita," who'd slip me extra fruit with winks and smiles. That was someone else's life, someone else's mother, someone else's happiness.
The cab drops me on a corner that looks exactly like it did twenty years ago. The heat slaps my skin, wet, heavy, nothing like the climate-controlled perfection of my penthouse. I walk until I find what I'm looking for: a bar that time forgot, narrow and dark, with Christmas lights strung year-round and the sharp click of dominoes from the back room.
Inside, the air is thick enough to chew, decades of cigarette smoke that's become part of the walls. A TV plays telenovelas with the volume too low to matter. Photos cover every surface: pre-revolution Havana, fishing boats, someone's grandmother in white lace. The regulars look carved from wood and leather, permanent fixtures arguing in rapid Spanish about baseball.
The bartender glances at my designer sundress, soft white silk that clings to my curves, and says nothing. In Little Havana, you learn not to ask questions.
"Rum," I say, sliding onto a cracked vinyl stool that's probably older than I am. Not champagne. Not the crystal flutes of Dom Perignon I drown in at my own club. Just rum, darkand cheap, like my mother drank when she thought I wasn't watching.
