She raises a hand to her mouth. “You look at me like I’m magic.”
“You are magic.”
It comes out without me wanting it to, involuntary as blood from a wound. My face burns, the places where the scars are go white as flame. I hack at the deer, sending strips of meat spraying across my chest and feet.
“Can I come visit you?” she asks.
I think of her, curled in my arms. The two of us sleeping under the stars. “Maybe.”
Another soft laugh. “I guess that’s a start. Will you think about coming up to the house for dinner sometime? Maybe seeing the guys?”
“No.”
She sighs. “Adriano, I know you miss your friends.”
“I’m not a girl.”
“Only girls have friends? And family? Because that’s what you guys are. Family.”
“Family can fuck up, Pryntsesa.”
She frowns. “Do you mean them or you?”
I say nothing.
“There’s something I’m not seeing. Some reason that you can’t forgive each other that no one wants to admit.”
I think about that night we sat down, the four of us back at Velvet House for the first time since January’s abduction. I remember Eli’s judgement, Bobby’s disappointment, Doc’s mocking smile. I slash at a swell of the deer’s fat, carving it from the meat.
“There’s no bad blood between me and my brothers. But I’m not going to eat at the same table as the men who insulted me.”
Her brow furrows deeper. “What did they say?”
I stop slashing. I know I shouldn’t tell her, but the words are boiling up like poison, the injustice of it. The idiocy. “They said they wouldn’t have done what I did. That they think I was weaker than they would have been.”
January goes still. “You mean taking me to my Zia?”
I raise the knife again. “Yes.”
“They don’t think I could have gotten them to let me go see my Zia?”
There’s a heat in her voice I didn’t expect. An annoyance that makes my lips try to curve again.
“No, Pryntsesa, they don’t think you could have seduced them. They believe I’m more vulnerable to you because I watched you dance all those years.”Because I’m in love with you.
“All of them? Even Bobby?”
“Bobby was the one who said it first.”
Her pretty mouth falls open. “They’re wrong!”
I flick a piece of hide off the knife. “That’s what they think.”
“And what if I can prove they would have let me seduce them?” she says in a hard voice. “What if they admit it?”
I laugh. “They’ll never admit anything. Bobby maybe, but not Eli. And Doc’d cut out his tongue first.”
“I can do it.” Her face shines as she says the words, like a saint on a mission.
