Their eyes held.
Even in this final moment, he couldn’t say the words out loud to her. It wasn’t pride. He’d never said them, even though he often should have. But now, he refused to give those words to her while her captor held her. His family could never know just how much she meant to him. She’d just have to know it in her heart.
She slumped into unconsciousness as the arm crushing her throat was able to close the final centimeters.
Good. It was better this way. Unconscious, she wouldn’t feel it. Wouldn’t see it when he was struck down.
He heard the gunfire before he felt it. When he did, pain unlike any he’d ever known before ripped through him as the bullets from the men above and behind slammed into him. In his last conscious act, he fired wildly at his father and Rodrigo, hoping to take at least a couple of his assailants down with him when he fell.
Just before he lost consciousness, he rejoiced as he witnessed his father and Rodrigo fall.
33
AUGUST 26, 2024
Steel
“Fanso?”
He opened his eyes. Or he thought he did. It took him a moment to realize he wasn’t blind. Wherever he was, the space was pitch black.
A calloused hand glided over his brow, careful to skirt a space above his eye. The surface stung at the edges of the cut. While it had mostly stopped bleeding, a thin trail of warm stickiness trailed from the temple, and a pulsing ache sat just below the surface.
“Leeza,” he croaked.
Her breath hitched. “Gracias a Dios,” she whispered. He heard the tightness in her throat, the sound she always made when relieved that the worst hadn’t happened. Most of their life together, it had been over incidents with Tobias. A tumble off his bicycle. The time he finally got over the flu after six days of vomiting. When she’d been carrying him, tripped, and fallen on the sidewalk,breaking her own arm in an effort to protect his head from the concrete.
This time, it was over him. That he was awake and alive… at least, for now.
Although he knew he had to get up, get moving, get them out of… wherever they were, he allowed himself this moment with her. There had been so few moments of tenderness with each other in the shit life they’d led. He deserved this, didn’t he? Just one last moment? So instead of doing what he always did… what he should… he stayed with his head in her lap, her fingers continually stroking his face along the hairline, over his brows, the slope of his nose, his cheeks. It was as if she were reassuring herself that he was really there.
“Where are we?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s a storage container of some kind. I didn’t get a very good look before they threw us in here and closed the doors.” She sniffled. “I thought you were dead. You should be dead,” she marveled.
He felt like he wanted to be dead. Absolutely everything hurt. Then again, he’d just had several magazines of bullets dumped into his bulletproof chest and backplate under his shirt. While he didn’t think any of those had penetrated him, each one was going to leave a literal bruise.
“They were too close. Everything that hit me would most likely be center mass, and I had my vest on. I needed to provoke them and pray that the odds were in our favor. Otherwise, he would have shot us both where we stood.”
“They did shoot you where you stood,” she chastised. “I knew what you were going to do as soon as you turned your cobra eyes on me. I’ve seen you with that look before, but never have you put it on me. Knew it meant you were going to try something foolish.”
When he tried to move his shoulder, he grunted in pain.
“Stop. You have one through and through in your shoulder. And someone was looking out for you because you caught a bullet graze above your eye. If you’d been turned even the slightest bit, you’d havelost the eye at the very least, but more likely, you would be dead. You might have taken one in the thigh as well, but it didn’t hit the artery. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but it felt like there was a wet patch on your leg. It’s finally stopped bleeding, and we don’t need you opening that wound back up and bleeding out.”
He made a move to get up, but she pressed down on his shoulders. “Stay put. You’re injured. You’ve been a punching bag for about thirty rounds. You’re not fit to be walking around, and it’s not like we’re going anywhere right now.”
Part of him wanted to disobey her order. He needed to get up, figure out where they were, and get them out of there.
“Did you activate your surface tracker?” he asked.
“Yes. I waited to do yours. I figure we could wait until mine goes dead, then activate yours. Twice the battery life.”
“Knew there was a reason I married you. Smartest woman on the planet.”
A featherlight touch against his forehead. Such gentleness. He never wanted to move, even if they never saw daylight again. If this is where they met their end, as long as she could be like this with him, he’d accept death. So he lay there, soaking in her touch. A few minutes of this peace between them was worth everything, so he let himself drift silently in a haze of pain and loss for what could have been until he drifted off into sleep.
“Te amo mucho.”
