I wanted to warn Diogo, but when I went to move closer, Jonathon held me still with a hand on my shoulder. When I looked up at him, he whispered, “You’ve got a scary dad.”
I nodded like duh.
He winked, and on his kind face it was an entirely different expression than on my father’s. “So’s mine.”
“Just a common fisherman,” Diogo replied, and I noticed he had a slight accent, the spice of a foreign land like the kind I’d always wanted to visit. “But even a common man can sense evil when it comes around. Whatever you got going on in there, think about hitting pause while your kids are around, yeah?”
Quick as a lightning strike, amicable Ignacio was gone, and the drug lord was in his place. He lurched off the doorframe before Diogo could blink and was in his face, a knife suddenly pressed to his throat.
When he spoke, spittle flew into the taller man’s beard, trapped like bugs in a web.
“Let’s get one thing straight before you and your Brady bunch get any ideas. This is my house. My territory. You want friendly neighbors, I suggest getting another postal code. And, blanquito? Next time you think to fuck with me or mine, remember that I know where you live, and I gotta helluva lot more friends in this town than you.” Abruptly, he stepped away from the Diogo with a wide, almost manic grin. He backed up into the doorframe, whistled at me with a jerk of his head to join him, then addressed the family gathered on our lawn as I made my way to him. “Welcome to the neighborhood, amigos.”
He laughed as he turned on his heel and disappeared into the dark, dank interior of our home.
I hesitated.
Truthfully, I thought the Booth family was foolish.
Even I knew you didn’t just move into a new, seedy neighborhood and insert yourself into someone’s conflict. If Ignacio had taught me anything, it was to mind your own business because no one else was going to mind it properly for you.
I couldn’t understand why they’d come over to check on me, and it was mostly curiosity that made me stick my head back out the front door before I closed it.
Jonathon and Molly had joined Diogo on our cracked concrete path. Across the street, the three other boys waited patiently in the front yard playing a game together.
They were so fascinating. I felt their strange, new beauty like an ache in my chest, an echo in a hollow place that I didn’t know back then should have been full.
Full with love and support and laughter.
Instead, I watched with empty eyes as Molly lifted a hand to me as if she wanted to reach out and touch me.
“Be safe,” she whispered, unshed tears thick in her voice.
“You come get me if you need me,” Jonathon said, voice strong, brow angled fiercely over those velvet brown eyes.
It seemed like something a father would say, yet he was only a boy.
“You need anything, you know where we live,” Diogo echoed.
“I’m good,” I lied easily, because I’d been lying all my life, and it was all I knew, sunk so deeply in my DNA it felt part of my very flesh. “I’m with my family. We’re all good here.”
And then I closed the door.
Dammit.
I could still remember just how much it hurt to do that, to close the door on the first people to give me a taste of hope.
It was still sweet in my mouth as I turned the two locks and slid the deadbolt home.
But it turned to ash when I moved down the dark hall, listening to Dane whisper furiously at Ignacio.
“I can’t believe you. I seriously cannot believe you would do this right now. With Lila in the front fucking yard!”
“She’s not a kid anymore,” Ignacio argued with a shrug. “She should know the family business.”
“She’s fucking five,” Dane argued.
This was true, but even at five, I knew there was some truth to what Ignacio said.
I didn’t feel very much like a kid.
And whatever childish inclinations I might have secretly harboured in the deepest hollows of my soul died a swift death by decapitation when I rounded the corner to the living room and saw exactly what had happened to the gunshot.
It had pierced a man right through the center of his chest.
Ignacio flipped his Zippo open to light his cigarette then regarded me curiously over a plume of smoke. “Just a dead body, abejita, nothing to cry about, okay?”
I nodded woodenly. I didn’t want to cry, but the fact that I didn’t made my stomach curdle like bad milk. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen blood, but this was different.
Or at least, it should have been.
Instead, I stood there as silent and dead inside as the body Dane was tidying on the ground.
He stopped mopping up the blood on the hardwood and leaned back on his haunches to regard me. “Go to our room and stay there, okay, Li?”
“No, no, she’s here. She might as well learn the facts of life and death.” Ignacio laughed lightly and moved forward to clasp my shoulder warmly. “This is the family business, Lila, and just like our family, no one fucks with our business. You get me?”
My tongue was buried in the ashes of my combusted hope, so I nodded, mutely, dumbly.
He didn’t like my lack of passion.
Ignacio sighed heavily, smoke swirling into my hair as he bent to one knee to look me in the eye.
He regarded me then, like a scientist with a microscope.
“You listen to me good here, Lila. Family is everything. You earn, you fight, you die for family. This man here? He died for our family because he threatened our family. Tienes que defender tu honor. Y a tu familia. It’s as simple as that.”
You defend your honour. And your family.
Ignacio lived and died by that mandate.
He paused then moved so quickly I flinched when he jerked the gun from the back of his waistband. Grabbing my hands, he fitted them to the gun, his meaty hands clasped on top so that I could bear the awful, awkward weight.
“You feel this? This is the weight of a life. I took it with one squeeze of the trigger.”
“Ignacio,” Dane argued, standing up and lunging toward us. “Don’t put a gun in her hands. Fuck. What is wrong with you?”
Ignacio moved our hands easily, swiveling the gun so it pointed at my brother. My arms locked, breath a wheezing pant as I tried to pull away from the gun, from my papá and his evil intent.
Ignacio raised a brow at Dane, making a silent point I didn’t understand, but my brother seemed to get it because his lips thinned, and he held up his hands in surrender.
Satisfied, Ignacio turned back to me and smiled softly, his expression tender against the hard sight of the gun held between us. “You’re a sweet girl, abejita, but you must grow strong. You cannot be soft if you want to survive, si?”
“Si, Papá,” I murmured, but my voice was a single thread pulled from a complicated tapestry of emotion clogging up my chest.
I was scared of the gun and angry with my father for putting it in my hands as if it was a disease that would seep through my skin and infect me for life.
I was horrified that I’d leveled a weapon at Dane for even a second, even forced to do it as I had been. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt like crying.
The tears lodged in my throat and made my eyes hot and glazed over like fired pottery.
Ignacio smiled as he dropped the gun from my grasp, easily taking it in one hand and tucking it back into his pants. I swallowed thickly when he took my face in his rough hands and brought me close to kiss my forehead.