15. Emilia
EMILIA
The words hit my bloodstream like ice water.
LA. The word alone contracts my lungs, squeezes the air out in a thin, whistling stream that doesn't sound like breathing. It sounds like the noise a balloon makes when you pinch the neck and let it slowly die.
I sit up fully. The quilt pools around me and the cabin tilts sideways, just slightly, just enough to remind me that I haven't eaten in eleven hours and that my body ran on adrenaline and terror for most of that time and now the tank is empty and this man, this giant, impossible man, is standing in the orange glow of the woodstove with a duffel bag and a gun and telling me we need to go back.
"No."
The word comes out small. Smaller than I want it to. I clear my throat and try again.
"No. Absolutely not. Justice, no."
He doesn't move. Doesn't argue. Just observes me with those cold blue eyes that aren't cold at all anymore, not when he looks at me, but the set of his jaw is granite and I know that look.
I've been waiting for that look for days.
It's the look he gets when he's already decided and the conversation is just noise he's willing to tolerate while I catch up.
"You don't understand." I swing my legs off the bed.
The wool socks hit the plank floor and I'm standing, or trying to, but my knees buckle from exhaustion and I grab the bedpost to stay upright.
"You don't understand what it's like there.
What he's like. He has people everywhere.
Lawyers, judges, cops. He plays golf with the deputy chief of the LAPD.
He sits on the board of three charities that fund the mayor's reelection campaign.
You can't just walk into that world with a duffel bag and a handgun and expect to walk back out. "
Justice sets the bag down on the chair by the door.
Slow. Deliberate. Then he crosses the room in three strides and I have to tilt my head back, way back, to hold his gaze because he's a full foot taller than me and standing this close the sheer mass of him blocks out the stove light and the window and everything else.
His hands come up.
Not fast. Not grabbing. He cups my face the way you'd hold something made of blown glass, his palms engulfing my jaw, his calloused thumbs resting on my cheekbones.
The heat from his skin burns against my cold face and I can smell woodsmoke and copper and the sharp antiseptic bite of hydrogen peroxide from the wound he cleaned and bandaged on his own arm without a sound.
"Look at me."
I am looking at him. I haven't stopped looking at him. But my vision is blurring because my eyes are filling and I hate it, hate that my body defaults to tears when I'm terrified, hate that my father trained this response into me with twenty-two years of control and consequence.
"Hey." His thumb catches the first tear before it reaches my jaw. "Right here. Look right here."
I blink. His face sharpens. The dark stubble along his jaw. The split in his lower lip from the cold. The thin scar above his left eyebrow that he's never explained. The absolute, unbreakable certainty in his eyes.
"I will be right beside you."
"He'll destroy you." You don't have money or lawyers or connections. He'll bury you in litigation. He'll have you arrested on fabricated charges. He'll make you disappear and no one will even know."
His thumbs stroke my cheekbones again. Slow. Steady. The same rhythm he uses when he's sanding down a piece of wood, patient and precise.
"I'm not going to fight him in a courtroom."
"Then what? You're going to, what, break down his front door? Threaten him? He has armed security. Full-time. The house in Bel Air has a panic room and an eight-man team on rotation."
"I know what he has. You told me everything he has. You also told me everything he's done. Every bruise. Every locked door. Every time his lawyers made a problem go away."
My throat closes.
"Men like him survive because nobody with proof has the nerve to use it. You have proof, Emilia. Those bruises. Those scars on your back you think I haven't seen. The texts on that phone you keep powered off in your bag. That's not just your pain. That's his prison sentence."
The tears have stopped.
"We go to LA," he says. "Not to his front door. Not to his lawyers. We go to the people he can't buy. Federal. We hand them everything. And we cut the head off the snake."
His hands stay on my face. Warm. Immovable. His bandaged arm must be screaming in pain but nothing in his expression shows it. Nothing in his grip wavers.
Not fear.
Rage.
The quiet, compressed fury of a woman who spent twenty-two years being small and silent and compliant, and who suddenly, for the first time, has someone willing to stand in the fire beside her.
I put my hands over his. Press his palms harder against my face.
"Okay."
We take his truck.
Not the tow rig. The other one. The black Ford F-250 with the dented quarter panels and the mud caked so thick on the wheel wells it looks like terracotta armor.
It smells like diesel and pine resin and him, and the bench seat has a permanent impression where he's lived for years, and the gearshift is wrapped in electrical tape where the plastic knob cracked off.
I ride with my knees pulled up and my forehead to the cold window and I look as his mountain disappears behind us.
First the peaks. Then the tree line. Then the last gravel road, the one with his gate, the steel one he welded himself, getting smaller and smaller in the side mirror until the highway swallows it and it's just gone.
All of it. The snow and the pines and the woodstove and the air that tasted like nothing, like clean, like the first real breath I ever took.
Gone.
Justice drives with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the duffel bag between us.
Not on my leg. Not on the console. On the bag with the gun and the zip ties and the burner phones and the copies he made of every photo, every text, every memo I've been hoarding on the phone I kept powered off for nine days.
Nine days. It doesn't seem possible. Nine days ago I was white-knuckling a dead sedan on an icy mountain pass and now I'm heading back to the city I fled with a man who leveled two armed investigators in the dark like he was clearing brush.
We stop for gas outside Bakersfield. The fluorescent lights of the station turn his skin pale and wrong.
He fills the tank, jaw working, and I go inside to use the bathroom and when I come out a teenage boy behind the register is staring at Justice through the window with the kind of wide-eyed alarm usually reserved for grizzly bears in campgrounds.
I understand the reaction.
Justice in the mountains makes sense. Justice against a backdrop of pines and granite and raw sky, in his grease-stained flannels with a wrench in his hand, that's a man in context.
Justice under the fluorescent buzzing of a Bakersfield gas station, ducking his head to clear the door when he walks in to buy two black coffees, his scarred knuckles wrapping around the paper cups like they're thimbles, the bandage on his forearm visible below his pushed-up sleeve, the way every single person in the store quietly, unconsciously moves out of his path without being asked.
That's something else entirely.
He hands me a coffee without a word. We drive.
The freeway widens. Two lanes become four become six.
The traffic thickens and the air changes, loses its bite, turns warm and flat and stale with exhaust. Palm trees replace pines.
The sky loses its depth and goes white-gray with smog.
Billboards for injury lawyers and cosmetic dentists crowd the horizon.
My stomach drops with every mile.
By the time we hit the 405, my hands shake again.
Not the cold tremor from the mountain. This is the old shake.
The one that lived in my body for years, the one that started in my fingers and crawled up my arms and settled in on me like a trapped bird.
I bring my palms flat against my thighs and breathe through my nose.
Justice notices. He always notices. His right hand comes off the duffel bag and lands on my knee. Heavy. Warm. The calluses catch on the fabric of the borrowed cargo pants I'm wearing, his cargo pants, cinched at the waist with a length of paracord because his smallest pair still drowns me.
He squeezes once. Doesn't let go.
We exit on Sunset.
The Beverly Hills streets unspool around us in their manicured, obscene perfection.
White sidewalks. Hedges trimmed with laser precision.
Cars that are more expensive than Justice's entire property gleaming in driveways behind wrought-iron gates.
A woman in a white tennis outfit and a visor jogs past with a miniature dog that probably has its own dermatologist.
Justice's mud-caked truck rumbles through this world like a wolf in a china shop. A gardener on a riding mower stops and gawks. A security guard in a golf cart at the mouth of a private cul-de-sac watches us roll past and reaches for his radio.
"Turn left here."
He turns.
The house rises behind a twelve-foot stone wall covered in jasmine.
The jasmine is a lie. Behind it runs a razor wire deterrent system my father had installed when I was sixteen, after a tabloid photographer got too close.
The gate is wrought iron, ornamental, beautiful, and backed by a hydraulic lock system that requires a six-digit code.
I know the code. My father never changed it because it never occurred to him that I'd leave.
Justice pulls the truck to the curb, two houses down. Kills the engine. The diesel rattle dies and the silence of the street fills the cab, that specific Beverly Hills silence that isn't silence at all but the low hum of money keeping the world at bay.
He looks at me.
I look at the gate.
"Staff changeover is at six," I say. "The night team overlaps with the day team for fifteen minutes. During that window, there's no one monitoring the south garden entrance."