Chapter 2
BENEATH A GOLEM’S SKIN
LORENZO
Iam sick of driving. Sick of the endless miles. I don't even remember when Inez first called me. It feels like a lifetime ago. But ever since then, whenever it was, I have been constantly in transit. All over Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Italy, Germany, and now the States.
We literally arrived here in Fresnillo earlier today after more than twenty-two hours of driving, and now, having been here less than three hours, we're going right back the way we fucking came.
I'd rather cut off my own dick than drive all the way across Mexico and the US yet again, but I love Sophia, so here we go.
I take first shift behind the wheel; Inez broods in the passenger seat, the seatback tilted to forty-five degrees, legs stretched out, her hands idly playing with her butterfly knife—snick-snick, open; snick-snick, closed; snick-snick, open; snick-snick, closed.
While I drive, I consider the question of Sophia versus Inez.
It's confusing to me, her near-obsession with her name.
To me, when I see the woman I love—and have loved for nearly twenty years—I see my Sophia.
I see, still, the seventeen-year-old girl I met, at once coltish and curvy, already with steel in her eyes and ice in her veins, already feared and respected by her father's lackeys, minions, and thugs.
I see her eyes, so dark brown they're nearly black, watching me from the shadows as I spar with one of Rafael's bodyguards.
I see her hands, fluttering over my shoulders like wary, skittish birds the first time I took my life in my hands and dared to kiss her.
I see her soft, sleek, nubile, caramel skin gleaming in the moonlight the night she gave me what is still the greatest and most precious gift of my life: her virginity. Her body. Her trust.
That is my Sophia.
But I also see Inez. I see Inez when I think of the moment I discovered what her father did to her—a plan I knew about and could not stop. I warned her. Told her to leave, to flee with me. She refused. Told me I was mistaken. Her father was harsh, yes, but he would never do that to her.
He did.
I'm keeping a secret from her, regarding that awful day; a secret and a lie. The lie is that I watched her marriage to Rafael through a sniper scope. I didn’t; I watched it from a cell beneath Bruno's estate, a gun to my head so I would not close my eyes or look away.
I was forced at gunpoint to watch, every second of every day for three days, as Bruno let his men rape his daughter.
I was forced to watch as she was married to that vile, evil, despicable monster. That is the secret.
Bruno's men let their guard down after the so-called wedding, and I escaped.
By the time I was able to return to Bruno's estate, intent on freeing Sophia, Rafael had already murdered Bruno and taken control of the drug empire, increasing security to the point that it became obvious rescuing her was simply flat-out impossible.
I remember my superior officer in the Brazilian spec ops team handing me a manila folder full of photographs of the carnage left in her wake upon her escape from Rafael.
Thirty-two people. A mad rampage, it was.
Godawful. Horrific. The responding officers who initially reported to the scene vomited.
No one—not in law enforcement, not in the Brazilian intelligence community, no one—knew the truth of what prompted the massacre.
I could not tell them, either. I could only let them vilify her.
Paint her as a psychopathic lunatic dead-set on murdering as many people as possible.
They hunted for her all over Brazil, but they were looking for what they assumed was a serial killer or some kind of deranged maniac.
They never found her, obviously, and they never could understand why or how she never appeared again, anywhere.
She never killed anyone in Brazil ever again—or anywhere in South America.
To the Brazilian government, the massacre of Rafael's entire estate staff was an inexplicable mystery.
It wasn't.
To Sophia—or more accurately, Inez—everyone who lived and worked on that estate was complicit in what was done to her.
And to be honest, she was right, at least partially.
They all knew who Bruno was. They all knew who Rafael is.
They all knew the kinds of things both men did.
You could not live or work on that estate and not know the evils that were done there.
You could not avoid the blood, the corpses, or the screams.
They were paid well, and so they pretended not to know. But they knew.
They knew what was done to Sophia. They knew, and did nothing. Said nothing.
Complicit.
I do not make excuses or justify the massacre of thirty-two people, no matter the reason. But I understand.
Inez was born that day. She was birthed out of trauma. She emerged from the ocean of blood spilled that day, full-formed, with hate in her heart and death in her veins. Inez is fueled by a sun-hot rage, a fission of fury.
I love Sophia.
I'm not sure how I feel about Inez.
I fear her. Respect her. But do I love her?
I don't think so. How can one love a creature like Inez?
For, in my mind, Inez is not a person. Not a woman.
Inez, to me, is a golem, a creature shaped by the hands of hate out of the clay of torment, fired in the kiln of killing, given life by the infernal magic of agony.
Somewhere within the destructive golem that is Inez, there is my Sophia. The girl who loved me. The woman who taught me to love. I will destroy that golem. I will free Sophia.
"Stop looking at me like that, Ren," Inez mutters, without so much as a glance at me.
“Like what?" I ask.
She shakes her head. "Just…don't."
"Why not?" I ask. "We're safe and alone for the moment."
"Lorenzo," she says, sighing. "You should give up."
"On what?"
“Me."
I bark a laugh at this. "Every single day from the moment I escaped your father's estate to the moment you called me to ask for help rescuing Solomon, I thought about you. I searched for you." I pause, but the truth emerges. "In S?o Paulo, there is a post office box."
I have her curiosity, now. She doesn't look at me or say anything, but the quicksilver blur of her incessantly flipping knife ceases and her body angles ever so slightly toward me.
"That post box is crammed full of letters," I say.
When I let the silence linger, she sighs. "Fine, I'll bite. Letters to whom and from whom?"
"From me to you."
"I don't have a post box in S?o Paulo," she says.
"No, but I do." I shrug. "They're from me to me, but they're letters I wrote to you. It was…a journal, sort of. It was the only way I could cope with missing you."
The knife resumes snicking open, snicking closed. "Ren," she whispers. "Don't."
"I needed to send them somewhere. The act of mailing out the letters…." I shrug again, shake my head. "It was…it helped me get the feelings out. I wrote you nearly every day for over a decade."
"That many letters wouldn't fit in a single box, Lorenzo," she says. "A letter a day for ten years? That’s…” she pauses to do mental math. “Almost four thousand letters?"
I chuckle. "When it filled up, I went to S?o Paulo, emptied the letters into a bin, and started over."
"Where is that bin, now?"
"A storage unit a few blocks from the post office, along with some extra gear."
“What did you write about?" she asks, after a few minutes; her tone suggests the question is spoken begrudgingly, as if her curiosity overpowered her reticence to discuss…well, anything to do with our former romantic relationship.
"Everything," I answer. "I complained about work. Superior officers. Missions. I wrote about dead friends. How I missed you. What I'd want to do with you, if I could see you. What I would say if I ever saw you again. Everything. My life."
She doesn't answer for a long, long time. "Why keep them all this time? Especially if you didn’t know if I was even alive.”
"I don't know. Throwing them away seemed wrong. I never imagined I'd actually see you again, though I never stopped hoping." I sigh, shake my head. "I suppose…no. I don't know."
"Say it, Lorenzo." She finally turns to look at me. "Say what you were going to say."
"I kept them because some part of me always held out hope that I would find you one day, and you would…" I pause, clear my throat gruffly, hating the thick knot of clogging emotion. "That you would perhaps want to read some of them, someday."
"Ren," she whispers.
"I know. It's foolish."
She stares at me, her black gaze inscrutable, unknowable. "It isn't foolish."
I don't know how to answer that.
Her gaze rakes back to the window. "Maybe…" a hard swallow. "Maybe someday, I will read them."
I don't know how to answer that, either.
I held onto the thinnest thread of hope for so many years, hoping against all evidence that she was alive, that she was out there somewhere. Hoping she was thinking of me. Missing me. Trying to find me. To return to me. I dreamed of seeing her again.
Our reunion is not as my dreams portrayed.
She does not want me. She is not my Sophia.
I do not know how to reach beyond Inez’s hardened clay golem skin to the Sophia at the core of her. I see glimpses of her, now and then, but I can as easily grasp a fistful of water as I can hold on to those fragments of the woman I once knew.
Long minutes of silence blossom between us, with only the roar of the engine and the hum of the tires.
"I'll never give up on you," I say, my voice low and rough. "I never have and I never will."
"The Sophia you once knew is gone, Lorenzo," she murmurs. "She died in that cell. She died along with the thirty-two people I murdered.”
"I know."
"Then what is it you hope to find?" she asks, looking at me once again. "Who are you looking for, when you look at me the way you do?"
"Just…you."
"Why?"
"Because I love you." It is the only answer there can be.
"Then you love a ghost."
"No," I answer. I reach over, moving slowly and cautiously, and rest my hand on her knee; when she doesn't slice my hand off, I give her knee the gentlest of squeezes.
"I love the woman you are now. Whatever name you choose.
Wherever you are. Whoever you are. I have loved you since I first saw you and I have never stopped. I will never stop. I cannot."
She only shakes her head and resumes staring out the window, brooding. "I say it again, because it is the truth, Lorenzo: you love a ghost."
"Then I love a ghost. So what? I have asked you for nothing, Sophia…
or Inez. Whichever. I will walk beside you wherever our paths lead.
I'll fight with you. I'll fight for you.
I'll kill for you. I'll die for you." I squeeze her knee again.
"I ask for nothing. I would love nothing more than to hold you.
To kiss you. To make love with you. But if you cannot give me any of that, so be it. "
"Why?" she asks. "You have a choice. You don't have to cling to these feelings. You can give up on me. You can let go."
"Of course I have a choice." I capture her hand and bring it to my lips. "I choose you. Loving you is a choice and it's one I make every day."
"Why? Why, Lorenzo? We shared, what? A few months of stolen moments, more than fifteen years ago? Closer to twenty, is it not? Why? Why cling to the bones of a dead woman, Lorenzo?"
"I don't know. A lovely, deadly seventeen-year-old girl captured my heart and never gave it back. Maybe I'm just a stubborn old fool, but…" I shrug, shake my head. "I don't know. I just know I love you, and I cannot, will not ever stop."
Her silence shifts, then. She tilts the seat all the way back and drapes her arm over her eyes. "I'm going to sleep for a while. Wake me up when it's my turn to drive."
My hand is still on her knee. That is a small but significant victory.