Chapter 15 Bonds Forged In Blood #3
They surround me, and their hands touch my shoulders, my back, my head. I find Lorenzo, beyond the circle, waiting. I reach for him, and he takes my hand, and I let them have it all.
I let go.
My breaking began a long, long time ago.
Perhaps, in a way, I was never whole. Never unbroken.
I was six the first time I saw my father kill someone.
I was already a crack shot with an air rifle by then.
I was a cold-blooded killer when most girls my age were dreaming of their quinceanera, or their sweet sixteen.
I led men twice my age in assaults against rival cartels when other kids my age were discovering sex and alcohol and weed.
While other girls learned the art of getting blood out of clothes because of periods, I learned it from executing people.
I was never whole.
And then came the day when my father told me I was going to marry Rafael Sousa. His protégé. His real heir, since of course the cartel couldn't go to a mere woman. What followed has been covered—no need to go over it again.
I lied to Rafael: Papa did break me. Those days chained to the cot broke me into shards and slivers.
Marrying Rafael broke me again.
Imprisonment, becoming his wife—La Víbora, the mistress, the cruel queen of his empire. That broke me.
The vile, depraved, violent things he did to me in trying to impregnate me—that broke me.
The birth. The massacre.
Shattered yet again.
But the healing?
I don’t know when that began.
When I opened my eyes and saw Jakob's face, stern and severe and brutally beautiful, jet black hair touched with silver at the temples—early graying from a hard life, he later claimed. That was probably the start. His eyes were cold and hard, but I saw kindness in them. Of a sort, at least.
He took me from the detention center and nursed me to health himself. Helped me regain my strength, my fitness. He never pushed me for my story. He just…took care of me.
I expected him to demand the obvious in return, but he never did.
I remember the day I tried to give him the repayment I assumed he would expect.
He was in his office working—out of a high-rise in Sacramento, back then, the offices of a shell company owned by other shells and subsidiaries, a tangled web of ownership no one could ever decipher.
I stripped out of my clothes outside his office doors, knocked, received permission to enter, and went in.
He didn't look up until I was at his desk and he caught sight of me in his peripheral vision.
He'd shot out of his chair and turned away. "Put your fucking clothes on, Inez."
Confused, stung by rejection even though sleeping with Jakob was the last thing I wanted to do, I'd dressed again and came back in.
"This is not that kind of relationship," he’d said to me, his tone hard but not unkind. "It never will be. I am your employer. Perhaps a friend. But nothing more. I do not want that from you. If I did, I would have already claimed it."
We never spoke of it again.
That healed me a little more.
Then he brought me his idea for the Broken Arrows. He didn't have the name yet, just the idea. A few men, down on their luck. Operators. warriors, men forgotten by the country they served. Good men dragged down a dead-end road by the vagaries of life. Destroyed by death and war and violence.
“We save them, Inez,” he'd told me. “Redeem them.”
“Why?” I'd asked.
He'd spent a long, long time thinking about that answer. "Because I needed redemption, once, and there was no one to give it. I had to find it for myself."
"Redemption from what?" It was the closest I've ever gotten to asking him his story.
"My many, many sins."
"Who?" I asked. "Who do we choose?"
He'd looked out at the Sacramento skyline and considered this. "I'll bring you a list and you choose."
The list he brought me, four months later, was extensive.
A hundred names. SEALs, Rangers, Raiders, Green Berets, SWAT, FBI, CIA, NSA, men who worked in the shadows and belonged to no one.
Each man had a tale of grief to tell in the pages of their dossiers.
I spent a week poring over those dossiers.
Winnowing based on feel and intuition. Unfair, perhaps, but the only way I knew how.
Eventually, after ten days of consideration, I chose a man named Rev, and with him, attached at the hip, it seemed, came a giant named Chance.
Then Kane, the Cabot brothers, Lash…
For a while, I felt little more for them than a kind of guarded consideration—reticent responsibility.
The idea, Jakob explained, as we designed and built Club Sin and winnowed the list of candidates, was to take men who had been broken by war, by violence, by sorrow, by guilt—the very things that had broken me, and, I assume, Jakob himself, although to this day I still do not know anything about him except his name—and teach them to embrace peace, to embrace life, to shed their guilt and find redemption through brotherhood and belonging and purpose.
Isolate them from the world at large, give them—men built to protect—a simple, single purpose: protect the club and the people inside it, and protect each other.
Guard their peace. Free them from the bonds of their past.
I was merely the caretaker, I thought. Sort of a zookeeper.
I am rather embarrassed to admit that "zookeeper" was the word that ran through my head as I thought about the seven men we had chosen.
It escaped my notice for quite some time that I was more like them than I wanted to believe.
I stayed in the club. I had a single purpose—run the club, manage the men. Ignore the world beyond the club.
Rather like the men, but I didn’t realize that at the time.
It escaped my notice that I was the first broken arrow he'd plucked from the battlefield and chose to fix rather than discard. It was just that I was so much more broken than the men that it took far, far longer for me to find my own redemption.
I assumed I was beyond redemption. Beyond salvation. Beyond fixing.
It's only now, as those seven men—and Scarlett, without whom I would never have even thought to reach for my own chance at love—that I truly grasp Jakob's long-term plan.
He used me to reach the hearts of the men. I brought them in. Showed them the rules. Guarded their peace until they were ready to face their pasts, one by one.
Until Solomon's past caught up to him and dragged me, kicking and screaming, out of the myopic and peaceful world of Club Sin and into the dark, violent, and dangerous larger world, where husbands lurked and lovers waited.
These men are my redemption. They fought for me. They risked their lives and shed their blood for me. They broke their vows for me.
For me.
They surround me. They don't see my past or my weakness. My guilt.
They accept me.
And then there's Lorenzo.
My eyes meet his, and mine water, burn. My throat tightens.
A million thoughts flutter through my mind as we lock gazes, but I can't find anything to say.
Words are wholly insufficient for the depth and breadth of how Lorenzo's love, patience, understanding, empathy, and resolve have changed me.
Healed me. Opened the pathways in my mind and heart.
Bled out the toxins of trauma and horror and fear, making room for love and joy and peace.
He held me when I needed to be held. He gave me space to be angry and difficult, and loved me anyway. He let me be angry. He gave me control when I needed it, and asked for nothing in return except honesty.
He loved me without any reassurance that I could love him back.
That, perhaps more than anything else, has healed me.
Rafael is dead.
It's over.
The book is closed. It's not a blank page in the same old story. What comes next is a whole new book, a whole new story, one yet to be written—a story we will tell together.
Me, and Lorenzo, and this found family, whose bonds have been forged in blood.