Chapter 27 August 24-25, 2024
Daleyza
They’d spent hours going over every door into the quadrangle, the church, and the residence.
Plotted every room on a multilayered map.
Drone footage from Midas gave them rough dimensions, and they highlighted every space they thought could hold a hidden entrance to stairs or elevators, or even whole rooms where the dimensions looked off.
At some point, someone brought her some food, and periodically, they refilled her tea.
She had a headache. Her body ached from hunching over the table.
“Enough.” Ildefanso’s voice cut through the conversation at the table. “She needs rest.”
There were murmurs of “Thank you” and “Good night” from several people, but she was too tired to respond, much less to acknowledge who said them. It was simpler to lean on Ildefanso, with his arm wrapped around her waist, and let him guide her to their room.
Inside, he stripped her down to nothing, then helped her into a long-sleeved flannel pajama shirt and pants. He tucked her into bed, placed a kiss on her hairline, and murmured that he would be back after a shower and to go to sleep.
“Fanso?” Her voice, hoarse from sleep, questioned the arms wrapping around her from behind in their bed.
He kissed the back of her head. “Sí, belleza. Go back to sleep.”
Instead, she rolled over to face him. He was shirtless, and her hands met with warm skin, just a touch damp in places from a recent shower.
She snuggled into his neck, her lips parting when they touched his throat so her tongue could sneak out for a quick lick.
She tasted the water, the soap, and the smell of warm male filled her nose.
He’d been gone eighteen days on this last trip for his father. Complete radio silence.
The lick turned into a nip. The nip turned into a kiss. Her hands began to wander across his chest, down his torso, and around him so she could get impossibly closer.
When her hands slid up to just outside his shoulder blades, she sucked in a breath. Beneath her hands, she felt stitches.
Instantly, the foggy remains of sleep were gone, and she struggled to sit up in bed.
“You’re hurt!”
“I’m fine, belleza. It’s just a scratch.”
“Those were stitches. A lot of them.”
“The cut is long but shallow. It’s fine.”
“You don’t get stitches when something is shallow, Fanso.”
He pulled her stiff body back down into his arms, holding both of her hands in one of his and tucking her head back under his chin with the other. “Don’t think about it, belleza. It’s over. I’m home safe. I just want to hold you close.” His hands went around her baby bump. “How’s our boy?”
She settled in, pushing his wound to the back of her mind. He often came home nicked up, bruised. This was the first time he’d needed more than one or two stitches.
“He’s going to be an MMA fighter, according to my insides.”
Ildefanso chuckled into her neck. “One less thing I’ll have to teach him.”
His chin pushed her hair out of the way, and then his lips were on her neck. She felt him press into her backside, his cock hard in the valley of her cheeks.
When she tried to turn, he held her still with his hands, which were still cradling her stomach. “Don’t move. I woke you up, but I need to be inside you. Just let me do all the work.”
Swimming up out of sleep, she saw moonlight through the windows. When she tried to shift to look at the clock, the warm body curled up behind her tightened its hold around her waist. Soft, even breaths puffed against the back of her neck.
His arrival in bed must have fed her dreams.
Unsure of how long she’d been sleeping or when he’d come to bed, she settled her hands on the forearms wrapped around her waist and burrowed deeper into the blankets, his citrus scent enveloping and soothing her with its familiarity, even after all this time.
Rather than disturb him, and not wanting to consider the consequences of allowing this closeness between them when everything was so uncertain, she decided to simply enjoy being in his arms.
Unfortunately, the cocoon they were in, with its warmth and security, gave her time to think rather than allowing her to slip back into sleep.
His voice rose in the dim light as if it came up from the underworld, gravelly and slow. “How do you ever sleep when you think so hard in bed?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Don’t apologize. You know I don’t sleep heavily anyway.” He paused before suggesting, “You should go back to sleep.”
She couldn’t help but smile at the words, so like her dream. Maybe she truly had been channeling him.
“I can feel you smiling. What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, really.” The fingers on her one hand traced lazily back and forth across his forearm. “I was dreaming before I woke up.”
“About what?”
She swore she felt a kiss on her shoulder, but through the flannel material, it could have been her imagination.
“I was dreaming about the night you came home a few weeks before Tobias was born. When you got that knife wound.”
His chuckle was muffled as he nuzzled into her neck and the pillow. “And that made you smile?”
She exhaled a short laugh and gave his forearm a light slap. “Trust me. There were times I wanted to take a knife to you myself,” she teased. “But no. That knife wound scared the shit out of me. A little deeper, and you wouldn’t have been there for Tobias’ birth.”
His arms flexed, and she felt as if he’d somehow drawn her closer.
“Heaven wouldn’t have allowed it. I would have come home to you no matter how badly wounded I was. There was no way I was missing the birth of our son.”
There was a long pause as she gathered her courage to say what she wanted to say. His uneven breathing was her only clue that he was still awake. “You’ve always come back to me.”
His breathing stopped. He shifted his weight.
She turned her head to look over her shoulder at him. His head was no longer buried against her skin, so she imagined it further back on the pillow as he stared at her with his silver eyes glinting in the dark.
“Even after we put you in a grave with a headstone, you still found your way back to me. Just like you promised you would.”
“Leeza,” he uttered with surprise.
She turned her head back to face the window of the room. “That night, despite your wound, was one of my favorite memories. The happiness of having you home. The excitement of our baby arriving. There weren’t many memories that were better.”
He remained frozen, though he’d begun breathing again, albeit short, shallow breaths.
“Do you remember that night?” she asked.
“I do. You told me our son was going to be an MMA fighter because he’d been beating you up on the inside.
” Across her now much-flatter stomach, he drew circles with his fingertips, as if trying to reimagine the space their son had grown within.
“He was always so active. Almost from the moment we conceived. I constantly wished I could make it less painful for you.”
“It wasn’t pain. Not really. Every movement was proof of life. That he was growing and wanted to be out in the world. I complained, but truthfully, I loved every punch, kick, and imagined battering ram.”
His laugh was more at ease, and he lay down behind her again, his fingers still moving across her skin. “While you were pregnant was the only time I ever felt useless. I didn’t know what to do for you.”
“You? Helpless? You helped with everything, barely letting me do anything when you were home.”
“No, Daleyza. Useless. Men can’t ever really understand what women go through during pregnancy.
I was part of his conception, but those nine months Tobias grew inside you?
That’s something only a mother can understand.
It’s why the bond between mother and child is so unique.
You and he shared the same space for nine months.
Everything the two of you did directly affected the other.
“But as a father? I didn’t have that experience.
I couldn’t feel the changes inside me like you could.
The bond with Tobias began immediately and continued all the way to his birth, making you a mother from day one.
But me? One day, I was playing at fatherhood—putting together baby furniture, painting walls, buying supplies—and then the next, I was a father for real.
It’s a miracle that sudden change didn’t give me an instant heart attack. ”
Smiling, she told him, “You more than made up for it once he was born. Tobias always came first.”
“Which made you feel like you were second place, or nothing at all.”
“Sometimes, maybe.” There was no point in lying to him.
He always knew when she was untruthful. “Being jealous of your own child for taking away your husband’s attention was stupid, but I think all mothers probably go through it a bit.
Especially if the men are good fathers, like you were.
But deep down? I understood, even when I didn’t like it, or even when I got to feeling sorry for myself.
He needed you when you were there because you couldn’t control the demands your family made.
Tobias was a child. He was too young to fend for himself or understand what was going on around him.
I was an adult, someone who should have known better and could take care of herself, not a child who needed constant reassurance and attention. ”
“It may be too late to tell you this, but I wasn’t ignoring you.
I was always watching. But you were always so strong that sometimes I felt like you didn’t need me.
” He sighed. “I wanted to empower you. Give you the confidence and the power to take back what should have always been yours. If you had that, then if there came a time when I wasn’t there to protect you, you could protect yourself.
“This afternoon, I took my own walk through memories of our past, only I was awake, literally and figuratively. Everything that came to mind was the good things. The happiest moments I’ve ever had with you and Tobias. Not a single one of the bad moments. That’s when I finally understood.”
He pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “You didn’t need me to teach you to stand alone because you’d already been doing that your whole life.
I taught you to be a warrior, and when the fight turned darkest, I let you stand alone, like you always felt you had been.
Because, in my fucked-up paradigm, I knew you’d come out of it okay.
“What I should have done was prove to you that you were my woman. Not in an overly possessive alpha-male way. Not as a shield to protect you. Not as someone behind you to clean up the mess if you failed. Instead, my partner. A woman to create a life with, in all the ways that means.”
He’d said many pretty things to her in the past. Things that had made her feel beautiful. Desired. He’d given her words that made her feel smart. Safe. Secure. But these words? These were the words that made her feel loved.
In the past, both distant and recent, he’d focused on trying to tell her why he’d done the things he’d done. He tried to make her understand his intentions, hoping that somehow it would make up for how it had all gone so wrong.
In this one vulnerable moment, he shared with her that he now understood his true mistake. He’d not been present. Somehow, he’d always remained separate. While he might have been in the same room, or even close by, he’d never been there with her.
“How do I erase this, Leeza? How do I fix what I’ve broken?”
Her heart broke for him. “You don’t, Fanso.
There is no fixing what’s broken beyond repair.
” She rolled onto her back. Raising a hand to cup his jaw, she brushed his cheek with her thumb, her sad eyes meeting his pained ones.
“But maybe we can start over. We didn’t choose each other the first time.
Maybe, if we choose each other now, we’ll find ourselves on stronger ground. ”
There was a flicker of something in his eyes. Hope, maybe? “Is that what you truly want? Life with me as a deadman will be no easier than it was with the cartel. In some ways, it might be harder.”
“I was never afraid of the difficulty. So yes, it’s what I truly want.”
She watched him swallow, as if it was difficult. Then he rasped, “I want it too, Leeza. I want it so much.”
Lightning fast, she rolled on top of him, clutching any part of him she could reach.
His arms encircled her from below, and they lay there, locked together, simply holding each other the way they should have been all the years they’d known each other.
Other than the day Tobias was born, this was the happiest she’d ever been, which was completely fucked up, given what was going on around them.
But that was marriage, wasn’t it? No matter how bad things were, no matter how impossible everything seemed, if your spouse was there with you, then any moment could be a good one.
You simply focused on that single moment and treasured it for exactly what it was.
Then you went about solving whatever problem you faced.
But you did it together.