Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rooster
The night before we cross, Razor lays it all out on the table one last time.
I stand at the back and watch all these people memorize how they might die.
The tunnel on Alejandro's property. The mile underground. The house on the Arizona side where we come up, and the trucks Vegas has staged in a barn outside Sasabe.
Two hundred miles after that, three vehicles at the speed limit with clean plates, because the fastest way to lose everything is a taillight and a bored state trooper.
The wash behind La Nada. The approach on foot from the southeast, in the dark.
"What’s the word if we abort the run?" Razor plants both hands on the table.
"Cricket," half the room answers.
Mila picked it. Nobody laughed when she did.
It's the one piece of that day Trask didn't get to keep, and now it's the word that means everybody stop, it's gone wrong, get out. There's a rightness to it. Her dog getting the last job.
"Say it again," Razor says.
"Cricket."
"You hear that word on any channel, you break contact and run for the creek." He looks around the table, slow, hitting every face. "You don't finish what you're doing. You don't grab one more woman. You fucking go."
Nobody moves.
"That's not me being cautious. That's me telling you the difference between eight of us coming home and none of us."
Amara closes the folder in front of her.
"Get sleep. We roll at four." She stands, and the room stands with her. "That's the last order I'm giving tonight. Whatever you need to do before we leave, go do it. I'll see you in the dark."
The room breaks up quietly.
I find Mila by the fire pit, which isn't lit.
None of us light it anymore. It's hers now, hers and whoever she lets sit by it, and tonight she's let me.
She's got my jacket on over her shoulders, looking north, out past the fence into the dark where the desert runs all the way to a border and past it to a hole in the ground with her whole life owed to it.
"You should sleep." I lower myself onto the bench beside her.
"So should you." She doesn't take her eyes off the desert.
"I can’t. Not the night before."
"Neither do I." She pulls the jacket tighter. "Sit down and stop hovering."
"I'm sitting."
"You're hovering while sitting. It's a skill." She looks over at me, and there's a dry twist to it. "You've done it all day. Like you think I'll come apart if you look away too long."
I put my hands on my knees and leave them there.
"I'm not going to come apart," she says.
"I know."
"You don't. You keep checking." She tugs the jacket collar up around her jaw. "I watched you at dinner. Every time I went quiet you leaned in like you were going to catch me."
"I'll stop."
"You won't." One corner of her mouth moves. "But thank you for saying it."
The cold comes up hard off the desert the way it does out here after dark.
Behind us the club goes silent room by room, men saying whatever they say to the people they might not see again.
I've got the woman I love beside me on a cold bench, and I can't find one word big enough for tomorrow.
"I'm scared," she says.
It surprises me. Not the fear. That she admitted it out loud.
"Yeah." I keep my eyes on the dark. "Me too."
"You don't understand what I mean." She turns and looks at me full on. "I'm not scared of the place. I need you to hear that, because you've spent all week terrified I'll fall apart when I see it. I won't."
"Mila—"
"I stopped being scared of that place a long time ago." She holds my eyes. "I stopped being scared of dying nine years ago. You can't threaten a woman with what she's already made peace with."
"Then what?"
She pulls her knees up onto the bench and wraps her arms around them.
I make myself sit still and let her get there.
"For nine years I had nothing. That was the one thing I had going for me down there. Nothing left they could take, so nothing left to be scared of." She rests her chin on her knees. "You can't frighten a woman who's already lost everything. It's the closest thing to armor there is."
"And now?"
"And now I walked up to a gate to get one answer out of a man who owed me, and get the women out, and be done." Her voice catches. "That was the whole plan. And instead I got a life, Finn."
I don't say anything.
"A warm bed. A woman who does my hair. A baby who fell asleep on my chest." She turns her head and looks at me over her knees. "You. I got you."
"Mila."
"So now I've got everything to lose all over again, and I got it the week before I walk back into the place that took it the first time." Her breath shakes going in. "It's not the hole I'm scared of. It's that I finally have something, and I might not get to keep it."
I reach over slowly and put my hand on the back of her neck, under her hair.
She lets me. She leans into it.
"I spent nine years unafraid." She says it into my shoulder. "You took it away in eight weeks. I hate you a little for it."
"I know." My voice comes out wrecked. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be." She lifts her head. "It's the best thing that's ever happened to me and I hate you for it at the same time. Nobody warns you about that part. Getting your life back is the most frightening thing there is, because now there's something to lose again."
"I need you to promise me something." She turns on the bench to face me.
"Anything."
"Don't say that yet. You don't know what it is." She sets her jaw. "Tomorrow. If it goes bad. If it comes down to me or the women—you get the women out."
"Mila—"
"You said anything." She doesn't blink.
"You can't ask me that."
"I can. I am. And you're going to say yes." Her face is dead calm, calmer than I can make mine. "Listen. This whole time you've known me, I've been teaching you one thing, whether you realized it or not."
I wait.
"That you don't get to decide for me." She keeps her eyes level on mine.
"Every time somebody decided for me to keep me safe, it cost me a piece of my life.
I'm done being kept. And you learned it.
You learned it so well you got on your knees in a garage and let me hand you back your own guilt because I asked you to. "
"That's different."
"It's exactly the same." She takes my face in both hands. Her hands are cold, and they don't shake. "I made a promise to a girl behind a door. Volveré. And you're the one person alive who could make me break it. Because you'd choose me."
"Mila—"
"I know you would." She presses on before I can. "If it came down to me bleeding out and eleven women still in the ground, you'd choose me and never think twice, and I would rather die on that property than live knowing you traded them for me."
My eyes are burning and there's nothing I can do about it.
"So promise me. You get them out. All of them. Even if the cost is me." She holds my face steady. "Because if you save me and lose them, you don't save me. You keep the body. The part worth keeping dies on that ground the second you make the wrong choice."
I sit there with her cold hands on my face and the whole desert black behind her.
She's not going to let me out of it.
And she's right, which is worse.
"Okay," I say.
"Say it."
"I get them out." It comes out of me like it's torn loose from somewhere. "Even if it's you. I promise. I get them out."
"Thank you." She presses her forehead to mine. "That's the last thing I'll ever make you decide for me. Everything after, I decide. But that one's yours, because I can't trust myself to hold to it, and I trust you."
We sit like that. Forehead to forehead. Breathing.
"Finn."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
I go still.
She's never said it. Not once.
I said it to a room full of men before I ever got to say it to her, and she's known that.
Everybody's known it, and she's let it sit there unanswered for weeks.
Because she doesn't say a word until she means it all the way to the floor.
And now she's said it. The night before. On a cold bench, with her forehead against mine.
"I've loved you since I was seven and a boy across the street let my muddy dog into his mother's kitchen and took the blame for it.
" Her thumb moves along my jaw. "I loved you the whole time I hated you.
I loved you in that hole, which I'll never forgive you for, because loving somebody down there is one more thing they get to hurt. "
"Mila—"
"And I love you right now. Tonight. More than I've ever loved anything." Her voice breaks clean through. "And I wasn't walking into that place tomorrow with it stuck in my throat. So there. Now you know."
I get my arms around her and pull her into me and hold on.
"I've loved you my whole life," I say into her hair. "I loved you enough to leave, and it was the worst thing I ever did, and I'd have done it a thousand more times to keep you breathing."
She goes still against my chest.
"I'm going to spend whatever I've got left learning to love you the right way instead." I pull back to look at her. "Starting tonight."
Her face is wet, lit up, and unafraid.
She stands and holds out her hand.
"Then come inside." She wraps her fingers around mine. "I'm not spending tonight on a cold bench."
We head inside and she takes me to her room.
She doesn't turn the lock.
That's the first thing I notice, with the door shut behind us.
She doesn't check it. Doesn't test it. Doesn't run the ritual her body's run in every room since the gate.
She shuts the door, turns around, and lets me watch her not do it. "Come here." She says it softly.
I do.
And this isn't the first night.
The first night she ran everything, because she had to know she could.
Tonight isn't that.
Tonight she comes up into me and fists both hands in my shirt and pulls me down and kisses me like she's trying to get under my skin.
Hard. No test in it. No waiting to see what I'll do, because she already knows.
"I'm not going to break tonight." She says it against my mouth. "Don't be gentle because you think I need it."
"Tell me what you need."
"To feel like I'm alive. Like you're alive. Like we're both still going to be breathing this time tomorrow." Her hands drop to my belt. "Can you do that?"
"Yeah."
"Then stop holding back." She works the buckle without looking down. "I've watched you hold back for weeks. I know exactly how much you keep off me so I can steer."
"Mila—"
"I don't need to steer tonight." She looks up at me. "I need you to meet me. All the way."
So, I meet her.
I get her up against me and she makes a sound into my mouth that goes straight down through me.
I let go of the distance I've kept since the courtyard, and she feels it the second it's gone.
She gasps and pulls me harder, because this is what she asked for.
This is her steering by telling me not to hold the wheel so carefully.
It's still hers. All of it. She handed me more of it.
We get each other's clothes off between the door and the bed.
I get to see her in the low light. All of her. The scars, the sharp bones, the freckle low by her mouth I've had memorized since I was a boy.
She watches me look.
Tonight she doesn't turn her back to test me, because there's no test left.
She lets me look, and she looks back, both of us seeing the other one whole the night before we might not get another.
"I love you." She says it again and pulls me down onto the bed with her. Over her.
When I catch my weight on my forearms she doesn't drag me down.
She wraps herself around me and takes me down with her, both of us going together, her heel hooked hard against the back of my thigh.
It isn't slow. It isn't gentle.
It's two people who found each other across a whole ocean of hurt, saying one thing with everything they've got.
Stay alive. Come back to me. Don't you dare not come back to me.
She says my name into my neck, over and over. Finn. Finn.
I give her hers back, all of it. Camila. The way her mother said it.
She comes apart with her nails in my back and her legs locked around me and my name in her mouth.
I go over right behind her, with her arms holding on so tight I can feel her heart slamming against my chest like it's trying to get out of her and into me, where it'd be safe.
After, she doesn't let go.
She keeps me right where I am, wrapped up in her, breathing hard against my throat.
There's wetness on her face and it's not the sad kind.
I hold my weight off her and stay inside the circle of her arms and let her keep me as long as she wants.
"This is how I want to remember it." She says it into the dark. "If it goes bad tomorrow. Not the hole. This. You."
"You won’t have to remember it. Everything will be fine, Mila."
"I hope so." She tips her head back and looks at me. "But if it is—this is the one I'm taking with me. Not any of the rest of it. This."
We don't sleep.
We lie tangled up in the dark with the club gone silent around us and four o'clock coming for us like a train, and we don't waste any of it sleeping.
She talks. More than I've ever heard out of her.
Her mother. The porch. The sound the screen door made. The way her father sang wrong on purpose to make her laugh.
The girl behind the eighth door, and what she's going to say to her when it opens.
I listen. I say small things back. I hold her.
I don't check the lock and I don't check her face for cracks.
I let her be exactly as strong and as scared as she is, both at once, all the way to the end of the dark.
At ten to four she gets up and starts dressing.
I watch her put herself together in the dark—the woman who walked up to my gate with nothing, pulling on boots to go back and get everybody she left behind.
"Finn."
"Yeah."
"Whatever happens today." She stops with one boot in her hand. "I already won. I need you to know that."
I sit up.
"I got the answer. I got the life. I got you. I got to say it out loud." She pulls the boot on. "Everything after this is more than I ever thought I'd get. So don't go into that place trying to save me because you think I'll die with something unfinished."
"Mila."
"I'm finished." She stands. "Get them out. Let me worry about me."
She's ready.
I have never been more scared, or more in love, in my life.
"Let's go get your girls," I say.