23 - Isa
The bathroom stall at La Sirena feels like a confessional.
The air is thick with expensive perfume and the lingering scent of sex from last night’s closing.
Adrian pressed me against the bar after everyone left, his cock filling me so completely I forgot my own name.
But that was before this morning’s silence, before the weight of what we’re doing to his chosen family became unbearable.
My hand moves between my thighs without conscious thought, fingers finding the wet heat that’s been building since I watched him work the room tonight, that perfect mask never slipping even as his family tears itself apart.
I press my back against the cool metal of the stall door, biting my lip to keep from making sound.
The staff bathroom is supposed to be empty during prep, but I can't risk it.
Can't risk anyone knowing that The Blade has been reduced to this.
Desperate self-touch in a bathroom because she can't go another hour without relief.
My fingers circle my clit, already swollen and sensitive, and I picture Adrian's hands instead.
Those hands that have mapped every inch of me, that know exactly how much pressure makes me gasp, how to work me until I'm begging.
The memory of his mouth on me, the way he groaned against my pussy like tasting me was worship, makes fresh wetness coat my fingers.
"Fuck," I whisper, the word barely breath as I work myself faster.
My other hand comes up to pinch my nipple through my shirt, imagining his teeth there instead.
Even after having him last night, even with his cum still marking my thighs this morning, I need more.
This constant ache of watching him move through La Sirena with that intoxicating mix of warmth and danger, of seeing his cock hard against his pants when our eyes meet across the room, of wanting to drop to my knees and take him in my mouth right there in front of everyone.
My pussy clenches around nothing, empty and aching to be filled.
I slide two fingers inside myself, but it's not enough.
Not even close to the stretch of his cock, the way he fills me completely, the way he fucks me like he's trying to crawl inside my skin.
My thumb presses against my clit as I fuck myself with my fingers, chasing the orgasm that might give me five minutes of relief from this constant need.
That's when it hits.
The boulder crushes everything.
The flashback slams into me mid-stroke, my fingers still buried in my pussy as the past breaks through.
Not the usual fragments this time. Something new surfaces through the fog.
Rock falling, massive and inevitable, crushing weight where there shouldn't be any weight at all.
The image makes no sense. We were at the quarry, down inside the first pit, there was the knife, blood spreading like spilled wine, but now there's also stone?
Falling stone that has no place in what I half-remember?
My hand jerks away from myself like I've been burned, wetness still coating my fingers as I gasp for air.
The bathroom stall spins around me, past and present colliding in a way that makes me want to vomit.
Here I am, touching myself while people die in my memories, while Meiling bleeds out in fragments I can't quite grasp.
The crushing sensation from the memory follows me as I stumble out of the stall, my pussy still throbbing with unsatisfied need even as guilt floods through me like poison.
I wash my hands mechanically, avoiding my own eyes in the mirror.
The woman reflected there is pathetic. Flushed with arousal, trembling with memory, caught between desperate want for the man I'm destroying and the crushing weight of a past that won't stay buried.
I can still feel the phantom weight of stone on my chest as I emerge into La Sirena's main floor.
The fragment lodges there, this new piece that doesn't fit with anything else.
What else don't I remember? Why did we have to choose that day to get high?
What else is buried under fourteen years of drug haze and trauma?
The air conditioning hits my flushed skin, but the atmosphere is wrong. Poisoned. The staff moves through prep with careful distance, like magnets with matching poles that can't quite touch.
I take my position behind the bar, trying to focus on the familiar routine of setup.
But my hands won't stop trembling, caught between the memory of touching myself and the crushing sensation from the flashback.
The fragment keeps surfacing. Boulder, weight, something terrible that I can't place or understand.
I'm wiping down the bar, the repetitive motion doing nothing to soothe the chaos in my head, when Gunner approaches Adrian at the host station.
Even from here, I can see the deliberate choice in it.
Gunner crossing the room to show support, to pick his side publicly.
His massive frame blocks Adrian from view, and I have to take a few sideways steps to keep him in sight.
"You need backup with anything," Gunner says, his deep voice carrying across the room, meant to be heard, "you know where I stand."
Adrian's shoulders relax fractionally. "Appreciated, hermano."
Marisol appears from the office hallway like a hurricane. She always moves like she owns the air around her, but lately her presence feels weaponized—every smile a threat, every step a dare.
She doesn't bother to lower her voice. "Of course you'd back his terrible judgment, Gunner. You've always been soft when it comes to him."
Gunner stands his ground, arms crossed over his chest, biceps straining the sleeves of his shirt. "I'm not backing his judgment, Marisol. I'm backing him."
"That's the problem, darling," she says, rolling her r. "You back people, not plans. And then we all have to pay for it."
"Little Shark." Gunner's voice drops to warning, the kind that usually precedes bloodshed. "Don't."
"Don't what? Point out that you're supporting something that's destroying us? You’re like a, a wing on a stealth bomber. Or the wheels. Do they have wheels? No, the engine."
“What?”
She lets out a short, helpless laugh, like she can't believe she even has to say it.
"Zayas soldiers at the port yesterday, eastern territories getting squeezed, and you're over here holding Adrian's hand through his little telenovela. Some murder teddy bear you turned out to be."
Adrian tries to insert himself, a hand raised in gentle mediation, but Gunner blocks him with the set of his body, like a human riot shield.
Marisol smirks at that too. "Look at you, always protecting your King. Sit. Stay. Good boy.”
A hush slides over the bar, the staff picking up the scent of imminent violence and scattering soundlessly into the prep spaces. Even the music seems to drop by a few decibels.
The words hang in the air, and I can feel Gunner’s shame blossom, a red tide rising up his neck. He's never been good with words. He was built for action, for violence and for loyalty, not for the quicksilver momentum of Marisol's tongue.
Marisol and Gunner have been close friends since before I arrived, sharing an understanding no one else gets.
The wild party princess and the semi-mute mammoth, somehow connected through love.
She dragged him into trouble, and he dragged her out of it.
Now they stand on opposite sides of a canyon I created, divided by the choice Adrian and I made.
Former friends turned bitter over us, and the venom between them makes bile rise in my throat.
“You and Nico are together. Me and Daphne. Why not Adrian and Isa?” Gunner asks, and his voice is softer than I expect. Almost pleading.
“Because Adrian and Isa are a fucking bomb. He can’t operate without her, and she is a loose cannon. You know that. You love them both, and so do I, but they are a walking disaster, and they will bring us all down with them if we let them.”
For a moment, her mask slips and I see it—the panic, the naked desperation that comes from knowing you're losing the best family you’ve ever had.
She covers it quickly, wrenching her mouth into a cartoonish grin.
"But sure, let's all ride this train off the edge together. Maybe we’ll get a Netflix deal out of it. "
"I can't abandon them," Gunner says, a tremor in the words. "Not over… this."
"Over what? Over loyalty?" Marisol's voice is suddenly high and childlike, an imitation of herself that’s more haunting than her real anger.
"You think I'm not loyal? You think I don’t bleed for this family?
And now I'm on the outside because Adrian can't keep it in his pants and Isa can't stop sucking up his poison. Is that it? That's the family now?"
"We're not pushing you out," Adrian says quietly. "You’re choosing to stand apart.”
“Don’t you dare,” she spits, turning on him now. “Don’t you dare sell me that ‘family is a choice’ bullshit when you know exactly how it feels to be left behind. You’re doing what you always do—making new rules when the old ones don’t benefit you anymore.”
Adrian’s expression is blank, but his fingers flex on the edge of the host stand, knuckles bone-white. “I’m trying to keep us together,” he says. “I’m doing everything I can.”
“Then stop fucking up so badly,” Marisol says, and the words are so close to pleading that they echo in the sudden silence. “Stop putting us at risk because you want to play house with your little psychopath.”
The word lands like a bullet. I feel it in my chest, a hot, gnawing shame even though I know she’s right. I am a loose cannon. I am the reason everything is fracturing.
“I still don’t see why Adrian and Isa are so different from the rest of us,” Gunner says, and this time it sounds tired, as if he’s given up hope of ever being understood.