25 - Isa
La Sirena pulses with Saturday night glamour, diamond chandeliers casting fractals across packed tables where Miami’s elite pretend they’re here for the cabaret.
The main floor thrums with bass that vibrates through my bones while I pour drinks.
Champagne for the judge’s wife who’s pretending not to notice her husband’s hand on the hostess’s thigh.
Whiskey neat for the dealer in Armani who thinks his suit hides the gun bulge.
Another Cuba Libre for the trust fund princess who’s been guzzling the same drink for two hours, watching everything with predator eyes.
My hands move through the familiar routine while my mind stays locked on last night's nightmare.
The fragments that won't leave me alone.
Blood spreading across sun-bleached stone, a knife catching light, the crushing weight of something massive and final.
The phantom taste of copper coats my tongue, making the champagne smell nauseating.
I haven't seen Adrian since I locked my apartment door between us yesterday morning, his concerned hovering still echoing through the wall we share.
My skin still remembers everywhere he's touched me these past weeks, and I long for him.
But I can’t allow myself to go to him. Not with Juliet missing. The first thing I did when I arrived was seek her out, ask everyone from the heiress Marisol down to the newest kitchen hand Roddick, and nobody has seen her. Not in days. She’s still missing.
Through the crowd, I catch movement. Adrian weaving between tables with his usual warmth, touching shoulders, sharing jokes, making every person feel seen.
But there's something different in his approach tonight.
A gravity in his expression that makes my stomach tighten, my pulse kick into overdrive.
His jacket fits perfectly across his shoulders, his collar open just enough to show the gold chain at his throat, but his hands are clenched at his sides.
He's not working the room. He's coming straight for me with the determination of a man about to detonate something, and my hand drifts automatically down, not quite reaching for the knife at my ankle.
"Isa." His voice cuts through the music when he reaches me, that honeyed warmth carrying an edge I've never heard. "We need to talk. Now."
He doesn't wait for my response, just tilts his head toward the Calypso Room entrance. The private room on the mezzanine level that Gabriel refuses to enter, for some reason I’ve never figured out, and where Lucia Zayas's body was found.
The gravity in his expression has weight now, something massive he's carrying that's about to crush us both.
The familiar scent of tobacco and lime drifts across the bar, making my thighs clench involuntarily with muscle memory of these past weeks, of every night he's been inside me.
I follow because refusing would make a scene, and because something in his eyes tells me this conversation will happen whether I agree or not.
The Calypso Room is an exquisite example of old-world charm. Blue silk wallpaper and crystal decanters, plush carpet. Adrian closes the door, muffling the glamour to a distant pulse. His hands shake slightly as he pours himself whiskey from the crystal decanter, doesn't offer me any.
He doesn’t speak for a long moment, swirling the whiskey as if it contains the answer.
"In a few days," he says finally, "someone is going to tell you a story about me. They'll have documents. They'll have most of it right and all of it aimed at your throat." He sets the glass down without drinking. "So it has to be me. Tonight. All of it."
Then, with a voice so careful it feels like the edge of a scalpel, he offers the first cut.
"I need to tell you something about when we really met."
My tongue goes numb, my pulse stutters. I can’t blink.
"I told you it was a party nine years ago," he continues, and it’s obvious he’s rehearsed these lines in his head a thousand times, editing for maximum truth.
"That I saw you there, and was destroyed by the sight of you.
" He hesitates, a ripple of pain moving through his jaw.
"But I’d actually followed you to the party.
I already knew you, but that was the first night I let you meet me. "
My hands still. I wait for a flood of anger, but it doesn’t come. This man has constructed most of my adult life, so I’m barely surprised to learn it extends further back than I knew. He’s my sculptor, my creator, my own personal God.
“Okay,” I say.
“Aren’t you going to ask when I first saw you?” he asks.
He needs me to ask, so I oblige. “Fine. Spill the details. I don’t see why it matters.”
“Oh, it matters,” he says.
Something in his voice makes me look up.
After a few heartbeats, trying to read his soul through his eyes, I give up and go pour myself a whiskey, double.
It suddenly seems important that he hasn’t kissed me, hasn’t offered me a drink, hasn’t pulled me against him, as though the past few weeks never happened.
A cold sweat coats my body as I turn to face him.
“Go on then,” I say, taking a swig of whiskey.
“I first saw you fourteen years ago,” he begins.
The numbers don’t add up. I do the math in my head: fourteen from twenty-eight. I was a child. The ringing in my ears is sudden and high, like the sound before a migraine crashes down.
He waits for me to respond, but I am mute, stone-cold, imagining the lies that could stretch back that far. He goes on.
“At the quarry.”
The phrase detonates in my brain.
At the quarry.
My body’s reaction is immediate and primal. My knee comes up, hand going for the knife at my ankle before I know what I’m doing, the instinct to defend myself overwhelming even though I can’t stab a memory.
"No," I say, but he’s already stepping closer, absorbing my panic like it’s an old friend. I can smell the heat off him, and suddenly it’s all over me, the summer sun, the copper tang, the terror that haunts me every night.
"I was seventeen, working construction that summer,” he says calmly. “I saw you and Meiling in that quarry."
The name is a scalpel to the heart. Meiling. Gone before I understood what gone meant. My throat closes, my head buzzes. I remember the shape of Meiling’s face, the bright blue polish on her fingernails, the way she made me feel like a dangerous co-conspirator.
His voice stays steady while my world tilts off its axis, while my throat closes and my vision spots at the edges.
"I watched what happened with the knife, carina. Witnessed the accident. Saw the blood spreading across the rocks. Saw you run."
The room tilts, my knees buckle. I collapse into the chair, clutch the glass, feel the stink of whiskey splash against my palm. I am fourteen again, dumb with fear, dumb with chemicals, watching blood pool like black paint in the crevices of limestone.
The fragments of memory I have never been able to piece together are suddenly, violently, being soldered into place: the sudden slip of the handle, the world going red, the frantic scramble up the rocks.
I remember someone yelling, a man’s voice, but I had always assumed it belonged to God or the wind.
Now I know it was Adrian.
"I need to… I can't…"
My blade falls to the soft carpet soundlessly, and I scramble to my feet. I try to move toward the door but Adrian blocks me, not touching but his presence a wall I can't pass.
"You need to hear this, mi amor. All of it.
" The endearment that used to comfort now feels like violation.
"She was already gone when I got to her.
But you were fourteen, high out of your mind, terrified.
If the cops found you there, you'd disappear into the system.
I'd just lost my siblings. Efrén dead in an alley while I was washing dishes three blocks away, Zoila vanished into foster care because I was too young to keep her.
" His hand moves unconsciously to his palm, to the scar I've traced with my tongue.
"I couldn't watch another kid get swallowed by that machine. Not when I could stop it."
I am shaking with something too big to fit in my body. I focus on the scar, try to pour myself into that narrow white line. "Your hand…"
He flexes his fingers. "From pushing the boulder. Had to make it look like an accident, like the rocks fell naturally. I didn’t want them to blame you, or anyone."
I can see it now. Seventeen-year-old Adrian covering up my murder, boulders slicing open his palms while he pushed a massive stone over the ledge to hide what I'd done. It landed on her body, erasing the damage I’d done. Replacing my murder with a terrible accident.
"And the knife…" He pauses, his perfect control finally cracking.
"I took it. Wrapped it in my work shirt, disposed of it in construction debris where no one would ever think to look.
The murder weapon you've been having nightmares about?
Wondering if it even existed? I made it disappear completely. "
The fragments that have tortured me for fourteen years suddenly snap together like magnets finding their match.
The knife in my hand, slippery with blood.
Mine, hers, I could never remember. The boulder crushing down with impossible weight because Adrian pushed it, staged it, made my crime disappear into an accident that let me walk free.
The memories align with his words so perfectly it feels like breathing after drowning, except the air tastes like poison, and I'm choking on fourteen years of lies.
"After that, I kept watch," he says, stepping closer while I press back against the silk wallpaper. "Found out where you lived, made sure you didn’t get blamed for it, get sucked up into the system. Then I just kept following, protecting, and I couldn’t look away. Not ever.”
“We didn’t meet at a party,” I say numbly, as though that’s the important takeaway from this confession.