25 - Isa #2
A sound escapes him that could be mistaken for a laugh, but I know better. It is the sound of derision, directed at himself.
“I lost control that night. I couldn’t keep my distance a second longer. I had to talk to you, to have your eyes look right into mine, to be known by you. So I followed you to the party and I just…went…in.”
I sag against the wall, letting it support my full weight. “You were at the quarry.”
He takes a step closer but doesn’t try to touch me.
“I protected you that day,” he tells me. “And I’ve been protecting you every day since, making sure you were safe, successful, mine.”
"Mine." The word makes me want to vomit. I try to speak but my throat won't work, my body shaking so hard my teeth chatter.
"Every morning coffee," he continues, and now he does touch me, his fingers on my wrist where my pulse pounds. "Every time I steadied you behind that bar, every story I told to make you smile. I was the boy from the quarry, keeping you safe from what we both know you did."
The violation of it makes my stomach heave. Every memory of us together suddenly contaminated. His hands on my body, his cock inside me, all while he knew. The Calypso room spins, and I taste bile.
"I love you," he says, gripping my face between his hands when I try to turn away, forcing me to meet his eyes.
"I've loved you since I watched you become mine that day.
Blood on your hands, terror in your eyes.
You were perfect, mi amor. Raw and real and so fucking beautiful in your worst moment.
You've always been perfect to me, Isa. My beautiful, lethal blade. "
The words land hard. He loves the version of me that killed my best friend.
Has only ever known that version. Built fourteen years of my life around that moment of violence, that girl with blood under her fingernails and death in her wake.
His love isn't despite my worst moment. It's founded on it, inseparable from it, a monument built on Meiling's grave.
"Say something," Adrian pleads, his thumbs stroking my cheekbones like he has any right to comfort me. "Please, carina. Say anything."
Ice spreads through my veins, the armor slamming into place with an almost audible click.
My face goes blank, giving him nothing while inside everything detonates.
This man controlled my entire life. Every choice I thought was mine, his design.
Every hard-won victory, his gift. Even the guilt that's eaten me alive, shaped by his lie about how she died.
The man I chose to let inside my walls was never real.
Adrian Marín was just another story he told me about myself, and I was stupid enough to believe it.
I pull away from his hands with deliberate control. Slowly, I take the three steps to where my knife lies abandoned on the plush carpet, then gently, carefully, I slide it into my ankle holster.
I turn to face Adrian, my voice coming out flat and dead. "Let me leave."
"Isa…"
"Let. Me. Leave."
Each word drops like ice in the warm room. He knows as well as I do that if he pushes me, my blade will find the soft skin of his throat, drawing droplets of blood or worse.
He steps aside, and I move toward the door.
The ice holds for three heartbeats. Then, as my hand touches the crystal doorknob, hairline cracks appear in my perfect armor.
By the time I wrench the door open, the fractures are spreading like a web through glass about to shatter.
The music from the main floor crashes over me, and suddenly I can't breathe, can't think, can't do anything but flee.
I stumble into La Sirena's glittering chaos, the glamour assaulting my senses.
Bodies pressed together on the dance floor, champagne glasses raised in toasts, laughter sharp as breaking crystal.
I push through the crowd while my control cracks wider with each step, the cold efficiency everyone expects from The Blade breaking apart on the glittering floor for everyone to witness.
People turn to stare. The judge's wife with her perfect lipstick, the dealer who was watching me earlier, servers I've worked beside for months.
They all watch The Blade come apart in public, watch me stumble through their beautiful world with my armor in pieces.
Someone, maybe Daphne, reaches out like they might help, but I shove past them, my body moving on pure instinct toward the exit, toward anywhere that isn't here with him and his truth and his poisoned love.
Sera stands near the exit, watching my approach with an expression that says everything.
Her arms crossed, her mouth set in that line that means I told you so.
Her judgment written across her features.
This is what we warned you about, this is the disaster we predicted when you chose him over the family.
She sees me destroying the family's reputation with my messy emotions, proving Marisol right about us being compromised, always doomed to implode.
"Isa…" she starts, reaching out like she might try to comfort me or contain me or manage this disaster I'm making in her husband's family's club.
"Fuck off," I snarl, the words ripping out raw and honest, my control fully shattered now.
She recoils, but I'm already past her, shoving through the door into Miami's humid night.
The thick air hits my lungs but doesn't help me breathe, the summer heat pressing down like the weight of that boulder Adrian pushed to hide my crime.
Behind me, La Sirena's music continues, the party going on without me while I flee from the man who conducted my entire adult life.
Who watched me kill. Who claimed to love me for it.
The man I let inside my body, inside my walls, inside everything I protected was never who I thought.
He was always the boy from the quarry, keeping his killer, building a life around a girl covered in her best friend's blood.
And the worst part, the thing that makes me want to scream until my throat bleeds, is that my fragments of memory clicked into his story like they'd been waiting for it all along.
Like even my memories aren't mine anymore, just more stories Adrian Marín told me about myself.