22. Leandra #3
“When your father gave him Cass. I began moving money, small, irregular, nothing to pattern-match. Accounts no one knows. Identification they’ve never seen.
” She recites it like a litany, a spell against the dark.
“Enough to keep us safe for years, Leandra. Several years, if we’re careful. More if we’re clever.”
The word clever lands like a blade; cleverness is what got us here, the cleverness of monsters.
I stare at her. Her colours hold steady, truth, resolve, and beneath them a deep, unspoken grief, a river of sorrow she has dammed up with sheer will.
“You knew. You knew it might come to this.”
“I knew it could.” She pauses, and her aura softens into muted blues, the colour of a bruise fading.
“There’s a difference. I hoped I was wrong.
I hoped…” She shakes her head, a violent, desperate motion.
As if she could dislodge the tears that now stream down her face, each one a tiny, liquid grief for the daughter she couldn’t protect.
“What about Hector? What about father?” I don’t care about my father, his name is a curse I spit out but I need to know he is gone, that she understands he is as much a predator as Ezekiel. That his hands, too, are stained with more than one member of our family’s blood.
“Hector is gone,” she whispers, and her aura darkens to the grey of ash, of extinguished embers. Loss. Resignation. The words are a tombstone.
“Gone where?” The question is a child’s, desperate for a geography of grief.
She draws a breath that sounds like tearing silk.
“He went with your father. They’ve gone to ground.
Astrid’s husband… he sacrificed himself.
He took Ezekiel’s place in the trap meant for Antonio.
” Her voice cracks on the word sacrificed, and I hear the unspoken, another body on the pyre of our family’s madness.
“Is Antonio dead?” My voice is a shard of glass. Antonio is a Guardian, a man who claimed to be Esau but whose colours screamed liar in hues only I could see. No one believed me then. They believe me now, I suppose, when it’s far too fucking late.
“He lives,” she says, flat as a death certificate. “Unharmed, by all accounts.” The words are acid; the devil walks free while we flee into the night.
“How is that possible?” The question is a howl trapped in a whisper.
“The devil protects his own,” she says, and her bitterness is a taste in the air, copper and salt.
I think that Antonio is a devil, but Ezekiel, Ezekiel is something worse, something that wears a man’s skin like a borrowed coat.
I press my hand to my mouth, as if the thought itself is a sin that might summon him back.
My mother glances at me, her eyes dark pools of understanding, and says nothing.
There are no words for the monsters we have known.
Outside, the countryside hurtles past, hedges like jagged teeth, trees with skeletal fingers, all shrouded in a darkness that seems to breathe.
We take corners with a sickening lurch, and my mother navigates without hesitation, as if the route is carved into her nerves.
At a junction, she turns right, and we plunge deeper into the night.
“Where are we going?” I blink back tears that scald my raw cheeks, each one a tiny exorcism.
“Tonight, a safe house.” She glances at me, and her aura settles into a calm, steady blue, the colour of a frozen lake, thin ice over black water.
“After that, options. I’ve been building options like a rat builds a nest in a sinking ship.
We won’t stay anywhere long. We’ll go to Europe, vanish into the cracks. ”
“And if they look for us?” The if is a lie; we both know they will.
“They will look,” she says, and her colours hold, truth, resolve, and a thin vein of terror like a crack in a dam.
“That’s why we’ll be careful. No contact.
No real names. No…” She pauses, and her aura flickers silver, caution, the glint of a knife in the dark.
“There are rules. I’ll teach you. But the first rule, the only rule that matters; trust no one but each other. Ever. Do you understand?”
I doubt I could trust anyone else; trust is a muscle that has atrophied in me, along with hope, along with the belief that touch can be anything but a prelude to pain.
“Leandra.” Her voice is quiet, a hand reaching through the dark. Her aura softens into warm, protective yellows, the colour of a candle in a tomb. “I need you to trust me only. Can you do that?”
I lift my head from the cold glass, the imprint of my forehead a ghost on the window.
She does not look at me, her eyes are on the road, on the future we are hurtling toward but her hand leaves the gearshift and comes to rest on my knee.
The touch is light, brief, a butterfly landing on a bruise.
It is not a gesture I know from her; it is a new language, one she has learned in the same secret school where she learned to drive, to lie, to plan an escape from the man she married.
Her fingers are warm, and I flinch. Not from her, but from the memory of other hands, other weights, other intimacies that were violations dressed in love.
“Yes,” I say, and the word is a surrender and a vow. “I trust you.”
It feels like the most terrifying thing I have ever said.