Chapter 3 #2
"Not here. Not safely. I need to taper him off, not yank the line.
If I pull it cold he could seize." Brick is already working, disconnecting the IV with careful, practiced hands, capping the line, checking Mateo's pupils with a penlight from his kit.
"We carry him out. I'll manage the withdrawal at the compound. "
I cut the zip ties on Mateo's wrists. His arms drop to his sides like dead weight.
Up close, I can see more.
Bruised knuckles—he fought back.
Burn marks on his forearm, circular, deliberate, the kind made with a cigarette.
Two fingernails missing on his left hand, the nail beds raw and dark with dried blood.
My whole body goes still.
Not tense—still.
The kind of still that happens when the rage is so deep it bypasses everything physical and just sits in your bloodstream like ice.
I've seen this before. I've seen what people do to other people in rooms with deadbolts on the wrong side of the door, and it never gets easier. It just gets quieter inside me. Colder.
"He fought," I say.
Brick nods without looking up. "He fought."
I hook one of Mateo's arms over my shoulder.
Rooster takes the other side.
Between us, we lift him from the chair and his head lolls against my shoulder, a low groan escaping his cracked lips.
He's lighter than a man his height should be.
I can feel every rib through the ruined shirt, the sharp jut of his shoulder blade against my arm.
Months of sedation and beatings and whatever scraps they bothered to feed him have stripped him down to bone and will.
The fact that he's still alive says more about Mateo than anything Imani ever told us.
"Where's Diego?" Python asks.
The sound of a toilet flushing answers his question.
A door at the end of the hallway swings open and Diego steps out, still drying his hands on his pants.
He sees us and freezes.
He's smaller than I expected.
Average height, average build, the kind of man who survives on cunning rather than strength.
He's got a pistol on his hip but he doesn't reach for it.
He's looking at Python's AR and doing the math, and the math isn't in his favor.
"Hola, Diego," Python says. The greeting is almost friendly. The AR aimed at Diego's chest is not.
Diego's eyes dart to Mateo hanging between me and Rooster. Then to Brick. Then to the empty chair with the cut zip ties dangling from the armrests.
"You don't know what you're doing," Diego says. His voice is steady but his left hand is shaking. "Alejandro won't—"
"Alejandro sent us," Python tells him.
Whatever color was left in Diego's face drains out like someone pulled a plug.
Brick sets down the med kit and opens it.
He pulls out one of the vials he grabbed from the IV setup beside Mateo's chair.
He loads a syringe with practiced hands, taps the air bubbles out, and holds it up so Diego can see exactly what it is.
"Poetic, right?" Brick says, and his voice is the coldest I've ever heard it.
I shift Mateo's weight fully to Rooster and cross the hallway in four steps.
Diego backs against the wall.
His hand twitches toward the pistol on his hip. I catch his wrist before his fingers touch the grip, wrench it behind his back, and slam him face-first into the cinder block.
The pistol clatters to the floor. I kick it down the hall.
"Hold still," I tell him. My mouth is close to his ear. "This is the nice version. You don't want the other one."
Brick steps forward and slides the needle into the side of Diego's neck, depressing the plunger in one smooth motion.
Diego jerks. His body goes rigid against the wall, then starts to go slack.
His knees buckle in stages—first a sag, then a tilt, then the full weight of him sliding down the cinder block toward the floor. His eyes roll back. His breathing slows to something deep and thick.
He'll be out for hours. Amara can decide what happens when he wakes up, and I don't envy him.
Zorro zip-ties his wrists and ankles. Duct tape over his mouth for good measure.
I check my watch. We have eight minutes since we cut the fence. Six minutes left on the patrol window.
"We move," Python says. "Now."
We're back through the fence and into the wash in under four minutes.
Rooster and I carry Mateo between us, his feet dragging furrows in the sand.
Python hauls Diego over his shoulder like a sack of concrete—dead weight, mouth taped, wrists and ankles bound.
Brick jogs beside us, one hand on Mateo's wrist, monitoring his pulse the whole way.
Zorro brings up the rear, walking backward, weapon trained on the compound.
Nobody follows.
The trucks are where we left them, Ismael behind the wheel of the first one with the engine idling low.
We load Mateo into the back seat and Brick climbs in beside him, already pulling supplies from the med kit—saline, a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope.
Python dumps Diego into the bed of the second truck like cargo.
César zip-ties him to the tie-down hook bolted into the floor.
He's not going anywhere, and when the midazolam wears off he's going to wake up in a place that's a lot less friendly than the compound he's been hiding in.
"Drive smooth," Brick tells Ismael. "No hard stops. No potholes if you can avoid them."
Ismael nods and pulls out. The second truck follows. Python and Zorro take the bikes.
The convoy moves back down the dirt road toward the highway, headlights still off until we hit pavement.
I'm in the passenger seat, turned around, watching Brick work on Mateo in the back.
He's got the penlight in his mouth, one hand checking blood pressure, the other adjusting the flow on a portable saline drip he's rigged from the bag to Mateo's arm.
Mateo groans once—a thick, sedated sound that comes from somewhere deep—and his hand moves.
Fingers grasping weakly at the air, reaching for something that isn't there.
Maybe Imani, or a gun he used to carry.
"He's trying to come up," Brick says around the penlight. "The midazolam's wearing off. He's going to be confused as hell when he surfaces. Probably combative."
"I'll hold him," I say.
"Gently."
"I know."
The desert streams past the windows, dark and vast.
My hands are steady. My heart rate is back to resting.
The adrenaline is pulling back, leaving behind a hard, clear calm.
We did it.
Mateo Torres is alive in the back seat.
Diego is tied down in the truck behind us, sedated with his own drugs, heading toward a conversation with Amara that he's not going to enjoy.
Nobody on our side took a bullet, nobody took a blade, nobody's bleeding.
I let my head fall back against the headrest and close my eyes for ten seconds.
It's the most rest I'll get before we're back.
We pull into the compound a few hours later.
The first thing I see when we come through the gate is Imani.
She's standing in the courtyard in pajamas.
Hair wrapped. Bare feet on the concrete.
She's been out here all night—I can see it in the rigid way she's holding herself, arms crossed, perfectly still, like any movement might crack whatever's keeping her upright.
Brick gets out of the truck first.
He goes to her, puts his hands on her face, and says something I can't hear. Low. Just for her.
Her composure breaks.
Brick opens the rear door, and Imani sees her father.
The sound she makes isn't a word.
It's not even a cry.
It comes from a place below language—a raw, animal thing that tears out of her chest and echoes off the compound walls.
"Papá."
Mateo's eyes are half-open now, glassy and unfocused, but when he hears her voice his head turns.
His cracked lips move. No sound comes out.
He can't form words yet, but his hand lifts off the seat—shaking, barely controlled—and reaches toward her voice.
Imani climbs into the back seat and takes her father's hand.
She cradles it against her face, pressing his broken knuckles to her cheek. "Estoy aquí, Papá. Estoy aquí."
I'm here, Dad. I'm here.
His fingers curl around hers. Weak, trembling, but there. He's holding on.
Brick stands beside the open door, one hand on the roof of the truck, the other hanging at his side with the fist clenched so tight his knuckles have gone white.
He's watching his fiancée hold her father's destroyed hand against her face, and his eyes are wet. He doesn't wipe them. He doesn't move.
I look away. Some moments aren't mine to see.
Ruby's already in the kitchen.
I can hear the coffee maker and the clatter of plates, because Ruby's response to crisis is to feed people and it always has been.
Amara appears in the clubhouse doorway, fully dressed despite the hour.
She looks at Python. He nods once. She nods back. No words. None needed.
Then I see Nova.
She's standing by the courtyard wall near the bikes, wearing one of my t-shirts—when the hell did she take one of my shirts?—and a pair of shorts, her hair loose around her shoulders in the early light.
Her arms are crossed and her face is tight with the kind of worry she's been holding all day, the kind that lives in your body instead of your head.
When she sees me climb out of the truck, her whole expression changes.
She doesn't run to me. That's not Nova.
She walks. Deliberate and steady, closing the distance between us with the same directness she brings to everything.
When she reaches me, she puts both hands flat on my chest and looks up at me with those dark eyes.
"You're okay," she says.
Not a question.
"I'm okay," I tell her.
Her hands slide up to my face.
She holds my jaw, tilts my head, studies me the way she does—those nursing-student eyes scanning for cuts, swelling, anything broken.
Her thumb brushes a scrape on my cheekbone I didn't know I had. "You smell like gunpowder."
"Yeah."
"And dirt."
"That too."
She pulls me down and presses her forehead against mine.
We stand like that in the courtyard while the sun comes up and Imani cries in the back seat of a truck.
Her hands are warm on my face.
My hands find her waist and I pull her closer, because I can, because after today, I need something that isn't broken.
I close my eyes and let myself have this.
Just this.
Her forehead against mine. Her breath on my mouth. Thirty seconds of her before the world starts up again.