Chapter 21 #2
“That’s because your fun ends with bloodshed, followed by your ass in handcuffs.”
Felix scoffs. “I don’t get stuck wearing them for long.”
“Have you given any thought to what comes next?” Julio asks.
Confusion draws my brows together. “What do you mean?”
“He means,” Felix drawls, “let’s say we find the bastard. We figure out who hurt your girl without any doubt. Then what?”
“We deal with them.” Obviously.
Felix’s dark brown eyes glimmer. “Yeah.” He smiles, but not the normal carefree one he reserves for pretty girls and friends.
This one has a vicious edge to it. “And how do you suppose we do that?” He leans back and spreads his arms wide across the back of the couch.
Raising a single brow, he turns from me to Julio and back, meeting both of our gazes.
“My ideas aren’t so crazy now, are they? ”
“You wanted to pummel answers out of innocent bystanders,” I remind him.
“We don’t know they’re innocent.”
“We don’t know they’re guilty either, dickhead. And if we’re going to risk being benched, or hell, face expulsion, it better be because we beat the shit out of the right guy.”
“But there will be ass kicking, right? You just want to make sure they’re—” he uses air quotes, “not innocent.”
Oh, my fucking god.
“I don’t know. Okay. And until I do, you can’t go messing around with guys on the team.”
“You’re fucking with Holt.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Enough!” Julio roars and stabs a finger toward me. “Pull the stick out of your ass and pay fucking attention.” He turns to Felix. “And stop behaving like some blood thirsty chihuahua. It’s embarrassing.”
Felix’s jaw goes slack. “Did you just compare me to a fucking rodent of a dog?”
“If it looks like a duck and talks like a duck—“ Julio glares, daring Felix to argue. When he keeps his mouth closed, Julio looks back down at his notebook and gets back to the real problem at hand.
“If we find out who it is, step two will be to gather proof. Most people don’t stop at one. Chances are whoever hurt her has hurt other women before her or has done it again since. Cecilia has her reasons for keeping quiet, but if another girl comes forward, that might be enough.
Tearing out a sheet of paper, Julio rewrites the six names he’d written a check mark next to and hands it to Felix. “You do not talk to the guys about any of this, got it?”
Felix shakes the list in his hand. “If I can’t talk to the fuckers, why the hell are you giving me their names?”
“Because you’re going to talk to their girlfriends. Their friends. Their roommates. Anyone those six are close to who might know the shit they get up to.”
“Okay. Yeah. I’m down for that.”
“We do this smart.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Felix waves him away, already scrolling through the contacts on his phone. Even without hitting anyone, he’s going to enjoy this.
“What do I do?”
“Nothing.”
I jerk back in surprise. “Nothing? What the hell do you mean, nothing?”
Felix snickers and heads for the front door. “Sucks to be you.” He grabs his helmet from the bench we keep by the door and throws back a wave. “I’ll catch you boys later. I’ve got some undercover work to do.”
“No fighting,” Julio calls out, but Felix either doesn’t hear or chooses to ignore him as he rushes out of the house, the door closing with a snick behind him.
Julio releases a sigh and steeples his fingers in front of him.
“I swear he will be the reason I go gray in my twenties.” He’s not wrong.
Felix will be the reason we all go gray.
I don’t know how his mother survived eighteen years of him under her roof.
And she’s got more still at home, just like him.
“Back to what you said. What do you mean, I do nothing?”
“You focus on your girl. Spend time with her. Help her feel safe. Let Felix and I figure this out.”
Not happening. “No way, man. I can’t just sit around—“
“You’re not just sitting.” Julio’s eyes flash. He’s not quick to anger. Most of the time at least. But looking at him now, I can tell he’s riding that line. “You have the most important role to play here,” he tells me.
My face tells him how I feel about that.
He covers his face with one hand, leaving me to stare at the skull and roses inked into the back of his hand. “Your girl is hurting.”
Does he think I can’t see that?
“So the best thing, the most important thing, for you to do, is to be there for her.”
I will. I am. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do both. That I can’t help with this, too. The words to argue are on the tip of my tongue, but Julio knows me better than anyone and doesn’t give me even a second to voice them.
“There’s a chance we figure out who hurt her and nothing comes of it.”
I scoff. No way am I letting that happen.
“I’m serious, Gabe. You need to hear me.”
I wave a hand for him to continue, but it doesn’t matter what he says. I find out who hurt Cecilia and I make them pay. Enough said.
“Have you given any thought to her suicide attempt?” His expression is casual, like he’s asking about the weather and not Cecilia trying to end her own life.
But despite his tone, I don’t miss the way his eyes track my expression, taking in every little detail as though he’s cataloging my reaction to contemplate for later.
The answer to his question should be obvious. No. Cecilia’s suicide attempt is not something I’ve given any thought to beyond making sure it doesn’t happen again.
“What kind of question is that?”
He knows what my brother did. He showed up not long after the ambulance took Carlos’s body away.
Julio and Felix were the only people there for me.
Allie had moved by then. Mom and Dad were both wrecked.
And me, I was in fucking shock. Felix had to drag me into the shower and turn the water to cold before I snapped out of it enough to tear off my blood-stained clothes.
He knows what Carlos’s suicide did to me. To my family.
There is no good reason for me to dwell on Cecilia’s failed attempt. If I have it my way, it was her first and last and we don’t need to revisit what happened that night again.
“What if she tried to get help, came forward, named her attacker, and nothing came of it? We’re assuming she wanted to take her own life because of the rape, but that’s not what sends people over the edge.”
“I think you need to drop your psych class. It’s making you over analyze this shit.”
“Hear me out. There’s a timeline of things, right?”
My brows draw together. “Yeah. I guess.”
“People commit suicide when they feel hopeless. I don’t think rape alone made Cecilia feel that way.
It’s traumatic as fuck. But it’s a single event.
” He pauses to make sure I’m following, and after I give him a short nod, he continues.
“Rape, along with any form of assault, comes with baggage. Lifelong trauma for the victim to manage. But a person is at their lowest point when the assault occurs. That is when they feel hopeless, especially if no one intervenes.”
“So something or someone made her feel more hopeless than when the assault went down?”
He nods. “I think so. I’m getting a B- in Psych this semester, so don’t quote me, but I’m guessing she was assaulted and did try to get help. She came forward, told her story, but whoever it was that hurt her walked. If that was the case—”
I don’t like where this is going.
“Then—“
“No. I don’t accept that.” No one gets a free pass to hurt women. I don’t care who you are. The fucker deserves to go to prison. To have his life stripped away. He deserves to suffer just as much, no, more, than Cecilia has been made to suffer.
“You might have to.”
“Bullshit. You want to tell me if Allie’s attacker didn’t end up in jail, if that sonovabitch walked after what he did to her, that the three of us wouldn’t be rolling up to Sun Valley to handle it in our own way?”
A nerve ticks in his jaw. “He didn’t get locked up because he raped her.”
“No,” I agree. “He didn’t. But justice was served all the same. If the fucker who hurt Cecilia got off on the assault, we find another way to make him pay.”
“That doesn’t land our asses expelled or in jail.”
“Sure,” I tell him. We’ll go with that.