Chapter 2
Lady
Pain has a rhythm if you listen hard enough.
Not music. Nothing that nice. Nothing with bass and lights and bodies moving like they believe the night forgives them.
This rhythm is uglier. Tires thumping over bad pavement.
Metal rattling somewhere behind my head.
My wrists burning every time the van takes a turn too hard and the plastic zip tie bites deeper into skin.
Thump.
Rattle.
Burn.
Breathe.
I count it because counting is better than screaming.
Screaming is what they want.
I learned young that fear feeds the wrong men, and I have starved worse monsters than these.
So I don’t scream.
I breathe through my nose and taste blood at the back of my throat.
The van smells like old cigarettes, wet carpet, gun oil, and flowers. That last part almost makes me laugh. It would if my mouth didn’t hurt.
Flowers.
White roses, probably. Pretty little death flags from biker trash who want to be poetic about being pieces of shit. Shady once told me white roses were not romance in his world. They were a calling card.
My cheek is pressed against ribbed rubber flooring.
It vibrates under me with every mile, shaking pain up through my jaw.
One of my earrings is gone. Fuck. They cost a fortune.
Not mine. A gift from the kind of man I dated before Shady.
I feel the naked tug of my earlobe and hate that I notice something so stupid.
My hair is all over my face, curls sticking to my lip where it is split.
My hands are tied behind my back, nails probably broken too.
My ankles are bound, body curled awkwardly because they shoved me in here like luggage they didn’t care about scratching.
Somebody in the front seat laughs.
“Road captain looked pissed.”
Another voice answers, rougher. “He’s supposed to. That’s the point.”
“He almost took your boy’s head off.”
“Yeah, and now we got his girl.”
His girl.
The words hit wrong. I know just what they will want to do to his girl.
I squeeze my eyes shut, and the garage flashes behind my lids.
Smoke. Concrete. Gunshots. Shady’s voice ripping through it all when he screamed my name.
His blood on his shirt. His face when he saw Cherry come out of that elevator.
Cherry.
My stomach twists harder than the van’s next turn.
Ask Shady who Cherry is.
Whoever sent that text knew exactly where to cut. They knew the name. Knew the timing. Knew the kind of woman I had become to survive attention and how fast I would turn insult into armor if someone handed me the right weapon.
I hate that it hurt.
I hate more that Shady saw it hurt.
The van swerves and my shoulder slams into the side panel. Pain bursts white behind my eyes, but I swallow the sound. My teeth clamp down so hard my jaw aches.
“Careful,” a third man snaps from somewhere near my feet. “They said don’t fuck up her face.”
“They said don’t kill her.”
“They said pretty sells better.”
A hand grabs my hair.
I go still. Still the way a snake goes still before it decides whether to strike or wait.
The man hauls my head up just enough that my neck screams. He crouches beside me, face half-hidden in the dim light leaking through the front windshield.
He is young. Maybe late twenties. Shaved head.
Thin mustache. A gold tooth that flashes when he grins.
No cut on him, just a black shirt and a chain thick enough to be fake.
“You awake, estrella?”
I stare at him.
“Good,” he says. “Would’ve been boring if you slept through your big moment.”
“You always this desperate for women’s attention?” I ask, voice rasping.
Men like him hate when the prey talks back in full sentences.
Someone in the front seat laughs. “She’s got mouth.”
The one holding my hair tightens his grip until my scalp burns. “I can fix that.”
“You touch my mouth, and I’ll bite your fingers,” I say.
It slips out before I decide to say it.
His eyes sharpen.
“Who said I’ll use my fingers?” he laughs.
My pulse kicks.
I smile even though my lip splits wider. Fresh blood warms my mouth.
“You’ll lose that too.”
That earns me a slap.
Not hard enough to knock me out. Hard enough to turn my vision sparkly at the edges and make my cheek explode with heat.
There it is.
The old male math.
Woman talks. Man hits. Man thinks he won.
I blink through the pain and let my smile come back, slower this time.
“Feel better, baby?”
His face darkens, and for one second I think he will hit me again. Then the driver barks, “Boca. Leave her.”
Boca.
Good.
Names matter.
The van turns again, and I let my body roll with it, using the movement to shift closer to the wheel well. There is a tear in the rubber mat near my fingers. Something sharp beneath it. Not enough to cut the tie yet, but enough to remember.
I count turns.
Left out of the garage. Hard right. Straight for maybe two minutes, maybe three.
Stop and go traffic. Horns. A bus braking too close.
Then faster roads, smoother pavement, no more dense downtown echo.
I hear an airplane overhead once, loud enough to shake the roof.
Then another. MIA flight path. Could be near the airport, could be west, could be half of damn Miami because this city loves putting planes over everybody’s secrets.
I force myself to breathe slower.
Think like Shady.
The thought almost breaks me. Because I can see him too clearly. Ice-blue eyes going flat. Smart mouth calm. Body bleeding and refusing to care. He will look at roads before feelings. Cameras before grief. Tire marks before prayers.
Road captain.
He will give Diablo routes. I know that because I understand the shape of him. Shady doesn’t panic like normal men. He turns fear into direction.
So I do the same.
I listen.
Traffic fades. The van slows over rougher pavement.
Industrial. Maybe warehouse district. Maybe Allapattah.
Maybe near the river. Something metallic clangs outside.
A train horn cries in the distance, low and long.
Not close enough to shake the van, but close enough to mark the air.
Then a smell creeps in through the vents.
Not ocean.
Not downtown exhaust.
Sugar.
Rotting fruit.
Diesel.
Flowers.
My heart knocks once, hard.
I know that smell.
Miami has places where pretty things come in boxes before people pay too much money to pretend they grew romance themselves.
Flower markets. Produce warehouses. Cold rooms. Trucks idling at stupid hours.
Men moving pallets before sunrise. I know because the men in my family moved pallets and unloaded trucks for money under tables.
The van stops.
The engine dies.
For one heartbeat, everything is silent.
Then the back doors open, and daylight stabs me in the face.
I squint against it, trying to see past the shapes of men.
Four of them. Maybe five. Boca near the doors.
Another with a bandana over his hair and a pistol tucked into his waistband.
The driver has a scar down one side of his neck and a Miami Mutherfukers patch half-hidden beneath an open work shirt, like he wants to deny it until he wants me to see it.
Shady was right.
Not Carmen.
At least not only Carmen.
Boca grabs my ankles while another man catches my arms, and they drag me out of the van. My shoulder screams when they don’t let me get my feet under me. I hit hot pavement on my knees, and the skin tears through my jeans.
This time I do make a sound.
A sharp, angry one.
Not a scream.
Boca laughs. “There she is.”
I lift my head.
We are behind a warehouse, or what used to be one.
The walls are painted a sun-faded turquoise that might have been cheerful twenty years ago.
Now it flakes in patches, showing gray concrete underneath.
Loading bays line the back. Two roll-up doors are open.
Inside, shadows swallow metal shelving, stacked crates, old pallets, and plastic buckets full of white roses.
Rows and rows of them.
Pretty as a funeral.
Above one door, half the sign is missing, but I can still read part of it.
REYES FLORAL IMPORTS.
Reyes.
I tuck it away.
A plane roars overhead, louder this time, its shadow sliding across the pavement like a warning hand.
Good.
Let Shady think roads. I will think sound.
They haul me inside.
The temperature drops as soon as we cross the threshold.
Cold air clings to my damp skin, raising goose bumps across my arms. The warehouse smells sweet and dead, roses and preservatives and old water.
Buckets line the wall, white blooms bobbing in chemical water like they are waiting for brides, graves, or enemies.
I have played clubs that smelled worse.
That thought helps.
Not much.
They shove me into a chair in the middle of the floor and cut the zip tie from my ankles only to bind them to the chair legs. My hands stay trapped behind me. A new tie digs into the old burn around my wrists. I flex once, testing.
Too tight.
Boca catches the movement. “Don’t waste your energy.”
“Should I save it for your funeral?”
He grins. “You got jokes.”
“I’ve got range.”
The driver steps into the light.
Older than the others. Forties maybe. Heavy shoulders. Neat beard. Calm eyes. That scares me more than Boca’s little-boy cruelty. Mean men with no control are dangerous, but mean men with patience are worse.
He studies me like cargo.
“You know why you’re here, Lady Nyx?”
I lift my chin. “Because your mothers didn’t hug you enough?”
Boca snorts.
The calm one doesn’t.
“My name is Toro,” he says.
Of course it is.
“Do I clap?”
“No. You listen.”
“I’m more of a performer.”
His hand flashes out and grabs my jaw. Not a slap. Not messy. Just fingers digging into bruised skin until my eyes water.
“You listen,” he repeats softly.
I breathe through it.
His thumb presses near the split in my lip. Pain blooms hot and fast.
“You’re alive because alive women make better messages,” he says. “Dead women are useful once. Living ones keep screaming.”
I hold his stare.
Inside, something small and scared tries to curl up.
I don’t let it.