Sweet Collateral

I swallow heavily, and my hands start to shake, from what? Anticipation? Relief? I’m not sure. “You found him,” I breathe.

“Seems you were whoring yourself out for nothing.” Rafeal shoves me away from him and takes a gun from the back of his pants, holding it out to me. “Shoot him.”

I glance at the beaten, barely-living man. He deserves this. He deserves everything he gets for what he does. The things he allows to happen to those girls, the things that happened to me. I lift the gun, calling on all my strength, but still, my hand shakes.

“Oh, come on, princess,” Rafael drawls. Princess. He makes a solitary word sound so derogatory, as though I’m some weak girl. And yet, as barely more than a slave, he always called me little warrior. “You can do better than that. I thought you wanted him so badly.”

“I do,” I whisper.

“Oh, I know. Enough to defy me. Enough to let some dirty Sinaloa fuck touch what is mine.” His voice is eerily calm. Cruel.

“It’s not like that—”

“Come on, killer. Shoot him. Take it. Become everything you wanted to be.” Killer. The word burrows inside my head, and the cold, misted eyes of that boy mock me, dancing through my mind in their own grizzly horror show.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I try to focus and lift the gun again. When I open them, Rafael is standing right next to Dominges, the beaten man’s hair fisted in his hand as he holds his head upright. “Should I wake him, so you can look him in the eye as you kill him?” He tilts his head to the side, and I can feel his judgment because we both know how cowardly it is to shoot an unconscious man. Before I can reply, Rafael backhands Dominges and the man groans, his swollen eyes opening just a crack. “There you go. Look him in the eye. Remember everything he’s done to you, everything he made you.”

“Why are you doing this?” I scream at him.

He moves until his enormous frame towers over me. “Make a choice, Anna. Who do you want to be?” It feels like a trick question because one person is the girl I want to be, and the other is the one he wants me to be. Our eyes lock, and the anger, the violence, and the love, it all swirls between us in a turbulent storm, so vicious it threatens to tear us both apart. Stepping around him, I take a deep breath and lift the gun. “I have to do this, Rafe.” He doesn’t understand it, and maybe neither do I really.

Again, my hand trembles along with my hammering heart. Dominges looks at me through swollen eyes, and I expect him to say something, beg maybe, but he doesn’t. He’s resigned to his fate, and that in itself feels like a sense of justice because I spent years resigned to mine, accepting it.

“You’re an animal,” I whisper through my tightening throat. Still, he says nothing, and I take a step closer, craving the regret in his eyes. He stares down the barrel of the gun that’s barely an inch from his face now. And I see it, the trace of fear. My finger squeezes over the trigger. Bang. Blood spatters over the wall behind him, and his head falls backward at a horrible angle. I choke as I release the breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding.

Rafael shifts behind me, the warmth of his body seeping across the small space between us and into me. Turning around, I lift my gaze to his, anxious about what I’ll see. His dark eyes are unreadable as he reaches out and swipes a finger along the length of my collarbone.

“You look good in blood.”

I open my mouth to respond, but his fingers dive into my hair, wrenching my head back so hard that it steals all the breath from my lungs.

His lips slam over mine, our teeth clashing together violently in something that should be tender and sweet. I’m unfamiliar with this kind of brutality from him, and yet part of me wants it because I know this is the real Rafael, the beast that he keeps leashed. I wanted to be strong, strong enough to see this, to handle this side of him. I didn’t want to be protected or coddled, and it seems he’s done doing that.

He yanks my head back even further until my spine bows over the bar of his arm at my back. His tongue swipes the length of my throat before he bites me. Hard. I gasp, my nails raking over his back.

Everything happens so fast. One minute I’m standing there, the next my back hits the mattress of the dirty motel bed. My shorts are yanked off so roughly that the button pings off. His eyes are wild, every muscle bristling with bottled tension. He tears my tank over my head, tossing me around as though I’m nothing more than a doll. Feral eyes trace over every inch of my body, and a groan slips from his lips.