Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

I just held her.

I held her as Ignacio lurched up from the floor and launched himself at the biker.

They fought brutally, guns abandoned, hands their weapons because passion called for physical blows, and both of them were passionate about Mamá.

Ignacio carved a massive gash into the biker’s chest with a piece of glass, but it was the biker who knocked Papá out by shoving him into the edge of our dining room table.

The biker disappeared after that, and no one was ever sure who he was.

But I didn’t notice any of that.

I only noticed Mamá, and then when he crawled through the glass over to me, Jonathon.

He sat behind me and curled around my small form so that I was cocooned by him.

Protecting me.

It was only then that I noted I was trembling fiercely and keening like a wounded animal as I looked down at Mamá.

As she died in my arms.

It didn’t take long, but it was long enough.

When Mamá took her last breath, Ignacio was out cold on the floor, and the biker was gone.

It was just the boy next door and me, sitting on glass, sticky with drying blood, holding a dead body.

The Booths had called 9-1-1, and they were already on their way.

That was how they found us, Diogo racing in just as the cop cars pulled up with their flashing lights cutting coloured shapes across the yard.

He stood in the doorway, staring blankly at his son and me on the floor in the middle of a war-torn home, and he started to cry.

I’d never seen a grown man cry before, and it shocked me out of my stupor enough to notice that I was crying too.

And so was Jonathon.

His cheek was wet against mine as he curled me closer and then carefully stood up with me in his arms, my legs over one arm and my neck braced by his other.

I stared mutely up into his brown eyes, caught like an insect in wet amber.

“You’re comin’ with me,” he said in a voice as raw as an open wound. Involuntarily, his hands squeezed me tighter to his chest, and I hissed as he pressed into the open cuts filled with glass on the backs of my legs. “You’re comin’ home with me.”

Diogo was there then, too, his hulking, inelegant form shading us from the blue, the red, and the white lights splashing through the house. He slowly lifted a big hand, watching me as he did it, then he carefully, gentle as a petal landing on grass, placed it on my head and ran a rough thumb over my brow.

It felt like an anointment.

“You’re coming home with us,” he echoed.

And it was funny.

Not in a laugh out loud kind of way because nothing about the nightmare of my life in that moment was worthy of laughter.

It was funny as in ironic, though, I didn’t know how to explain the emotion until many years later.

Ellie had been fighting for me to be hers.

Then she was dead.

Ignacio had claimed I was his.

Then, after an open and shut trial, he was incarcerated for life for manslaughter.

And then, I was no one’s.

But the Booths… the Booths tried to make me theirs.

NOVA

I’d been awake for hours, but then again, I couldn’t ever sleep for shit. Insomnia had plagued me since I was fresh outta the womb. Though lately, I had real reasons not to sleep. The loss of Dane and Lila hovered over the Booth home like a mushroom cloud of toxicity. We moved slower, talked lower, smiled less. After the calamity of Ellie Davalos’s murder, social services had pried them right outta our hands and placed them separately in cities hours apart from each other by car. They were away from us and away from each other in a way not one’a us could stand.

In the short seven months since we’d moved to Entrance and met the kids next door, we’d fallen hook, line, and fuckin’ sinker for Dane and Lila Davalos.

Dane was my boy, the best friend I’d ever had. I was the kinda guy who’d always had lots’a friends, but I was also the kid who didn’t feel for anyone, not much and not really.

My parents and brothers were good people, salt of the earth kinda people, or maybe more fittingly, salt of the sea. They had love and affection to give stray cats, lost kids, family and friends galore.

I wasn’t born that way. Easy with a smile, free with a laugh, I could entertain the best of ’em, but I didn’t get in for bondin’. People didn’t interest me much because most people were easy. I could see their needs and desires like florescent lights at the back’a their eyes, and it was borin’.

Dane wasn’t borin’. He was the farthest fuckin’ thing from borin’, and not only because he was the son’a Entrance’s premier drug dealer, but because he was cut from bad cloth yet somehow constructed into a good man. He was stand-up, the guy who stuck by your side through thick and thin. He didn’t judge, and he couldn’t be swayed from his own ethical standards.