Page 31

Samantha

My eyes open from a slumber that feels so profoundly deep that it has its own gravity trapping me in the wonderful confines of Diesel’s bed. They don’t open willingly, but they’re pulled apart by a bodily urge, and I stand up, look around the room that I now share with Diesel — a thought that makes me flush and, despite the urgency, draws my eyes to him as he sleeps on the bed. My eyes trace lines over the muscular crags and mountains of his chest, the tattoos that mark events, ideas, beliefs that form so much of his identity — including that small tattoo of a rose and a date that he keeps well-hidden, but always present — and the small, peaceful smile that sits on his face even in slumber. I beam at that, so brightly I look away for fear of waking him up.

He’s suffered so much. Despite all the pain he’s carried, all the pain he’s inflicted on himself, all that he’s taken on to protect his friends and surrogate family, he’s always given when he’s needed to, but now, he’s healing.

There’s a depth of satisfaction that touches my soul to realize that.

But Diesel isn’t just a project. He’s not someone to fix; as much as I’m helping him, he’s helping me. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for him.

Or maybe, if I was still stuck at that club and under Grub’s thumb, I’d be wishing I was dead.

The situation I’m in right now isn’t perfect, but it’s one where I can see hope, and, at the end of the tunnel, love.

Love.

That word that sprang off Diesel’s lips with all the strength of sincerity.

“I love you, too,” I whisper to his slumbering form, before throwing on some clothes and heading to the door in search of the bathroom.

In the hallway, I see door after door that I’m afraid to open because they might lead into a biker’s room and I might see something I can’t unsee. So I take what seems like the safest option and head down the hall to the door that leads back into the bar. They’ll have a bathroom there, I’m sure.

Three figures sit at the bar, wrapped in a darkness kept at bay only by the light of a few candles. There’s the well-dressed and scary-looking woman from earlier, there’s Molly, and there’s an old woman with long dark hair and a face lined with age and wisdom. They sit huddled over glasses, voices nothing more than dark murmurs.

I make it just three steps before the lethal-looking woman sees me.

“Samantha? What are you doing up so late?”

“I’m looking for the bathroom,” I say, too tired to say anything other than the truth. “And I was scared to try the doors back there because I didn’t want to walk in on an orgy.”

She rolls her eyes and snorts. “There hasn’t been a proper orgy here in ages.”

“Just boys, playing, as boys are prone to do,” the old woman adds.

Boys playing? What does she mean? Is an orgy just play to her, or is it something else?

I clear my throat. “Anyway… I’m just going to find the bathroom and go back to bed.”

“No, you’ll sit,” says the lethal woman. She gestures to Molly, who pours a glass of some amber liquor into a glass. “But only after you use the toilet. It’s in the door in the back left corner. Over there.”

She gestures. I go, then come back, and head right for the bar. The idea of disobeying this woman and doing what I really want to do — sleep next to Diesel — doesn’t even cross my mind. I have the distinct feeling that ignoring her request would be the last mistake I ever make.

“I’m Alessia,” she says. “Alessia Marchetti. Goldie is my husband.”

“Your ol’ man?” I say, remembering the word I heard thrown around earlier and wanting desperately to seem like I fit in, like I belong, instead of feeling like some outsider in her pajamas who got lost on her way to the bathroom.

“True, though you will rarely hear me use that term. It often feels so undignified.”

“Drink, young Samantha. You look like you need it,” the old woman says. Normally, I’d object to anyone calling me ‘young’ in that way, except this woman looks as if everyone is young compared to her.

I take a sip. The liquid tastes — and burns — like I’ve just swallowed a campfire. I cough. “What the heck is this?”

“Mezcal,” the old woman says.

“It’s Yolanda’s favorite,” Molly says. “She has friends from down south who send her bottles from time to time. This one’s from Oaxaca, I think.”

“It is. They make excellent mezcal there,” Yolanda says, taking a slow, relishing sip of hers. “And coffee, too. Some of the finest comes from Pluma Hidalgo, an area high in the Sierra de Oaxaca. There is so much more than just mole to Oaxaca. The nature, the people, the spirit of them all, oh, so beautiful, so fierce.” She sighs, closes her eyes, and takes another sip, as if transported there. “Such a beautiful country. Sometimes, in times like these, I miss my home.”

“Times like these?” I say. I take another sip of the mezcal and it burns, but the burn is different this time. A little less. The way a forest fire is a little less of a burn than a volcanic eruption.

“War,” Alessia says.

Yolanda nods, a reflective smile on her face. “War, yes.”

Why is she smiling?

And why does Alessia look like a wolf about to corner a pack of baby deer?

I shift a little and look at Molly. At least she looks annoyed, which is slightly better than the others, who look excited or ravenous. “Are you sure?”

“Can’t you feel it?” Alessia says. “No, of course you can’t. You don’t have the time, the experience. I forget sometimes, growing up in this, how other people can’t even see it until the barrel of a gun is right in their face. Even before my father would start a war and turn his rivals into nothing more than blots of ink on a mortician’s ledger, I’d know it was coming.”

“How?” I whisper.

Molly just rolls her eyes.

“Because, to survive in this life, you have to be ahead of them . Think ahead of them, feel ahead of them,” Alessia says. “You know the signs before they do, and you use it to your advantage.”

“Them?”

“Men.” Yolanda snorts. “When you learn, you know. But you don’t use it to your advantage. You help your man, help him survive, or you know what’s coming and then maybe you do some of the fighting yourself. You take care of the ones he doesn’t know about, or the ones he can’t.” She pauses, sips some of her drink and then swirls the dark liquid around in her glass. “Sometimes, that’s what you have to do: the things he cannot.”

I look down at my hands clutching the glass. They’re not killer’s hands.

For a moment, I think about getting up from my place at the bar and going back to bed with Diesel. But something keeps me here. Curiosity, maybe. Desperation, possibly. Or a sense of self-preservation. I don’t know what Alessia or Yolanda would do if I did something so rude as to turn my back on them and just walk away, and I don’t want to find out. I’d like to live a little longer to enjoy what it feels like to be with Diesel, and maybe see the side of him that comes out when he’s not trapped in war or grief. To think about him smiling, kissing, being with me and only me, instead of being distracted by pain or danger, it makes me smile despite my surroundings.

“What if I can’t or don’t want to do those things?” I say.

Molly tops up my glass. “No one is telling you that you have to pick up a gun and start killing people,” she says, finishing with a determined look at both Yolanda and Alessia.

“No, I can see you don’t have it in you,” Alessia says. “Your hands are shaking already. If I gave you a gun and a target, you’d just miss and get yourself killed.”

“Let me tell you something,” Yolanda says. She pauses, and her eyes pointedly flicker from mine, to my drink, and back again. I follow her unspoken command and drink a long drink. “My corazon and I lived a wonderful life together. He is gone now, Samantha, but together, oh, we were fearsome. There were bullets, blood, and that ferocious, handsome man and I could do anything we put our minds to. Many times, it wasn’t about the money — sometimes it was about robbing a bank or a train or a rich man just to prove that you could. There were so many that loved to brag that they were untouchable, and often the ones who bragged about how above it all they were were people who needed to be humbled. They would hurt people, you see. Or take their money or their land. It was horrible.”

“It sounds like it,” I say, feeling like saying anything else, like maybe there are better ways to deal with people than robbing them and murdering them, might wind me up in a fight I cannot win.

Molly tops up my glass.

“Just listen,” she whispers.

“He and some of his friends, some people who worked for him, they had robbed this rich man. A powerful man. He had been a governor at one time, and he had used his position to make himself wealthy, powerful, connected. And this prideful man decided he would not accept that my husband had beaten him. He wanted revenge. He wanted it so bad he offered so much money to this group of killers who used to be in the military to hunt and execute my husband. Oh, there was so much fighting, so much blood,” Yolanda stops, sips her drink, and fans herself. “It was so intense. Oh, I still think about it.”

“Don’t think about it too hard, Yolanda,” Alessia says. “I have no desire to see where your thinking about it leads.”

“Me neither. Save it for later,” Molly says.

“Even though I like you all, even you, Samantha, I would not make you see that. As close as we are, we will never be that close,” Yolanda says. Alessia and Molly both chuckle. I smile, both grateful I don’t have to see it, and surprised that I’m so quickly a part of the group, even though half the group scares me senseless because it seems like they get turned on from killing people. “Now, my husband, this war he was in was one that I knew I had to stay out of, even though I desperately wanted to take care of this rich man for him. And I could have, too. Easily. Because he didn’t know what I looked like, and as hard as it is to believe, I was even more beautiful when I was young. It would not have been the first time I charmed a man into a vulnerable position and then took care of him. But this was a war I had to stay out of, as bloody as it became, because it was a matter of my husband’s pride.”

Before I know it, and despite the objections of my palate, I’ve emptied my glass of mezcal and gestured for Molly to refill it. As much as my thoughts are with Diesel and the danger he’s in, my thoughts go to Jake, too. He’s alone, he’s got no one to defend him, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to get through to him to get him a warning. It’d be one thing if he knew what was coming and could make his own decision, but that he’s alone and clueless — as he so often is — fills me with agony.

“Sometimes,” Yolanda says. “All you can do is watch and wait. You listen, you care for your man, and when the dust settles, you help him pick up the pieces and tend to his wounds.” After a pause and a giggle, she continues, “Though I am so proud of my husband that I had to do neither during his war with this rich man. My husband disguised himself and several of his men as workers, and they snuck onto the rich man’s estate, past his guards, and shot him to death while he was on the toilet. Oh, it was so magnificent. We made love for days after that.”

Yolanda raises her glass, as do Alessia and, to a lesser extent, Molly. Eventually, after a warning glance from Molly, I raise mine and toast to love — even though my thoughts are with my brother. What pieces of him will be left if Victor Moretti gets ahold of him?

We tap glasses, toast to love, and then Yolanda finishes her glass and sets it down upon the bar counter with gusto.

“Thinking of my former husband, it tells me it is time I go to bed,” she says and slides gracefully out of her seat.

“I better check on Goldie. Make sure he’s sleeping and not still up doing yoga. I swear, that man would forget to eat if I wasn’t there to remind him. The flexibility, the stamina, it’s fucking wonderful, but sometimes, I wonder about the cost,” Alessia says. She leaves, a graceful shadow that disappears down the dark hallway leading to the biker’s quarters.

“Hang on a second, Samantha,” Molly says as I slip off my seat.

“What is it?”

She reaches beneath the bar and pulls out a small paper bag, which she sets in front of me.

“I have something for you.”

Inside, I find a cheap prepaid cellphone in a clamshell plastic case. I take it out, and with a pair of scissors handed to me by Molly, I open it. A push of a button turns it on and a welcome messages flashes on the screen, telling me I have tons of data, along with unlimited texting, minutes, and the opportunity to buy a discounted subscription to a streaming service I’ve never heard of.

“Oh my god, Molly. Thank you,” I say, holding the cheap phone in my hand like it’s a precious jewel. Then I turn it off and put it back in the bag, worried that it might make a sound, or someone might come through the door into the bar and see it and confiscate it. “You sure you won’t get in trouble for this?”

“Not unless you go around blathering about how I gave you a contraband cellphone.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Good. I know you have your own shit going on, Samantha. We’re not all bandit-wives or mafia princesses. Some of us are regular people, with people we care about who can’t handle this life. Sometimes that means breaking the rules a little to help the people that matter most to us.”

“Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.”

“No, you won’t. Because if you do, I will break your nose and all your fingers.”

I smile a little. Until I see from the look on her face that she’s not joking.

“I promise.”

“Be careful with that thing, but don’t forget about the people who matter. And if you get caught, you didn’t get it from me. Now, you have a good night, Samantha,” Molly says. After a second, she adds, “In case that wasn’t clear, I want you to get out of here, because I need to clean up and try to get some sleep before all hell breaks loose in a bloody fucking tornado tomorrow morning. Which, no matter what they say, years of experience tells me it will happen.”

I wish Molly a goodnight and slip out of the bar, the small paper bag containing the contraband cellphone clutched tightly in my hand. I make my way to Diesel's room. He's still fast asleep on the bed, his chest rising and falling with the steady rhythm of deep slumber.

I set the bag with the phone on the floor and cover it with some of my clothes, then I carefully crawl into bed beside Diesel, trying not to wake him. His warmth envelops me as I nestle against his firm body.

Diesel stirs slightly and murmurs, "I love you," before drifting back to sleep, a content smile on his face. My heart swells hearing those precious words fall from his lips again. I beam, feeling so incredibly lucky to have this amazing man in my life now.

But as I lay there in the dark, Diesel's muscular arms wrapped around me, my mind can't stop churning. My little brother is out there alone and unaware, a sitting duck just waiting for Victor Moretti to swoop in and destroy him. He's the only family I have left; I can't bear the thought of losing him too, especially not like this. Not when I have the power to prevent it with a simple call or text.

I roll and fish the bag and the phone out from beneath my clothes.

A push of a button brings the phone to life.

By memory, I program his number into my phone. It’s one I’ve known by rote for ages, the number that — no matter how late it is or where I am — I always answer.

It sits now, on the screen. Him. Jake. My little brother.

His life depends on me.

Contacting him could cost me everything. It could put Diesel’s life at risk, or the lives of those he cares about. The lives of people who have taken me in and protected me.

It could put my life at risk, too.

But the risk of not contacting him?

It could cost me the last family member that I have left in this world.

My finger hovers over the button.

Just one push.

Just one.