Page 4 of Tainted Blood
Not ever.
“Bug!” I look up to find the older boy swinging the sedan alongside the sidewalk we’re lying on. A spray of bullets hits the trunk. “Shit!”
The back door opens, and another boy about my age leaps out, frantically digging in the snow until he finds the girl’s hand. Glaring at me, he tugs her toward the car.
I’m wrapped around her so tightly he’s dragging me with her. Then logic kicks in, and I roll to the side, releasing her.
She came here with them.
They’re taking her out of here.
To safety.
Away from me.
I’m not prepared for the knot those three words twist inside my chest. My head knows she’s better off with them, but there’s something ingrained which hates them for it. It hates them for being her heroes instead of me.
The second boy pauses before he lifts her inside. She locks eyes with me again, an unspoken question on her face.
“Go,” I repeat. “You don’t belong here, muñequita… Go!”
The boy yells something at her, but their argument is muffled by another vicious blast of wind. As it clears, I watch him turn toward me.
“He’s a Carrera,” I hear him say. “He’s their look-out. He gave the signal. Don’t you see? This whole meeting was a trap. He deserves to die like a dog for that.”
The hatred in his words gives him away. Many fear my family. A few loathe us. But only one lives to see us suffer.
Santiago.
“¡Hijo de tu puta madre!” I curse at him. He’s a lying son of a bitch. Whoever they are in Santiago’s organization, they live in a bubble. That pendejo knows nothing of my world. Nothing of what I just sacrificed. Tonight, I chose a stranger over my own family.
Surprisingly, the boy’s lies don’t seem to affect her. Instead, she reaches out her hand to me. “Come with us!”
Innocent and brave.
In that moment, I know I’ve made the right choice. I may be a boy, but I’m also a Carrera. There will never be a place in Heaven for me, so when an angel falls at my feet, I have two choices: clip her wings, or help her fly.
In another time, in another place, maybe I’ll be selfish, but not tonight.
Shaking my head, I offer her a parting gift—the truth. “I can’t. I won’t… This isn’t our war yet. But it will be soon.”
She doesn’t get the chance to answer. The door slams shut, the sedan speeds away, and I watch as it’s swallowed up by the storm.
Everything feels colder suddenly. Heavier. Darker… For the first time since landing in New Jersey earlier, I shiver.
Gathering every thought of her together, I lock them in a box at the back of my mind.
It’s time to be a Carrera. It’s time to prove I am my father’s son.
Coolly and methodically, I rise from the sidewalk and walk, stone-faced, straight into the line of fire.
* * *
“You did well tonight, Santi,” my father says, lifting his glass.
He looks so blasé and unaffected sitting there, sipping tequila at forty-one thousand feet, as if nothing has happened.
As if he doesn’t have eleven new stitches holding his right side together.
