“Though I’m really more in the mood for something salty,” Maddox says, leaning back in his chair and sprawling his legs out. He meets my eyes and lifts his hand to his mouth, slowly sliding his tongue along his middle finger.
I swear my heart stops beating when he wraps his tongue around it, making a completely obscene show of licking off his finger. After the longest moment of silence in history, he pushes his finger into his mouth and sucks greedily.
Suddenly, the scrape of chair legs shatters the brittle silence, and Lennox dives around me and grabs Maddox by the front of his shirt. “Outside,” he barks in his brother’s face. “Right fucking now. We’re going to get this over with for good.”
Maddox stands, looking completely unconcerned. He towers at least four inches over his brother, his frame bulky enough to dwarf Lennox’s lean, muscular one. “O qué?”Maddox asks, then adds a word that sounds more like a taunt than a term of endearment. “Brother.”
“Or I’m going to paint Mom’s kitchen with your blood,” Lennox fumes.
“Outside,” Valeria barks, pointing to the door. “And get it out of your system this time, because I’m tired of this shit happening in my house.”
I gape at her as Maddox shrugs off his brother’s grip and saunters out. Lennox casts a furious look at me, one that makes my stomach twist into a cold knot of dread, and then stomps after him.
“What are you doing?” I hiss at Valeria. “Maddox is going to kill him!”
“He would never kill his brother,” she says. “Sometimes, you have to let them just punch it out of their system until they tire themselves out. They’ll go back to being friends tomorrow.”
“They’re not five years old,” I say, my voice rising with panic. She doesn’t understand that this shit has gotten serious—deadly serious. They’ll always be her little boys, like she said. But they’re not so little anymore, and the conflict between them has reached a breaking point. I can feel it in the desperation in my bones, but I know she’s as helpless to stop it as I am.
We need someone bigger, someone their physical equal.
Neither of us have answers, but I turn and run for the door when I hear the first shout. I can’t understand what they’re saying, as they’re yelling at each other in Spanish now, but there’s already blood on Lennox’s shirt by the time I throw open the door and charge onto the porch. He screams obscenities at Maddox and charges him, slamming his shoulder into Maddox’s middle. They tumble to the ground in a blur of violence and power.
“Stop,” I scream, lurching down the stairs in my heels. They won’t stop for me, though. They don’t even hear me, too absorbed in a conflict that started long before I showed up. I consider running next door for about two seconds, but I don’t know if Lee’s healed, and if he is, he’ll bring a gun. So I pull off my heels, toss them over my shoulder, and run across the street in bare feet. I pound on Reggie’s door with both fists.
“Reggie,” I yell. “I need your help. They’re going to kill each other!”
I can hear the sound of their blows landing all the way across the street, their grunts and curses, shouts and wordless exclamations of pain, the heart wrenching agony of brother turned against brother, of fist and bone, blood and fury.
“Please,” I yell, pounding harder.
“What is it?” demands a familiar voice, and the door is wrenched open. Selma looks at me, then across the street. Her eyes widen. “Oh, shit.”
She turns and yells for her brother, and the dog comes padding in, looking unconcerned. I keep glancing over my shoulder, nearly screaming in frustration for them to hurry. At last, Reggie appears.
“Come on,” I say, grabbing his arm. “Maddox is killing him!”
And then I hear another shout, different exclamations. I turn back, my heart gripped with cold dread, just in time to see Lee with his knee on Maddox’s back, wrenching his hands behind him. He snaps a pair of cuffs on him, even though he’s not in uniform and probably not on the clock. I race back across the street, onto the grass where Lennox is curled, spitting and coughing and cursing.
“Don’t hurt him,” I scream at Lee.
He looks up at me, his face set in hard, cruel lines I know all too well. Is that how he looks when he arrests people? The same way he does when he beats the fuck out of his wife?
Maddox is spewing a stream of obscenities in Spanish, struggling under Lee’s knee. Ignoring him, Lee barks for backup into his radio, then shoves it onto the simple holster he wears with jeans and looks me over from my bare feet to my black dress. “So this is where you been,” he says, his lip curling in disgust.
“Don’t hurt him,” I say again, my voice pleading now.
“I’m not hurting him,” he says, climbing off Maddox and dragging the cuffs with him, forcing Maddox to lurch clumsily to his feet or have his arms dislocated. Blood runs from his nose and mouth, and one eye is already swelling closed. “They’re hurting themselves.”
“Get your dirty, wife-beating hands off me, pig,” Maddox snarls, jerking his arm free of Lee’s grip.
“Go stand next to my cruiser,” Lee says, then turns to Lennox, who pushes to sitting. His glasses are gone, crushed somewhere in the brawl, and his face looks even worse than Maddox’s. His nose is skewed to one side, obviously broken, and blood pours down his mouth, chin, neck, and the front of his shirt.
“It was him,” he says, his voice muffled by the blood. He stares at Maddox, who hasn’t moved despite Lee’s order.
“I’m sure it was,” Lee says, reaching for a second pair of cuffs. “Now get your hands behind your back. You can both tell your side down at the station.”
“No,” Lennox says, stumbling to his feet and glaring at Maddox over Lee’s head. “He’s the one who attacked you. He broke your arms last spring.”