My hand shot out, gripping his bicep where blood lay wet over his tattoos. “Hey,” I whispered and squeezed. The blood rolled down over my fingers. Warm. Still full of life. It was that vibrant red, like roses on the sunniest day after a summer rain. “If you’re hurting, if you’re about to break, break me instead. I can handle it.”
“Are you offering what I think you are?” His gaze ran up and down my body, searing it and branding it as his with just a look.
I swallowed and then licked my lips, knowing deep down I was his at the end of the day, that Bastian—that no man—could tie himself to me like Rome could. He’d been there for me since the beginning, and so I would be there for him until the end. “Yes.”
His hand shot out so fast to wrap around my neck that I jumped and fell back into the brick wall behind me. Little fragments of the aged cement crumbled onto my shoulders as I leaned farther away from him. My body was accustomed to pain and suffering. Still, this once, I was sure this was the most danger I’d ever been in.
He squeezed, and I felt my windpipe start to close. “Kate-Bait, I will break you. And I won’t put you back together.”
“I’m already broken,” I murmured, but it sounded far away. “And I don’t expect a handout from anyone.”
“At least you’ve learned what it’s like to be in the family.” He grabbed my hand and slid it under his shirt. I felt the warm liquid before it registered that he was bleeding, that he was running my hand over his wound. “My blood is your blood. I bleed, you bleed.”
I whispered the family’s oath. “I bleed, you bleed . . .” He squeezed harder so that I couldn’t finish it.
Then he yanked my neck toward him so he could devour my mouth.
. . . Maybe this was where our end began.
Rome
I pulled her down into the black hole. It swallowed us up and ate us whole.
Our light was gone.
1
Katie
The meds weren’t working. Daddy was getting worse. The glass in his hands shook so much, the water spilled over onto the worn linoleum floor. He winced and managed to set it back on the table.
Rushing to grab the towel from the sink, I did a quick wipe over the yellowed patterns, trying my best to swipe away the evidence of his disease quickly.
He sighed as I stood back up. “I’m sorry, Katalina.” His voice cracked with the effort and pain of saying each word. My father had never been a man to apologize. I remember the time he took me to a baseball game just a few years ago. A man barreled into both of us. He was two times the size of my father, black tattoos of skulls covering his massive arms. He’d yelled at us to apologize for spilling his drink, told us we were clumsy.
My father stood there, composed as ever, as the man ranted on and on. I started to apologize, but my dad put his arm around my shoulder to whisper in my ear, “Never let them see you cower or back down, Katalina. You are better than everyone.”
Then he dropped his arm from around me, met the man eye to eye and stared him down. “Walk away or apologize for running into my daughter. And let me be clear: we will not be saying sorry.”
With a crowd forming, the man’s eyes bounced around. A few of my father’s friends, ones I saw every now and then but never really hung out with, seemed to appear out of nowhere. They always did. Men in black suits with slicked-back hair and very nice shoes.
He stepped back from my father, eyes wide, and shook his head vigorously back and forth.
So our lives went. My father never backed down, never had to. I wasn’t sure why until so much later.
Douglass King presented himself with discipline, precision, and restraint. My father had emigrated from Jamaica and followed all the immigration laws. He’d legally waited his turn, ten years of waiting on the list to come to America. He told me that when he got the call, he cried, and he wasn’t sure if they were tears of joy or sadness.
He’d left his whole family—mother, brother, and sister—to come here and worked like a dog the moment he stepped foot in the United States.
Somehow, his work paid our bills. Daddy was always cutting a nice house’s lawn, always fixing something in a big house that had more garages than I could count at a young age.
He’d followed the rules of the men he worked for, but one night when he called in sick, in too much pain to go in, the men in nice suits showed up at our little home’s door.
“Your daddy home?” Mario’s frown was genuine; I could see how his eyes creased just enough to show sympathy.
I nodded but held the door where it was, cracked just enough so the man couldn’t step forward with two other men behind him. When I squinted, I saw three boys there too.
“Bellissima bambina, he’s sick. I know he’s sick. He needs care. We’re just here to talk, heh?”