Iron & Bone (Lock & Key #3) (40 page)

“No.”

“I’m pregnant.”

A punch landed in my chest. My head spun. “What?”

“I said, I’m pregnant.”

I grabbed her hands to steady myself, to feel that connection to her again, especially now. But her hands were cold, and she yanked them from my grip.

I stumbled. “Is it mine? I mean, it could be mine, right?”

“I don’t know, Santiago!” She raised her voice, her face a bitter sneer.

I’d asked her an odious, vile question that she never wanted to answer. I was annoying her.

Fuck her
.

“You don’t know?” I repeated, my soul getting sucked out of me, my heart thundering in my chest, blood rushing in my ears. “You don’t know? You don’t know! Why don’t you know?”

The salesgirl in the store backed away from us, her face pale.

Tears filled Inès’s eyes, her head fell to the side. “I don’t know!”

“We gotta go, man. Just take her, and let’s go!
”
Jake yelled from the doorway.

“I’m not going anywhere.” Her face tightened, and she folded her arms.

Clack, clack, clack
went her high heels on the polished floor of the boutique as she stepped away from me.

I shook from the inside out. My body swayed.

I tore my shirt up. The angry red scar hadn’t healed. It still sizzled on my skin. “This is what you did to me. Look at me! You cut me. Why? Why?”

“No, no.” She shook her head, her hands stretched out. “I didn’t. I couldn’t. No.”

“You did this to me.” My voice seethed. “You. What have they done to you?”

Her back straightened, she blinked. “You don’t understand, Santiago. You never will because you’re a boy. They’re men. People listen to them. People look up to them.”

“People are afraid of them, you little fool.”

She raised her chin. “I’m not afraid of them. I love them, and I don’t want to leave.”

Love.
The word we’d used together, for each other. Now, it wasn’t ours anymore. Not anymore. She
had tipped a cauldron of molten tar over me with that goddamn
word.

“We’ve got to go!” Jake yelled.

“Go, Santi. Please go.” Inès said, her voice suddenly soft, pleading, her hands twisting at her sides. “If they find you here, they’ll kill you.”

“You already did,” I breathed.

Jake grabbed me by the arm, and we tore out of the back of the shop and down the street to the corner.

The fucking Coronet glided to a halt in front of the store.

That night, I got my crowbar from its hiding place in the basement of my old rathole building. “You in?” I glanced over at Jake as I pulled the iron bar from behind the brick shelf, my limbs lightening at the familiar weight in my hands. “I get it if you ain’t.”

“I’m in. Sure as fuck,” he said, those odd light-brown eyes of his gleaming like tarnished gold coins in the glare of the flashlight he held for me.

“You take this.” I tossed him my 9mm.

I slid the plastic baggie with my mother’s rosary and the photograph of us out of its hiding place behind a loose brick and tucked it in my jacket pocket.

We found Julio, and he suggested a junkyard that was one of the Executioner’s new domains. Felipe was lingering there at about four in the morning with a flunky who was out taking a piss.

Jake got the bodyguard from behind with a knife to his side as I garroted him with a wire cord. His thrashing in our hold, his struggling, his helplessness made me high. Grunting, we finally dropped his lifeless body to the ground.

I approached Felipe, and I didn’t even have to say a word. He raised his gun at me, and Jake shot it out of his hand. The crowbar was alive in my grip, conforming to my palm like the soft and unbending iron it was for me. The weeks away hadn’t changed that. It propelled me forward—again and again and again through Felipe’s howls, through the splintering cracks, through the thuds. The force of my hate and the fury of my rage empowered me. The authority of my anger was so loud, it made me wild.

Inès’s voice saying
“love”
fueling me.

“Enough!” Jake dragged me away. “Jesus!”

I hurled that fucking iron crowbar on Felipe’s broken, mangled body.

I was covered in blood, bone, gunk, sweat, and grief.

So much grief.

Jake and I ran, becoming a part of the shifting shapes of the darkness. He got us out of Denver, out of Colorado. He had thought ahead, had made detailed plans for us, and I followed, grateful he’d taken on that burden.

I was burnt from the inside out.

We ended up heading for Utah in the back of a truck crammed with fertilizer.

“We’re never going back,” Jake muttered. His head sank onto his knees, his body shuddering.

Poor kid. All that adrenaline had finally run its course, and all that blood and gore had shaken him up. He’d never killed anyone before this.

I leaned my head back against a crate, the stench of manure unbearable.

“Thank you,” I whispered into the shadows between us.

I couldn’t remember when I’d last said those words, and I meant them now. It was a relief, it was the truth. He could have called me insane and taken off, but he hadn’t. Jake had seen this through with me. He’d had my back. No one had had my back for such a long time.

A long, long time.

“You don’t have to thank me.” Jake wiped at his eyes. “That felt good. Freaked me the fuck out, but it was good.” He sat up straight. “You know shit. You know shit I want to learn, and you’re going to teach me. ’Cause that’s the only way from here on in. The only way.”

I raised my head and was met with hard eyes. Eyes blazing with determination.

What had burned me, had lit him on fire.

What had drained me, had breathed new life into him.

Ah, here were demons. But were his real or were they ghosts?

“You sure? That’s what you want?” I asked.

“That’s what I want.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, good.” He grinned. Brittle hope and brutal confidence.

“You ever used a gun before today?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Well, you got good aim. Got a bright future ahead of you.”

He laughed.

I got him to tell me his whole fucking story, and I told him mine. Oh, his demons were real, all right. Real and bloody and unavenged.

But my fight was done.

He leaned forward. “Plenty of places for us to go. Plenty. We’ll change our names, too.”

“Jake, I—”

“I’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry about a thing. You’ve been through enough lately.” He reached out a hand, wrapped it around my neck and squeezed. “We’re in this together now.”

Jake was a believer in a better day, a blacker one, but it would be a day of our own making. That was something I could believe in, that was something I could hold onto.

He lifted his chin. “You and me, Santiago.”

“You and me.”

A new fucking era was born for Jake Pence and Santiago Arana that night in the back of a foul smelling truck hurtling down I-70.

“Never goin’ back,” I murmured.

“Never,” he agreed. “And never letting anybody have that power over us again.”

Yeah, never sounded real good.

Never was a plan.

I weaved through the traffic in downtown Denver and willed those bitter images away from my vision.

That tingling numbness just beyond the scar tissue flared across my middle, reminding me of my willingness to believe over and over again. I had known it was tempting fate to have something good for myself, to have Jill. The gods of vengeance were angry at my arrogance.

At least, Alejandro Calderone was.

I steadied myself on the memory of making love to Jill last night and this morning. On the fragrance of my scented oil that she’d dabbed on her chest before we’d finally fallen asleep. On Becca’s voice piping up across the hallway in the darkness—a soft babble of words, non-words, and sighs that filled my empty house.

My chest swelled.

I had achieved what I had always known I shouldn’t, what Alejandro would never allow.

The last time Alejandro and I had spoken was a few weeks after Dig and I had left Denver. I had made the mistake of calling Julio, and Alejandro had answered his phone.

His voice had smoldered over the line.
“You killed my brother and now she lost my baby, you motherfucker. I will never allow you to have what you’ve taken away from me. Never. That’s a promise.”

Yes, never.

And never was today.

I BELIEVED THAT HATE
remains buried in our marrow. Does it ever soften? Does its power over us fade? Maybe. Maybe if you were able to forgive.

The glacial dark eyes of Alejandro Calderone told me different. His was a hate born of passion, full of fire.

A security guard had patted me down in the private elevator up to his penthouse high above Denver. The ceiling had to be over twenty feet high. The floor-to-ceiling windows wrapped around the living and dining rooms, offering a massive view of the city and the mountains beyond. Artwork crowded the walls, furniture and carpeting stifled the space.

He stared at me standing in his royal domain. He was pleased to see me. He was pleased with himself.

I nodded at him. “Look at you—a suit, a pressed shirt, five-hundred-dollar shoes, and a palace to go with it.”

“The shoes cost a grand, but I wouldn’t expect you to know these things, Santiago. Look at you—a piece-of-shit white-trash biker in the wilderness, speeding around in your own little Wild West rodeo.”

I only lifted an eyebrow.

“I’ve grown up,
ese
. While you? You’re stuck in the camouflage grunge of our younger days.” His fingers waggled in the air, two gold rings glinting in the sunlight coming from the wall of windows. “You could have been at my side, like you were from the very beginning.”

“At your side? I was your drudge, not your partner.”

“You did good work, my friend. So dependable. You always went above and beyond the call of duty. You were so very responsible, too. A very unique quality. I needed you, and I took care of you. And what did you do to repay me? You killed my brother.

“Even though you were just a kid, you were the best, so focused, so vicious. You wanted to excel, and you did. No gratitude though,
El Hueso
. None. Without Felipe and me, where would you both have gone? What would you have done?”

“You wanted me to pay for that for a lifetime.”

He tilted his head and made a sucking sound with his tongue behind his teeth. He held my gaze, but I gave him nothing.

“You took her, Alejandro. You used her, lied to her, made her candy-sweet promises.”

His eyes lit into me, his voice puncturing my veins. “Lied to her? You never understood this, but she came to us, Santiago. She wanted us. You couldn’t accept that, could you? I admit, at first, she was a new, pretty acquisition. Fun. But Felipe and I adored her. We loved her. It had been going on for weeks before she finally left you. I know, in some ways, she was…delicate, but she was always intriguing, a surprise.” He took in a breath. “Our
perla negra.”

“All this was her idea,” he continued. “Us getting off the streets, leaving the bullshit pissing contests behind. The companies, the moving forward into something better than our”—he gestured at me with a flick of his tan hand—“grunge. It was hard and very bloody, but with her at my side, it was all worth it.”