“That’s right. We’ll bury him at first light.”
“May I make a suggestion?”
“I get the feeling you will anyway.” She smashed her lips together.
“Make me a visible part of the ceremony.”
“You really know how to push a woman.”
“Not pushing. You know it makes sense. Integrate me quickly, for the sake of symbolism. A unified front.”
Rosa swiped a lock of hair back and tucked it behind her ear. Her smile was hard and rueful. “Shit, if Falco was half as smart as you . . .”
But Chris was not in the mood. The last few hours had been too intimate, too meaningful, to keep dealing with her reflexive coldness. “This isn’t about Falco. Hell, this isn’t even about us.”
“Us.”
“Yes, us. And the vow I just made. Hell, Rosa, it’s about your home branded on my body.”
He took hold of her upper arms and pulled her closer, not to kiss, not to hold. Just to get into her stubborn skull. He felt like throwing his weight around. She tilted her head back to stare him in the eye.
“You’ve made something good here,” he said, as soberly as she had spoken the words of the initiation ceremony. “I’m sure as hell not gonna let it be destroyed. Falco is an opportunist, not a planner. He’s interested in what he can grab. That’s not me. I’ve made some pitiful vows over the years, but this isn’t one of them. Put your ego aside and let me help.”
The war was plain to see on her face, more like a wounded animal than a woman.
“But then I’ll lie low for a few days,” he continued. “I’ll stay out of sight, just checking on Tilly and the new girls.”
“Good,” she said with a halfhearted sneer. “Wait a few weeks and maybe one of them will take a shine to their benevolent doctor. You might get lucky.”
Chris smiled slowly. “We both know why I won’t let that happen. Besides, I’d rather read the book you stuffed into that basket of food.”
Rosa’s eyes widened. “How . . . ?”
“Don’t worry, I don’t know which title it is. At least that’ll be a surprise.”
“But you knew it was there.”
“Yup.”
“How?”
“How the hell should I know?” He slid his hands behind her back, tugging her near. Tension pushed between them like magnets flipped the wrong way around, but Chris didn’t back down. “How do I know anything about us, hm? How do I know the sounds you make in the back of your throat just before you come? Or that you have a scar from a bullet wound right here.”
As if to confirm how crazy it was, Chris eased open the collar of her white ceremonial gown. There on the inside of her left shoulder, in front of the joint, a round scar marred her caramel skin.
“You tell me how,” he said, his voice gaining strength. “How did I dream that?”
“I don’t know, okay? Just keep your voice down.”
“Ah, even now. We can’t make a little noise without you worrying whether the town thinks we’re fighting or fucking.”
“You don’t have the right to do either.”
“Horseshit,” he spat. “Rosa, knowing you but not having you is ripping me up.”
“You’ve changed the rules on me. I can’t keep you at arm’s length like everyone else. You want to tell me why that is?”
He heard an invitation she would never put into words. And so Chris pulled her close. They were both injured and weary, needing to lean a little. It was twilight now, the sky darkening outside the workshop. A single lamp near the workbench filled the center of the room with light, but that only made the space more intimate. Shadows swallowed the walls and windows.
“You think I wanted this to happen?” he asked against her temple. “I’ve been divorced.
Twice.
Twice I’ve woken up beside a woman I once loved and just . . . stared at her, wondering when I stopped caring. That sort of failure doesn’t leave a guy, believe me.”
“What were their names?”
He hadn’t expected that. He cleared his throat before saying, “Tabitha and Mary Jane.”
“What were they like?”
Closing his eyes, he felt their memories inside his heart like ghosts drifting around a graveyard. But they were so long ago. So far gone, as was everything before the Change. “I met MJ when we were freshmen at the new Cornell campus in San Diego. She was blond.” Right now, he couldn’t even picture her face, which seemed wrong. “Vivacious, always in the mood for a party. She had the loveliest Australian accent. Her student visa was expiring, and we feared immigration crackdowns, so—”
She traced a fingertip down his jaw, distracting him from her question. “So you married her because she was beautiful and needed a protector?”
“No, I loved her. Or thought I did. But we were different in our means of coping with imminent disaster. Her diversion of choice was people. Parties. Mine was work, studying zoology. We lasted only a little over a year.”
“What about Tabitha?”
“Brown hair, always concerned about her weight, even when food went scarce. We were better suited, more mature. She studied economics with a government internship in Fresno, the new capital. I spent months at a stretch in the wilderness of British Columbia, finishing my Ph.D. The timing between us was always wrong. I’d come home for these fantastic weekends, but we spent weeks hardly speaking.” He shrugged. “Eventually even the weekends petered out. We didn’t know each other anymore. Tab found another man, and I didn’t blame her. I was almost . . . relieved.”
“But you talked about your honeymoon. Seeing the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas. You must have been happy. What happened?”
Surprised, he pulled back enough to study her face. He couldn’t believe she’d remembered. That meant something, surely—that they were more than this volatile chemistry.
“It’s a bad feeling to realize it’s your fault,” he said. “I mean, I wanted them both to be happy. I wanted Tab and MJ to laugh again. Just not with me.”
Rosa pulled away in response to his honesty.
What did I say?
Maybe it was the idea that he could just stop caring. He sounded capricious even to his own ears. But when forced to choose between work and love—well, it had never been much of a choice. Afflicted by the uncertainties of the Change, they needed stability he had never been able to provide. He’d hidden from reality as best he could, until one day it had banged on his door at that Oregon nature station. Walking south from the only friends he had left—from Mason and Jenna, from young Tru and Penny—he’d simply slipped back into hiding.
If Ange had lived, would he have stayed? He liked to think so. But it bothered him a great deal that he couldn’t say for sure.
“Then how was this afternoon any different?” she asked. “If you make a habit of vows you can’t keep.”
“Those things we know? The things we shouldn’t know?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s how I’m sure this time. I’m not going anywhere, Rosita. I’m . . . I’m a different man now.” He shook his head at the inadequacy of that statement. He was practically a whole different animal.
“But you admit the divorces were your fault?”
“Yeah. I was a terrible husband. Work came first, always.” He tried to make light with a wry smile. “You know how that is.”
But Rosa wouldn’t be budged. She wore an expression that said she was going to keep flaying at him until he bled. Chris steeled himself. If he was in this, he was in it for good. Valle de Bravo was an amazing place, but it was
her
place. He didn’t see himself sticking around for just food and shelter, no matter how nice. Unlike Falco, who seemed able to wait around for her change of heart, Chris wanted Rosa or nothing.
So he braced for it, whatever she needed to hear—whatever she needed to make her believe he was on her side.
“Then who broke your heart?”
Chris flinched. Images of blood coated his vision. He’d let Tab and MJ down, but not like . . .
Here we go.
He released Rosa and reached for his shirt. She stopped him, just her hand on his.
“Cristián, who was she?”
He exhaled slowly, finally meeting her imploring gaze.
Idiot
. To think he could do any better with Rosa and the people in this town. He shouldn’t be here. And yet, how could he not? She’d marked him with more than his tattoo.
“Her name was Angela, and I watched her die.”
When additional words died unspoken, he swallowed around a thick lump. Rosa gave his hand a little squeeze. Silently, she was his companion through the horror of those long-ago moments.
“We only knew each other for a few weeks. She was a mother. Penny, her little girl, was only about nine. They’d come through those first days of change in the west like I did—by sheer luck. By falling in with the right people. Stronger people.”
He stared into the dark shadows of the forge. Enduring the sharp pulse of Ex’s tattoo needle would be preferable to revisiting this horror. “Ange and I—we had a lot in common, both quiet and unsure in a world gone to shit. There were a couple of seriously intense days where we just held each other. I’d never been like that with a woman, just needing someone to hold. Nothing more. We connected.”
Rosa stroked the hair at the nape of his neck, softly with a lulling rhythm. “She died?”
“Saving her daughter, yes. We both tried. She ran out of ammo and . . . I saw the resignation in her eyes before they took her down.” Chris pulled away from Rosa and stood, pacing the forge. It was a large room but filled with all of Ex’s machines and tools. “I should have been faster. I thought so for years. Or I should have locked her up to keep her safe.”
“You’d try to keep a woman from saving her child?”
“She might still be alive.”
“Cristián, I cannot imagine she’d want to live if her safety meant her daughter’s death.” Rosa watched him with more calm and sympathy than he had ever seen from her wide, dark eyes. “Where’s the girl now?”
“With my friends, Jenna and Mason. I . . . I had to go. After I buried what was left of her mother, I just couldn’t stay.”
TWENTY-ONE
That explained everything.
Rosa wished she hadn’t asked, or that he hadn’t answered. It was easier to call him just another
pendejo
before she realized he had the capacity to care . . . and to suffer. She stood in silence in the shadowy workshop, trying to decide how to proceed. Did he seek forgiveness or comfort? Perhaps neither from her, but she felt compelled to speak.
“People die,” she said softly. “Sometimes there is no saving them.”
From the slight shifting of his expression, she knew he hadn’t wanted that response. Nothing she offered had yet to ease his pain.
Mierda
, she didn’t know anything about men. Not like this. Not one-on-one. She only knew how to please them sexually or how to manage them en masse, but nothing about soothing wounded souls. It wasn’t the sort of thing bravos asked of
la jefa
.
But then, Cristián wasn’t just another bravo, and she suspected he wanted her to admit that. Her brother was the only man she’d ever loved wholeheartedly. Their father had been a brutal
hijo de puta
, and only their
abuela
had saved them from his fists, more times than she could count. Though she had been a small woman, Rosa’s maternal grandmother had been able to force her father from her house with only a dark stare.
That had been Rosa’s introduction to the power women could wield over men. As she grew up, she had lost that sense of power. But she had it back now. She’d wrested it from the desert, from the Change. She wasn’t sure she could give it up, even for a man with whom she shared intimate dreams and an inexplicable yearning.
His dark gaze compelled her—and she didn’t like it. Yet the words came anyway as he stared, demanding . . . something.
“I couldn’t save my brother,” she said. “José. He was two years younger, and I promised my grandmother I would always look after him. But when the Change overwhelmed Mexico and she died, it was so hard.”
She had never spoken of this to anyone. Valle de Bravo offered a fresh start, away from the pain of the past, although she would carry the scars to her grave. He seemed to know that instinctively. Had Chris moved or spoken or touched her with kind intent, she could not have finished. He only stood in shadows and silence, listening to her heartbreak. That made it possible for her to go on. It seemed right she should show him her gravest wound. There had been other anguishes, awful indignities, but nothing had scalded her spirit as deeply as this failure.
They had been in Juárez looking for a coyote, a human trafficker, to take them across the border to the New United States. Because it had seceded from the rest of the country, heavy border patrols excluded everyone. Everyone was terrified of hellhounds and skinwalkers and the unstoppable change. She’d saved money for that expense by selling her body—not that José ever knew the truth. It was to fight for their survival. Rosa had been determined to forge a better life.