Inked in Lies: The Fallen Men #5 Read online

  “You’re scum,” Mamá screamed, high and shrill like the whistle of our rusting tea kettle. “You’re fucking scum, and you think you’re king of this place, but you know what you are? You are king of shit all, Ignacio. Shit all!”

  There was a whoomphing thump, and I winced in bed, wishing more than anything that Dane was there to comfort me.

  But he wasn’t.

  It was a Thursday, and on Thursdays, Dane snuck out to see his secret girlfriend, Anne Munn.

  So I was alone amid the wilting blooms in my bedroom, the air hot and stale because it was mid-summer and so hot the Okanogan Valley was alive with wildfires. I was sweating, so thirsty my tongue peeled like Velcro off the roof of my mouth, but I didn’t dare to venture to the kitchen for water.

  That was their battleground.

  I curled tighter beneath my blanket, listing off flower varieties in my head to distract myself from the chaos in the kitchen.

  I always started with sunflowers because they were my favourite, their bright, smiling faces such a marvelous contrast to the grit and grime of my reality.

  Little Becka, Soraya, American Giant.

  “I’ll take the kids and run!” Mamá screamed over the clang of falling pans.

  “Over my dead fucking body,” Ignacio roared.

  Pacino, Zohar, Baby Bear, and Elegance.

  “You can’t keep an eye on them all day long, Ignacio, and I swear, I’m taking them with me.”

  “No one takes my kids. You think they’d wanna go with you anyway? You’re practically a stranger to them, Ellie. They’d be more likely to go with the fucking ice cream truck driver.”

  A female war cry and then a series of thumps.

  Mamá always ended up hitting Ignacio when she was in a rage.

  Bashful, Frilly, Suntastic Yellow.

  “I’m taking them, I’m taking them, I’m taking them––” Mamá chanted, high and clanging, an alarm I wished I could shut off.

  There was a sharp rap against my bedroom window that startled me so badly it broke the seal on my lips and a bright, high sob burst through. I peered under my blanket through the low light at the window, heart beating so hard in my chest it felt like a hammer strike.

  Some of Ignacio’s friends had come by before and peered through the window after a deal or on their way to the back porch where Papá held court. Luckily, they hadn’t done anything but look and leave streaks of greasy fingermarks against the window pane.

  It wasn’t one of Ignacio’s friends there now.

  It was mine.

  Jonathon’s face was cut into harsh angles by the grimy yellow light of the street lamps, but I recognized him in the dark, even in the midst of my own personal hell.

  It wasn’t strange to find him at my window either.

  He was an insomniac, which he’d told me meant he couldn’t sleep. Embarrassingly, I’d followed that up by asking if he was a vampire.

  He hadn’t laughed in a mean way, which was one of the many reasons I loved him. He never made fun of people who were inferior to him in any way. He was more handsome, funnier, and more charismatic at seventeen years old than most people ever were, but he was also kind, his endearing smile authentic.

  It wasn’t until a few years later that the smile I’d once loved turned brittle at the corners and cracked like an ill-fitting mask.

  But right then, in the midst of my terror, I’d never seen anything so lovely as Jonathon Booth’s smile through the yellow glint of the window pane.

  He jerked his chin at me then worked his fingers under the ledge to jimmy the window up its tacky seams.

  “Come here,” he whispered, his hand snaking through the gap, fingers unfurled, a pen drawn image of a lotus flower in the center of his palm. “You come stay with me tonight.”

  I bit my lip as there was a crash of breaking porcelain in the kitchen. Sometimes, when Dane wasn’t home, I thought Jonathon made a special effort to check in on me. And sometimes, if I needed him, he would arrive at the window and pull me free of the stinking wrath boiling up the walls of my house before it could scald me.

  But sometimes, when I was too terrified to leave Mamá alone with Ignacio or Ignacio alone with Mamá, worried their fury would raze the house to the ground, I begged Jonathon to stay.

  I unpeeled my sticky tongue from the roof of my mouth to do just that when he sighed gustily and heaved the window open even farther so he could swing himself through it. He landed nimbly on his scuffed black converse and made his way to my bed. When he sat, I felt the ugliness in my chest, the knotted mass of emotions residing there, loosen.

  He smelled like tobacco and something spicy that itched my nose in a good way.

  Instantly, my hand snapped out of the covers to clutch at his.

  His wavy hair fell across his brow as he stared down at our cinched hands, and for one moment, almost scarier than the minutes before that, I was worried he’d reject me.

  But then he gave my small hand a firm squeeze and tipped his chin up so I could see the depthless brown of his shadowed eyes.

  “I’ll stay ’til Dane gets back, yeah?” he whispered.

  I nodded, scooting back on the bed so that he would have some room to lay beside me on the lumpy mattress. He hesitated for a second before swinging his shoes up on the covers as he settled on his back.

  I closed my eyes and dragged a deep lungful of his familiar scent. His big body was effectively between me and the door, me and my fighting parents, me and the raw brutality of my life. Tucked away in the floral, humid air of my bedroom amid the pots and plants, rucked up against the wall with a boy I trusted almost as much as my brother, I finally let myself relax.

  We were quiet for a long time, long enough for the fight to die down, the front door to slam as one of my parents left in a huff, and silence to descend.

  I thought maybe Jonathon was asleep until he shifted his head on my purple pillow and looked at me with wide, alert eyes.

  “Not sleepy, huh?” he asked softly, his voice barely audible above the rasp and texture of his head sliding over the pillow. When I shook my head, the left side of his full mouth curled up. “Yeah, me either. Whaddya do when you can’t sleep?”

  I shrugged, feeling heat in my cheeks as I fiddled with the edge of my comforter.

  He nudged me with an elbow then winked when I looked at him. “C’mon, you can tell me. You know I won’t make fun. Hell, maybe I can even steal some’a your tricks. I could use the sleep.”

  “I make lists of flowers,” I admitted. “I was on Suntastic Yellow Sunflowers when you came in.”

  His lips twitched, but true to his promise, he didn’t laugh.

  “Suntastic, hey? Well, I’m pretty fuckin’ sure I can’t name varieties of sunflowers, but I could do other flowers good enough. You wanna do it with me?”

  I stared so hard at him my eyes burned, and then when that didn’t work, I reached out to touch the warm skin over the hard curve of his tricep.

  He quirked an eyebrow at me in question, but I surprised myself by admitting the truth of my action.

  “Sometimes, Dane and I don’t think you’re real,” I confessed on a breath, horrified that tears started to well at the backs of my hot eyes. “You and Molly and Diogo and your brothers. We never met anyone like you.”

  Something shifted in the planes of his face, like tectonic plates beneath the crust of the earth. Whatever emotion passed through him was too deep for me to decipher, I only knew it left his eyes so dark they looked black as he blinked at me.

  “You know what, Li? You’re gonna grow up and meet tons more people who treat you well, and then my family and me won’t seem so weird to you.”

  “Not weird,” I corrected harshly, nails digging into the arm I still held. “Beautiful.”

  I watched his mouth soften, thinking it was too red for a man but that I liked it anyway.

  “Okay, not weird. But I mean it, this…” he gestured to the cramped room, the lingering memories of the argument in the kit
chen haunting the space like a silent spectre, “is only temporary. Dane’s almost eighteen, and he’s gonna take care of you. He’s gotta plan.”

  I knew Dane had a plan. He’d been hatching plans to get us out and away from our parents since I could remember. He was smart, but it was hard to do well at school when you had a part time job as a drug dealer’s protégé combined with the stress of raising a little girl because your parents couldn’t be bothered to do it well themselves. He was noble and strong with a sense of heroism that we both shared. I knew he wanted to be a cop or a soldier or something important where he could fix broken lives like he swore he was going to fix ours. But that kind of job took education, and education took money that we didn’t have and time we couldn’t spare. So he figured he’d get into some sort of trade, and we’d get a little apartment, just us two.

  But something about the plan made me sad and in the confessional silence we’d created in my bedroom, I was brave enough to admit that much.

  “I wish he didn’t have to plan,” I murmured. “I wish he only ever had to dream.”

  Jonathon made a sound at the back of his throat, an involuntary grunt like my words had socked him in the stomach.

  “Do you have any dreams, Flower Child?” he asked me, trying to lighten the mood with one of his sideways smirks. “You wanna open a flower store or something?”

  I frowned because I didn’t have any dreams, not really. I clung to Dane’s plans for us like a dream, because I was hopeful but suspicious of our ability to succeed.

  But for myself?

  No.

  I hadn’t been given the tools to even know how to build one.

  Instead of answering, I turned my head on the pillow to offer Jonathon my shining eyes in reply.

  His lips twisted, a smile deformed by pity. “We’ll find you a dream. Don’t worry. There’s plenty’a time yet for you.”

  “I bet you have dreams,” I said, because Jonathon was always moving and shaking, meeting new people, trying new things. Almost like his good life bothered him, always searching for something new to test his edges against.

  He exhaled deeply and looked up at the ceiling like it held all the answers. “Yeah, I got dreams.”

  “I can keep a secret really good,” I rushed to say, then blushed at my eagerness and shrugged lamely. “I mean, if you wanna tell me.”

  I traced his slightly smiling profile with my eyes and felt warmed by his ease with me. He was loose and relaxed, still in a way I rarely saw him. I liked that. I liked that he could be at rest in my small room wrapped in the hot green scent of leaves on my cramped twin bed.

  “My dreams don’t line up real well with my family’s dreams for me. So I think I’ll keep ’em to myself for a while longer. But you’ll be the first person I tell, yeah?”

  That was somehow even better than being told right away.

  “Okay,” I agreed easily, the last syllable warbled by a mammoth yawn.

  Jonathon chuckled. “Okay, Li, why don’t we try your flower game, huh? We can get some sleep before Dane comes home. You start us off.”

  I snuggled deeper into the warm bedclothes, turning on my side so I could face him and tuck my knees up to my chest to hug while I slept.

  “Anemone.”

  “Baby’s Breath,” he countered, reaching over to gently flick my nose.

  I scrunched it up. “I’m not a baby.”

  “No, but it’s gotta be said, I wish you were. You’re eyes are too damn old for six years’a life.”

  I pressed them closed so he couldn’t read anything else I had written in my hazel eyes and stubbornly continued.

  “Carnation.”

  “Daisy.”

  “Evening Primrose,” I murmured because it was already working.

  An hour ago, sleep had been out of the question, but enclosed in my room with Jonathon like a sentry at my side, I trusted him enough to reach for the hand of sleep and be led into the dark.

  “Flower Child,” I heard him murmur distantly as I sank into slumber. “I hope you find some dreams tonight.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I woke up because I couldn’t breathe.

  There was a hand over my mouth, fingers pressed up under my nostrils so I couldn’t drag air through my nose. Instantly, I froze. It was a conditioned response. The history of abuse in my family had taught me that the only course of action in a crisis was to be still and be calm or else face an escalation of violence.

  So I tried to focus my eyes on the figure looming over me.

  My mamá.

  The whites of her eyes glowed in the dark, her irises pools of depthless black. She looked haunted. No, not haunted, because I always imagined ghosts as sad beings.

  She looked demented.

  Driven by some crazed force that was telling her to steal my air.

  I blinked hard to clear the fuzz at the corners of my thoughts and tried not to panic.

  “Hey nena, come with your mamá now, okay?” Mamá swooped lower over me, and I realized she was at the end of the bed, being careful not to disturb Jonathon who was still passed out beside me.

  Jonathon.

  I tried to kick his leg somewhere to the right of me, but Mamá’s hand clamped down viciously on my struggling limb, and her eyes glowed even whiter.

  “Listen to me, nena, I need you to do exactly what I say. Get up quietly, and come with me. We don’t want your papá to hear, do you?”

  I didn’t.

  Mamá didn’t care that there was a teenage boy in her six-year old’s bed, but I knew Ignacio would kill Jonathon as soon as he discovered him there.

  So I nodded as much as I could under the force of Mamá’s hand, breathing deeply when she released me.

  Before I scooted off the bed, I shot a look at Jonathon.

  He looked more peaceful than I’d ever seen him, one arm flung over his head, the other low on his stomach, mouth lax, lashes long fans over his cheeks.

  My stomach cramped at the thought of him hurting, at the thought of the Booth family hurting if Ignacio discovered him there when all they’d ever done was help Dane and me.

  I sucked in another deep breath and crawled off the bed even though I didn’t want to go anywhere with Mamá.

  Ignacio had been cruel earlier when he’d said she was a stranger to us.

  But he wasn’t incorrect.

  I bit my lip as she took my hand and started to cart me from the room. We walked swiftly and silently down the short hall to the kitchen where the broken detritus of their fight lay scattered across the floor. A small wedge of glass jabbed through my heel, but I didn’t make a sound, and I didn’t stop.

  Ignacio was a light sleeper.

  We were at the front door when I noticed the small suitcase beside the frame and a chill bit viciously into my spine.

  I was no longer worried about where we were going.

  I was worried about how long it would last.

  With a grunt, I wrenched my hand away from Mamá. The force sent me hurtling to the ground where I landed in a pile of glass that shredded my palms and the backs of my thighs where they were exposed by my sleep shorts.

  A short wail worked itself free of my throat before I could choke it back.

  But it was too late.

  Mamá stared at me in abject horror for a moment before she cursed and flung the door open.

  I caught a glimpse of a man in a leather jacket with a thick beard and a big tummy standing in front of a truck before the roar of a familiar voice echoed down the mouth of the hall.

  “ELLIE!”

  I shifted to get up off the floor and out of the way of the ensuing argument, but the long, sharp teeth of a broken glass cut deeper into my thighs. Wetness sluiced between my legs, and when I looked down, the previously yellow-tinged linoleum was red with blood.

  I blinked, my mind disassociating from my body.

  There was a loud crash. A door flung against a wall.

  Then the stomp of heavy, angry f
eet over the old, creaking floor.

  Even his breath was audible, like a great, terrifying dragon disturbed from his sleep and furious for it.

  Ignacio appeared in the dark mouth of the hall, his fists balled, face twisted with all-consuming rage. His gaze swept over me, and his mouth twisted up small and tight, a poor attempt to cap the emotions I knew were bubbling in his chest.

  The second his gaze hit Mamá in the doorway, he blew.

  “Are you trying to take my kid?” he asked, low and loud, more growl than words.

  Mamá stood frozen like cornered prey even though the door was open at her back.

  I was six years old, but I was still smart enough to know she should have run.

  Instead, she called for backup.

  To this day, the details are blurred.

  But I remembered a few things, murky memories bleeding and faded like old tattoos inked into my mind.

  The biker waiting by the car appeared behind Mamá with a gun.

  Ignacio had one in his hand suddenly, and he was yelling.

  But Mamá? She was screaming, and then suddenly she was diving toward me, tugging my hand to drag me over broken glass toward the door.

  Screaming that I was hers.

  Hers!

  Ignacio warned her.

  God, he warned her.

  Let go, or else.

  Touch her again, you’re dead.

  I mean it, Ellie, you take one more step, I’ll shoot.

  You know I will, Ellie. And you know I never miss.

  Let Lila go.

  The biker had his gun raised, and when Mamá got close enough, he stepped slightly in front of her.

  Maybe to protect her.

  Maybe he saw this as an opening in the drug trade and decided to take advantage.

  They said the man shot first.

  It would have hit Papá, they said, the police afterward who had crawled over the scene like ants on their hill, if Jonathon Booth hadn’t chosen that moment to shove Ignacio to the ground.

  The man’s bullet missed them both cleanly.

  But Ignacio’s fired too.

  In the millisecond before Jonathon tackled him.

  He pulled the trigger on his revolver, and the bullet found its way straight into Mamá.