With Rosalita’s words lingering in my head, I head back upstairs, arms laden with a heavy wooden tray, heaped high with meat and cheeses and grapes and generous hunks of bread. The good kind, all soft and warm and delightful. Not the shitty kind that’s more suited to blunt force trauma to the head than anything else. And then there’s the wine. That I took when he wasn’t looking. A fresh jug from Santiago’s secret stash. He thinks I don’t know about it, but, oh, I do. Of course I do. How could I not?

“Kiki, get the door,” I call out as I near the threshold. “It’ll be a bitch to get it open myself.”

The door doesn’t budge. Not even an inch.

It’s probably too loud. She can’t hear me.

It takes some juggling but I manage to free one hand enough to grasp the handle and push the door inward.

But Kiki is not waiting for me inside, body half-hidden by a threadbare sheet, skin warmed by the fire crackling merrily in the hearth.

Said sheet has been discarded, draped across the floor as if abandoned. It’s crumpled, as if someone’s legs had gotten tangled in its length. The rickety chair that had been sitting by the fire is now lying on its side, one of it legs shattered into two pieces. The window stands open, drapes fluttering gently in the cool night air.

And on the window’s lintel is a streak of something dark and liquid. Something I can mistake for nothing other than what it is.

Blood.

The tray tumbles from my hands. The handle of the jug slips from my fingers. Grapes bounce away from the place where I am rooted. Chunks of cheese land with dull thuds against the wood. Wine splashes against the toes of my boots, seeping into the cracks between the floorboards, soaking into the fallen bread.

Kiki is gone.

And she did not go willingly.

I turn to run, to grab my weapons, but something smashes into me from behind.

“What the fu—”

Another something hits the back of my head, and my world goes dark.

CHAPTER 35

Kiki

Everything happens so fast.

I am lying in bed, my limbs heavy. Slow. Sated. I feel more comfortable in my own skin than I have in quite some time. It’s almost as though some great and burdensome carapace has been removed, one that I believed had been protecting me but had, in fact, only been shielding me from my true self. This is who I am. This is the real me. The me I am with Ana. That is the truth I had tried so hard to deny.

These thoughts are joyous. Loud. So loud, I don’t hear the window open. So loud I don’t hear the first footfall on the ground. I don’t see them until it was too late.