I keep muttering it as she pulls me away, even though I fight. I don’t know where she’s taking me. I don’t care. All I know is that I cannot leave this place. I am needed here. He needs me here.

But my body refuses to cooperate. My feet are clumsy, like they belong to someone else. My vision blurs, stealing the sight of those swinging boots from me.

“No,” I say. Over and over and over and over.

And every time I blink, those boots swing, back and forth, back and forth, with nothing there to stop them.

CHAPTER 12

Ana

I am no stranger to grief.

You don’t get to live as I did without learning what it feels like to lose someone. The city has its way of teaching you how cruel and ugly the world is. It chips away at you, smoothing down all your jagged edges until all that’s left is something as hard and as callous as the hard and callous things that made you.

Grief—my own—is something I know how to deal with. But handling someone else’s? That is beyond me. All I can do now is watch Kiki and hope that I can catch her before she hits the ground and shatters.

I should be sad.

Alejandro was my family. Not by blood, no, but he was family all the same.

So, I should be sad. But strangely, I’m not.

All I feel is anger.

No, not anger.

Rage.

It feels as though it’s bubbling right under my skin, a building pressure that never finds release.

The problem is that I have no one to be angry at. No place to direct my rage, to funnel it out of my body. It just builds and builds and builds. Soon, there will be nothing left in my body but fury. No blood, no bones, no bile. Just pure, unadulterated wrath.

The anger follows me everywhere.

It follows me to the stables, where I consider jumping on Tornado and riding until his dark flank lathers with sweat, until we both collapse, until I cannot run any farther away.

It follows me to my bedroom, where I scream into a pillow for lack of anything better to scream at.

It follows me to the basilica, where I stand now, listening to some shit-for-brains priest tell Don Carlos that his son cannot be buried in hallowed ground.