I was reading, or trying to read, but was having a hard time focusing. The passion that had exploded between Nester and me the previous day still lingered in my veins, causing crazy ideas to fly through my head.

 

Nester still loved me, I thought. Sure, he was obviously still angry—the rivalry between him and Santos had been going on for ages. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone was just going to give up overnight. I understood that, and didn’t even blame him for being angry with me. After all, I’d broken his heart; I couldn’t expect him to just shrug that off like it was nothing.

 

I wouldn’t want him to, I thought to myself, my eyes staring at the pages of the book I was reading, though I couldn’t make out a single word. My mind was way too far off.

 

But despite his anger and the sting he felt from Santos, I knew he still loved me. Or maybe that was just really wishful thinking on my part. I told myself that you didn’t kiss someone like that if you didn’t still love them terribly, but how true was that really? Maybe not at all.

 

“It is true,” I mumbled to myself, tucking my feet up beneath me as I sat in the overstuffed chair tucked into the corner. My “reading” corner. I’d spent countless nights studying for my nursing degree right in this chair, though that was all gone and past now. Santos didn’t need a smart chick, as he liked to put it.

 

Putting the book aside, having given up any hope of reading, I gave in to my desires and let my mind wander.

 

We could run away, I thought. It was a romantic, albeit childish thought. Unrealistic to say the least, but what was holding us anymore? Neither of us had family to tie us down. And I wasn’t in school anymore, so there wasn’t an issue there. I frowned, honestly thinking it through even though there was a reasonable part of my mind that already knew it was never going to happen. The MC was here and Nester wouldn’t just abandon them, but most of their ranks had scattered, hadn’t they? Santos always liked to talk about it, mentioned how they were dwindling and pathetic now. How they had no resolve, no backbone. Maybe that was reason enough for Nester to leave them and start over with me.

 

You’re dreaming, Zelda, I thought, but I continued to dream anyway.

 

I thought of how we could run off to some tiny little town, maybe buy a little land. I had some money set aside now. A security blanket just in case things went horribly wrong with Santos. Just in case I…needed to get away.

 

We could use that. And I was sure Nester had something set aside. Maybe we’d try farming. Or I’d be a waitress again, but at some diner in the middle of nowhere. Hell, maybe he’d be a mechanic and I’d be a schoolteacher.

 

My fantasies were anywhere from mundane to wild, doable and completely impossible. They would flood my mind and for a second, I felt hope flood my chest like a crazy drug that I couldn’t get enough of.

 

But every time I got too far involved with them, I would remember that there was a huge rock sitting on my finger, reminding me every waking moment that I belonged to someone else now.

 

It didn’t matter that I didn’t love that someone else.

 

Shaking my head, I got up from my corner and finally just accepted the facts: Nester was no longer in my future. It hurt my heart to even think the words, but I had to. I had to move on from him, because there was no getting around who I’d made my deal with, and Nester was probably angry enough that he didn’t love me anyway, and what sort of man kissed a woman who he knew was engaged?

 

I felt a trickle of anger enter my system and clung to it desperately. It was the only thing that was going to keep me sane. Period.

 

Feeling the need to do something, I went to cleaning the house. Again. I had dinner that night with Santos, but the day was mine, and though the house was spotless thanks to my rampage of cleaning the previous day, I went to the kitchen and started all over again. I went top to bottom until my nostrils burned with the smell of bleach and my hands were dry from being dunked in chemical addled water and dried a thousand times.

 

It didn’t really address what I was feeling inside, but it made me feel a little better.

 

***

 

I put on a pair of somewhat gaudy dangling earrings. They were diamonds, real, Santos had told me, and since they had been a gift, I thought he probably wanted me to wear them. And since my hair was straightened and then deliberately curled only to be piled on my head like some sort of hive, I figured the noticeable and altogether too large dangly earrings wouldn’t be too much.

 

That was my hope anyway.

 

I’d changed into a slinky red dress that was ankle length but had a slit between my legs in the back and had a plunging neckline that put the ladies most noticeably on display. Maybe I should have felt beautiful, but mostly I just felt…cheap.

 

It was hard not to when you were dating a man only to keep another man out of prison. It made you feel like you were little more than a toy to be bargained with.

 

Shaking the feeling aside, I went to my closet and found the heels. Thankfully, Santos wasn’t as tall as Nester was, so the heels were kitten only so that I wouldn’t become taller than him. It was a small thing, but it made me feel a little less like I was some kind of paid escort. I’d take what I could get these days.

 

As I slipped on the heels, I heard the knock at the door. Santos had asked for a key several different times, but I always told him that I never gave out keys to my house. Period. It was one of those things that irritated him, but he conceded. It was less of a point of contention these days since I had agreed to marry him and soon it wouldn’t matter whether I gave him a key to my house or not, because I wouldn’t have a house anymore. Instead, I would live with Santos and sell the little place that I had grown so fond of.

 

Sighing, I finished putting on my shoes, glanced once more in the mirror to check my hair and makeup, then headed downstairs to greet Santos.

 

For a wild moment, right before I grabbed the handle of the door, I thought it might be Nester. It was a silly, impossible idea. Nester wasn’t going to show. And if he was, it wasn’t going to be now. It was Santos on the other end of the wooden door and I knew that.

 

And yet I couldn’t deny how much my heart fluttered at the thought it could be him—or how disappointed I was when I jerked the door open to discover that it was, in fact, Santos on the other side.

 

Covering up my disappointment as quickly as I could, I greeted Santos with a smile, and when he stepped closer to plant a kiss on my mouth, I didn’t resist. It felt nothing like the passionate one I’d shared with Nester the previous day, and instantly I felt guilty for thinking that.

 

What sort of woman kissed two men one right after the other like that?

 

“Are you ready, babe?” he asked me, looping his buff arm around my waist. Santos wasn’t necessarily an unattractive man. He was on the shorter side for a man, closer to five feet ten or five feet eleven, but was big still. He was stocky, bulked up from intense work outs that were borne of a mixture of vanity and a need to be able to break people. His face was long with hard lines and angles that made the toughness within him more noticeable. His eyes were narrow and wrinkles licked around them like crows scratching at the skin. Brown hair was kept so short that he was often mistaken for a military man, though I knew for a fact that Santos had never served.

 

Forcing a smile on my face, I nodded. “Yeah, let’s go.”

 

Santos had brought his car tonight, for which I was grateful. My dress didn’t really lend itself to riding a motorcycle. If anything, I’d end up ripping it, or having to pull it up so high on my hips that I might as well have just worn my damn panties.

 

He opened the door for me and I slid in, thanking him. He closed the door after me and rounded the front of the car to get into the driver’s side. He started the car and we were off. I didn’t know where we were going tonight, but made the assumption that it would be some place “nice.” Or at least, nice in terms of expensive. It wouldn’t be quaint and the food would probably be fancy, but generally tasteless, and it would feel like a library or a museum where you basically felt like if you were going to talk you had best whisper.

 

It was the type of place Santos always took me and though I never complained, I missed the days where Nester and I would go to some hole-in-the-wall café and have breakfast for dinner, because I was wearing my comfy sweats and my favorite holey t-shirt and he didn’t care. He’d still call me sexy.

 

Stop thinking of Nester, I admonished myself. You’re not marrying him.

 

The ride to the restaurant, wherever it would be, was mostly quiet. We made polite conversation in the way of me asking how his day was and him telling me that I looked beautiful—or at least perfect, which he thought was the same and I didn’t. Beyond that, there wasn’t really much substance to the whole thing.

 

I found out when we parked that the restaurant that he picked was that French place—I hated French food unless it was toast or fries—where he’d asked me to marry him. It was one of his favorites and I hated it because the only thing I could ever find on the menu that I liked was a damn salad.

 

Again, Santos opened the door for me, helping me out. Again I said a polite thank you. Then I looped my hand through the crook of his arm and allowed him to lead me into the restaurant. I told myself that everything was going fine, that this was a good place to eat—even though I hated it—and that Santos was a good man—even though there were so many reasons I didn’t think that was true.

 

Santos had reservations and gave his name to the host, a snooty-looking man with one of those tiny mustaches that made it look like there was something unfortunate and a little slimy crawling across his upper lip. After a moment, the man escorted us to our table, gave us each a menu, and informed us a waiter and a bottle of chardonnay would be out in just a moment.

 

I reached for my menu and began perusing the options, though there wasn’t really any point. I already knew I was going to get a Caesar salad with dressing on the side and breadsticks. And they weren’t even the good breadsticks. They were the small, thin, crunchy ones that you always had to wash down with a lot of water.

 

Gross.

 

But I made a point of looking at the menu anyway, because if I didn’t, Santos would frown at me disapprovingly and ask if I didn’t like the restaurant. And that if I didn’t like it, I should have said something. Then he’d go on and tell me how he understood, that it was okay, because I’d been dating a ruffian for so long that of course I didn’t know good taste when I saw it. And then he’d insist on ordering for me, because he knew what was good here and he’d turn me into a cultured woman in no time.

 

It was a miserable conversation to have with anyone, especially Santos with his deep, kind and condescending tone, and I was loathe to have it again.

 

Just because I liked cheeseburgers with bacon didn’t mean I was uncultured.

 

While we were looking through the menu, Santos casually spoke to me. “I heard you had a visitor yesterday.”

 

I froze. I was incredibly grateful for that menu all of a sudden, because I was sure that my eyes had gotten wide and that my face had flushed a deep, deep shade of red that was most definitely not natural.

 

Santos knows, I thought, panic slowly rising up from my gut like a coiled snake just waking up, uncoiling itself inside me. Santos knows that Nester came to see me. What else does he know?

 

I wasn't sure how to respond. Did I tell him, yes, of course I had a visitor? And if I did, did I tell him it was Nester? Or did I try to deny the whole thing and that I had spent the day alone? I chose to remain silent, banking on Santos to have more to say before he really got to his point, which I assumed was catching me at something.

 

“Old friend?” he asked, his voice still calm and casual as though we were still in the car discussing something stupid and unimportant like the weather. Except that I knew there was an edge lying just beneath the surface, a blade as sharp as anything, even if I couldn’t see or hear it.

 

I swallowed. I could say it was a woman. I could say that it was one of my friends from the diner, but I quickly dismissed the idea. He hadn’t given my “visitor” a gender yet, but that was beside the point. The fact that he knew I had a visitor at all told me more than enough. If Santos knew that someone had come to see me yesterday, then he knew that someone wasn’t a woman. All I could hope was that he didn’t know that that man was Nester.

 

I wasn’t stupid enough to think that wouldn’t get me into a ton of trouble.

 

Smoothing out my facial features until I looked just as calm as Santos spoke, I finally answered him. “It was. From school. I don’t suppose you ever met Charlie, but we were very good friends.”

 

There, I thought, feeling a spark of pride and triumph. Charlie could be a guy or a girl. Make what you want of that!

 

“School,” he repeated, turning to look at the next page of the menu as though he weren’t really invested in my answer or the conversation at all, though I most definitely knew that wasn’t true. “I didn’t realize you kept in touch with anyone from high school.”

 

I don’t, I thought. I’d met Nester while I was in high school still, though we didn’t date until we’d both graduated. He was the only one I’d clung to after getting out of there, and even then, we hadn’t gone to the same school. I’d gone to an all-girls school, a very expensive one that I’d managed to get into through sheer force of will and a scholarship. Obviously, he hadn’t gone there.

 

“I don’t,” I said, voicing my thoughts. “I meant from nursing school.”

 

Which sounded much more believable. Santos probably wouldn’t like it, but he’d like it more than the truth. In all honesty, it didn’t really matter anyway. It was most definitely still a lie. I didn’t keep I touch with people from nursing school either. At first, I’d tried to, but it was hard. Hard because Santos didn’t like the idea of me being influenced by “people like that,” but also because every time I saw them, I knew how close they were to finishing. I knew that had I stuck with it, I would have been so close, too.

 

It was a terrible thought.

 

Before we could continue with the conversation, the waiter appeared and took our orders. I got the salad. Santos got a rare steak. The waiter poured us each a glass of the chardonnay, asking us if there was anything else we might need, before moving off to the kitchen for our orders. I thought maybe I had gotten lucky and the conversation was over altogether and that we’d have a normal date after that, which consisted mostly of silence, eating, and a few polite words here and there, but then Santos leveled me with an intense stare.

 

I was startled by the sudden spark in his eyes, and it wasn’t a tender or passionate spark of love. No, there was danger laced there. I sensed it long before he said anything.

 

“Friends are important, Zelda, my dear,” Santos told me, smiling despite that obvious and malicious glint of danger lurking in his cool eyes.

 

I swallowed, not sure how to answer. After a moment, I nodded and offered him a smile, hoping that would be the end of it. Of course, it wasn’t.

 

“I know it’s hard for you sometimes,” he continued, maybe trying to sound contrite but really coming off as condescending and even pompous. “You don’t have a lot of friends, you never really have, have you? Always a bit of a loner, an outcast. It’s alright; I understand. I used to be like that, too. Did you know that?”

 

I frowned. No, honestly, I didn’t really know that. When it came right down to it, I knew quite a bit about the Santos today—he had his dirty fingers into several construction companies, his “up to code” front companies, as well as his illegal dealings with firearms, drugs, and god knew what else—but I didn’t know much of him before. Most of my information came from Nester, and I wasn’t sure how reliable that was. Not that I thought Nester had done a lot of lying to me, but rather his impression of Santos was skewed by years of hatred. That sort of thing could warp how you viewed someone until you were saying things about them whether you knew they were true or not.

 

“I didn’t,” I told him finally when it became clear he actually expected a verbal answer from me.

 

He smiled at me, somewhere between a shark-like grin and a serene, angelic smile, which made it all the scarier. “No, of course not. No one does. Why? Because I’ve made myself into the kind of man I want to be, you understand?”

 

I didn’t really, but that wasn’t the point. I nodded just to get him to continue, because that look in his eye and the smile on his face was unnerving me tremendously. I could feel myself sweat, my heart beating so fast and loud that I was sure it was echoing in the silent, museum-like atmosphere of the restaurant. All I wanted to do was go home. Screw the dinner and the small talk and the goodnight kiss. I just wanted to be away from Santos.

 

Of course that wasn’t an option, so I tried to make it go as quickly as possible.

 

Reaching for his glass, he swirled the liquid around in it for a moment before taking a careful sip. “Good,” he told me, indicating that I should try my own. I reached for it only for the sake of keeping him calm, if that was even possible now. He continued. “You know why I’m telling you this, Zelda?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer this time. “I’m telling you this because I’ve made myself into the kind of man who has a lot of friends. I’ve made myself into the kind of man who has those friends because he is a force to be reckoned with. I’m proud of that man and I want you to know that, as a prideful man, there are certain things that I simply cannot allow.”

 

I was doing my best not to shake, but I wasn’t quite hacking it. The glass in my hand trembled, causing the liquid to ripple and swirl, so I put it down before I did something stupid like spill it.

 

Santos’s smile widened; he’d noticed my shaking. “Do you know what I cannot allow, Zelda?”

 

I shook my head, knowing that even if I had something to say, an answer, my voice would come out as a tiny squeak of a thing, trembling and terrified.

 

“Another man,” he said in a low voice, the threat no longer veiled, even though his smile stayed strangely in place as though it were painted there. “I don’t share well, Zelda, and if I find out I’m sharing you, well, you may just not have to regret it.”

 

I paled.

 

You may just not have to regret it. It sounded almost…forgiving, but I knew better. The words were thrown together almost haphazardly, twisted strangely until they sounded almost sweet. But that wasn’t what they meant at all.

 

Santos was telling me that if I ever cheated on him, then I wouldn’t regret it because I wouldn’t live long enough to.

 

If I cheated on him, Santos DeArma would kill me.