Carmen

 

I heard a howling shriek and saw blood erupt from my father’s leg. To either side of me, his two henchmen collapsed. They were dead before they hit the ground.

 

I screamed as I fell, cowering into the dirt, shielding my head and eyes and praying I didn’t get shot.

 

I peeked out between my hands. From across the yard came two massive, shaven-headed men wearing tactical gear with big sniper rifles strapped across their shoulders.

 

They pushed James onto his back, then one of them reached a hand down to help Ben up. He took it and struggled to my feet.

 

“Are you okay, friend?” said a voice behind me.

 

I turned and saw a man walking towards where I stood. He was wearing a tracksuit and looking as casual as could be. But I saw the glimmer in his eyes and knew he was brewing with anger.

 

“I’m okay,” Ben said.

 

I didn’t know what was going on, but somehow, I’d made it through unhurt.

 

The man nodded sagely. “It seems our timing was appropriate. I am glad,” he said with a Russian accent.

 

“You don’t even know the half of it, Ivan, my brother.” Ben and the man clasped hands, then turned as one to look at James where he was lying in the dirt.

 

“So this is the motherfucker, eh?” he asked.

 

“This is him,” Ben replied.

 

Daddy sat up on his elbows, breathing in heavily through his mouth. His eyes were wild with animal fear.

 

“That is a nasty wound,” Ivan said, pointing at my father’s leg. “You ought to go to a hospital. You are very likely to bleed out if you do not.”

 

Dad kept breathing, not saying a word. Off to my right, I saw the crumpled bodies of his henchmen. Each of them bore a clean bullet hole right through the forehead.

 

“Tell me, James,” he continued, “why did you hurt my friend, Olaf? And your wife? That is a very disgraceful thing to do, friend.”

 

“I didn’t do shit,” he spat.

 

Ivan clucked and shook his head. “I know very well what you did. Do you think you are the only one who is friends with the police?” He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, crouched, and waggled it in front of James’s face. “There was video, wasn’t there? You knew this. They had you on camera! Very sloppy, very sloppy, indeed. You are not so good at this job. Perhaps it is best that you do not do it anymore.”

 

Daddy paled. I felt my stomach drop.

 

“Let us watch together, shall we?” Ivan announced. He hit play and held the phone so Daddy could see. As each second ticked by, the pallor in my dad’s face whitened further. By the end of it, he looked like a corpse.

 

The desert was silent when the video ended. Ivan stood up. “Tell your daughter what you did,” he said. His voice was icy cold, barely human. When Daddy stayed silent, he nudged a toe against his ruined leg, eliciting a bone-chilling scream. The howl echoed in the night. “Tell her,” he repeated. “Now.”

 

Daddy closed his eyes and started to speak, but Ivan interrupted again. “No, you must look at her. Like a man. Explain what you did and why.”

 

My father looked at me and the whole world shrank down to just his voice. I couldn’t see anything else, hear anything else, couldn’t even breathe as he spoke. His eyes were quivering. “It was me,” he said in a near-whisper. “I did it.”

 

I shook my head vigorously. “No, you didn’t, Daddy. You couldn’t have.”

 

“He did it, Carmen,” Ben said softly.

 

Tears pearled at the corners of my eyes. I heard a hollow, rushing noise, like the blood in my head had begun to stream faster and faster through my veins. My heart in my chest was fluttering at top speed.

 

“Daddy, why? Why would you kill Mom?”

 

His face twisted into a violent snarl as he erupted suddenly. “Because she was a fucking whore!” he thundered. “A nasty, cheating slut!”

 

I shrank in fear at the sudden outburst. Who was this man lying across from me, telling me he’d murdered my mother, calling her a whore, a slut? It was night and day. Just moments ago, I’d felt like I was reunited with him, like I had my father back and everything was falling back into place. But there was one more sudden jerk of the world left in store, it seemed, one more dizzying wrench before I could get a bearing on my life. Just moments ago, he’d seemed so innocent. This didn’t seem possible.

 

But then I remembered the day with the broken vase, when I’d seen the beast in my father come roaring out as he bellowed at my mother. Tell me who it was! He’d been a monster then. Maybe he’d always been a monster.

 

“She was sleeping with that fucking filth I found her with. She didn’t have to tell me; I knew it. They were together, just like I knew they’d be. I found them, and I did what had to be done. I don’t regret it. She died like she should have—like a whore.”

 

The Russian man, Ivan, tilted his head to the side. “She was not cheating on you, James. Olaf was her friend. They had known each other for a long time. He told me often that a friend of his was in trouble, that she was trying to run away from an abusive husband. But he did not say it was you. Perhaps she made him swear to keep her secret safe; I do not know for certain. But I do know you killed an innocent man. One who deserved better than to die at the hands of a pig like you.”

 

I couldn’t keep everything straight. Revelations were being tossed around casually, but each one was exploding in my head like a hand grenade. My mother was a cheater—no, she was just scared. Ben had killed her—no, my own father had. I didn’t know what to think, how to feel. It was all too much. I felt dizzy and nauseating. And all this blood around me wasn’t helping.

 

“What are you going to do to me?” Daddy asked. “Take me to the police?”

 

Ben shook his head grimly. “Whatever Ivan has in store for you will be far, far worse than jail, James. I’d say, may God have mercy on your soul, but I don’t believe in the big man upstairs, and even if I did, I don’t think he gives a damn about you.”

 

Ivan’s men bent down and each took one of my father’s arms in their grasp. They began dragging him off to the side of the house, where a truck sat idling. Ivan looked at Ben once, nodded brusquely, then turned and followed his men to the car. They tossed my father into the backseat and climbed in after him. Then they shut the door. The car turned and disappeared around the bend in the road.

 

Ben turned to face me. I was still lying in the dirt. He walked over and reached down to help me up, brushing off dirt from my clothing as I stood. I felt weak and numb everywhere, like I could barely support my own weight.

 

He looked down at me, his eyes steely and soft at the same time, boiling with some inscrutable mix of love and distance, of fire, of glaciers. All of the things that made him who he was, they were visible in one way or another, or maybe I was just going delusional from all of the emotional stress.

 

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.

 

“I know.”

 

“Is it true?”

 

He took a moment before nodding. “I’m sorry, Carmen. It’s a horrible thing to hear.”

 

I bit my lip, then fell into his chest. He wrapped his arms around me and for the first time in a long time, I felt safe, protected. Like the wildly pinwheeling world had finally come into balance and I could start trusting the things around me again. There would be a lot of time needed to recover. It wasn’t going to be easy to come to terms with the fact that my father had killed my mother, that he’d lied to me, that he’d used me as bait to lure his enemy here and try to kill him. I was an eighteen-year-old girl, not a war-hardened biker like Ben.

 

But somehow, being close to him made me feel like I’d find a way to make sense of everything. To find my feet again. I felt strong. Do you trust me? he’d asked when I stood on top of the rock and looked down at the branches hiding him from sight below me. I’d said yes, and I jumped. Wasn’t this just more of the same?

 

In the midst of the dizziness swirling through my head, I began to feel centered and calm. His arms around me were so solid; there was no way in hell I could doubt them. His breath was so steady, so easy to rely on. It was mind-boggling how quickly he had become my everything. In a world that refused to sit still for me, he never budged. Ben was a rock. My rock.

 

I leaned back and looked up at him and said the only thing I knew I could say in the moment. “I love you, Ben.”

 

He brushed his lips against mine. “I love you, too, Carmen.”

 

And, at long last, the world stopped spinning. My world stopped spinning, at least. I had everything I needed. Right here. Right now.