Page 53 of Shadow Man

“I’m not fucking apologizing, if that’s what you’re after… You promised free pussy, and I’m here to collect.”

A dull beat explodes between my thighs as he kicks the dead body away from me. “Free pussy?”

A touch of a smile graces his lips. “The only pussy.” He glances down at the corpse. “This man was Fernandez’s best. We keep firing arrows at him like this, he’ll send in his tanks.

“Do you even know how to apologize?”

“Never apologize, never explain… Dante taught me that.”

Yeah, I bet he did.“Just because he lives by that code, it doesn’t mean you have to.”

He slides his gun into the waistband of his jeans with an expression that’s set with russet stubble and stillness. “Don’t go thinking there’s some big fucking difference between me and him,Luna. We’re cut from the same red cloth, and we always will be.”

“I don’t agree.” You’re more. You’re so much more.You could be everything.

He grunts and shrugs. “Think what you like. I can shootsicariosin the head for you, but I can’t protect you from the shit you tell yourself at night.” In one stride, he has his hand locked around my wrist. “Time to go.”

“I don’t think much about anything at night,” I say, trying to ignore the firecrackers go off under my skin. It’s intrinsic.Wanted.“I’m too busy hunting for my moon.”

He stops and turns, his shutters dropping for a split-second.

“What?” I say, but his expression is written in hieroglyphics.

“I don't have time to explain.” Gray-blues have frozen up again as he yanks me toward the back of the store.

“What about the body?”

“Gomez will sort it.”

“Gomez knows you’re here?” I say in surprise.

“The whole of fucking Colombia knows I’m here, thanks to you.” He leads me toward a restroom, through an open door to the side, and then out onto a path that leads us back out front. Stopping next to his car, he opens up the back door with a jerk.

“Get in. We don't have much time.”

“We need to wait for Vi!” I turn in her direction, but the payphone booth is empty.

“Where the fuck is she?” he roars, fists slamming down on the roof of the SUV.

“Here,” she says calmly.

A beat later, a second gunshot is ringing out across the bloody Leticia sky.

22

Anna

My mother once told me that my first memory would have the strongest roots. She was always coming up with weird shit like that. She lived her whole life believing that a single event would have the ability to sprout seedlings when I least expected it—guiding judgements, inciting emotions, warming me with nostalgia in the lonely cold of dawn.

Mine turned out to be a hunting trip to Maryland with my father when I was five years old. Later, I would tell mom that I was the luckiest girl in the world to claim this as my first.

I lied.

I wasn’t lucky, and it wasn't special. It was dark, dirty and damaged, and I would grow to hate it like I did all the men who stole something precious from me. That day, I watched my father kill a stag, but his reckless bullet lodged deep inside me as well.

I can’t recall much of the day leading up to the kill shot, besides the scratchy feeling of his beard against my skin and the way my tiny hand slotted inside his. But when he cocked his Remington, with me hunkered down in the dirt next to him, my mind hit a flashing red record button.

I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be here; I wanted to be making cookies with mom or playing unicorns with Ria from next door. Most of all, I didn’t want my father to kill something that didn’t deserve to die. The stag hadn’t charged us or hurt us. He was targeted simply forbeing,and thismade the memory of my father’s actions even more of a traitorous ruin.

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