Page 19 of Ink

Fer nodded. “Alright, well, I’ll see you later.”

I waved her off and went back to scrolling and shooting the shit with my online Latine community. I wasn’t always able to be active on the forums, but when I was, I liked to reply and catch up on everything I missed.

Nonconsequential things were always traded back and forth. Things like how to press edges, make chilito quemado, and there were even groups asking for beta readers for poetry and books.

I was so engrossed in my task–looking over the written lyrics from one of the members named Veronica who wanted to be a singer one day–I didn’t realize how much time passed after that. By the time I did, it was late, and Ink still hadn’t shown up. It was weird, but maybe there was club stuff going on. No texts, though. As I began typing one up to ask him when he was coming, the door to the shop opened.

I looked up and my fingers froze on the screen of my phone.

“Hello,puta.”

My lip pulled up at the sight of the gringos from a few days ago. They were back, still dressed immaculately in those pretty little suits of theirs, but this time there were no niceties on their expressions.

An immediate chill went down my back and my thumb pressed down on the send button. I set my phone down in front of me and dropped my hands to the side.

“What do you want?” I asked.

In unison, they smirked.

“So you do remember us? That’s very good. Because we’d like for you to give a message to your boss.”

There was a single moment when the darkness swallowed me whole. I couldn’t be sure how long it lasted, only that it did and by the time it was over, it spat me back out into the light.

My breaths sawed in and out of my body, painfully scraping through my throat every time I tried to suck in air. My face was coated in thick liquid, causing me to see red.

I tasted copper on my lips, and while I still had my sense of taste, everything else was numb. The pain in my body didn’t come until later. The rest of my senses came gradually. Sound. White noise filled with my own breaths. Red became the maroon and black decor of the shop. My eye throbbed. My knuckles screamed. Every bone in my body felt like it’d been through a grinder.

And yet the sweet breath of life filled me.

“Fuckingshit! Xiomara! Xiomara, are you okay?”

I vaguely recognized the voice. Not at first. Not until he stood in front of me, taking my bloodied cheeks in his hands.

My breathing finally stilled and his name escaped me on a sigh of relief. “Ink.”

His cold facade cracked like ice splintering down the middle. The veins on his neck pulsed. His jaw worked. And yet his eyes on me were tender.

“Xiomara, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I think.”

“Baby, let go of the bat.”

I hadn’t felt the cold metal grasped tightly in my hands, slick with rivulets of blood. I loathed to let the weapon go, but Ink was here.

He was safe.

It’d be okay.

The bat dropped between us with a clang to the ground.

Only then did Ink grip me by the elbows and turn me. The jolting action pulled me from my shock, like every other time before I felt myself grounded back to reality after the initial disorientation. Everything slammed into me at once. The smell was the worst of all. The tang-like cold metal.

My gaze swept around the shop, surveying the destruction.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ink ordered. “I’ll take care of you.”

“But what about–”

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