Mess You Made

54.

Miguel.

I'm sat opposite Cristian at the small table when he relays everything to me. The sound of the water keeps running in the bathroom and I glance back through the living room and across to the door where she's showering. My heart beats in my throat again— thinking of the look in her eye, feeling her fingers wrapped around my wrists. I've never hated anything as much as I hate her distraught.

"And you don't know where she is? Your mom?" I look over at him.

He's smoked three cigarettes in a row ever since she came home, since Cristian held Malibu's face in her hands and made her tell him everything. You may as well have ripped through his jugular, that's what it looked like— the mere thought of her being afraid did it to him. When I coaxed about it, he told me everything. I'm glad he trusts me enough.

He gives a sharp shake of his head. So silent. Tension emanating from every inch of him, like it always is, like it never stops.

"Look, Cris—" I shut my eyes, "Just let me—"

He cuts me a look and it's harsh enough to make me shut the fuck up. The longer I've been around Harlem, the more I've heard about Cristian Adams and how notorious he is for all the things he's done— but it's hard to believe when all I've seen of him is the softer shade nurtured by his sisters and around his girl. It's easy to forget. Not tonight, though.

He looks seconds away from something violent and moments away from trouble and so much like my brothers that I'm weary as fuck.

"You can pay me back." I lie, "Fuck, just have some sense, Cristian—"

His jaw is tense, amber eyes harder than ever, "Do you think I'm doing anything else except thinking this through with fucking sense? It's my family. My sister he went to."

"I know." I nod slowly, "I know that so let the debt be paid off. Let it be done and let them fuck off away from her."

Irritable, he puts out the cigarette against the leg of the wooden table and then picks up another one, shielding the end as he lights one immediately. Smoke billows from his lips and after a moment of silence, he speaks, "I know them."

I lift my gaze to his, my brows furrowed.

"I worked for them. I did their dirty work for months." He pauses, falters, runs a hand down his thigh like he can't settle down and takes a deeper drag, "I've seen what they do and how they work. They won't be satisfied with just the money."

"So what the fuck would they want?"

"To make our lives hell." He pulls the cigarette from his mouth, "Savino has too much pride— and if he can't get his hands on her, he'll want to make us pay somehow."

I swallow down the way my throat tries to knot itself up. I won't let her be hurt. All three of them, they mean more to me than I could've ever predicted or imagined. This family in Harlem, this house, all the pain that bleeds off them. I wish they could just breathe. That they could be happy and I don't know Malibu's mother— I've never met her but fuck me, to have a mother as absent as hers that still somehow has a hold on you, that led her own children into trouble without ever even fucking being here, it makes me mad for her.

Their front door swings open then and I recognise the guy that ducks under the doorframe, clad in all black. The last time I saw him, I was holding my hands over his wounds. He was a stranger and still is. Eyes that are a rare shade of grey blue, skin this olive tan shade and short dark hair. His ethnicity's ambiguous but maybe something Hispanic, maybe Eastern European. Tall. I can't see him under the black hoodie but he seems lean.