Preston's Honor(11)

When we were seven, Cole and I had gotten into an argument about something and when our dad broke it up, we’d both turned away, each of us holding onto our personal grudge. Our dad had made us turn back to each other and that’s when he’d told us about the brother oath. We’d shook, promising to drop the grievance. “All right then,” our dad had said, “you’ve promised to let it go, and so you will. A man is only as good as his word.” He’d repeated it often over the years.

A man is only as good as his word.

“Brother oath,” I repeated.

He nodded once. “If I win, you step away from her. If you win, I’ll step back. Honor between brothers.”

I pressed my lips together but nodded. Brother oath. Honor between brothers. And we’d never broken either.

A man is only as good as his word.

We dropped our towels and took a minute to stretch, eyeing each other like two gladiators about to go into the ring. We were each wearing water shoes, which weren’t ideal for running, but at least we were on even footing, literally.

We lined up, facing opposite directions, the dirt road I was going to run stretched out in front of me. This was stupid. This wasn’t right. I turned to my brother to call it—

“On your mark, get set, go!”

Despite my last-minute reservations, the words jolted me into action, and we both took off, shooting apart, running toward our goal. My legs pumped and my lungs ached, but I ran my heart out.

Lia.

Lia.

Lia.

I pushed myself as far as I could possibly go without breaking, not caring that I was shaking with effort as I rounded the bend. I ran for Lia. I ran as if I were running straight into battle for her. I’d never run so hard in all my life. And yet as I came around the corner, I let out a sharp cry of pain and defeat, the bitter blow of disappointment knocking what little wind I had left completely out of me.

Cole was just arriving at the mailboxes. He’d beaten me by twenty-five yards. How the hell had he done it? I was obviously far more out of shape than I’d thought. Fuck!

I came to a walk, breathing harshly, my lungs still aching from my effort, a sharp pang in my side where a nasty stitch had started. Cole was breathing just as hard, but he leaned back against the post, shooting me a smug smile.

“Don’t gloat, asshole,” I said, bending forward and resting my hands on my knees in an attempt to slow my breathing. I’d lost her before I’d even had her, and he had the gall to rub it in.

He laughed, slapping me on my bare back. “I guess she was just meant to be mine,” Cole said. I wanted to own those words. I guess she was just meant to be mine.

I tried to pretend it didn’t hurt as badly as it did that I’d just lost Lia. In a fucking foot race.





CHAPTER THREE


Lia – Fifteen Years Old



My mama stepped into our house, the door slamming behind her. I glanced up, and then paused, frowning at the look on her face. She always looked tired, always looked slightly angry, but tonight she looked as if she was in pain. “Hi, Mama. You okay?”

She dropped her purse on the table, sitting down in one of the chairs and swearing softly in Spanish.

“Is it your back?”

“Sí.” There was resentment in her tone as if I should know very well it was her back.

I sighed, standing from where I’d been sitting on my air mattress doing my homework. I went to the cabinet in the kitchen where we kept medications and grabbed the bottle of pain reliever and a glass of water. I brought them to the table and set them in front of her, moving around behind her wordlessly so I could massage her shoulders.

She poured four tablets into her palm and threw them back with a long drink of water and then let her head fall forward so I could work out some of the kinks.

I kneaded her muscles in silence, staring at the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe that she often kneeled in front of in prayer. I knew that one of my mama’s prayers was that I’d never been born, so I’d come to look at that shrine with anger and pain. “The devil held me down and raped me all through the night,” she’d once told me. “In the morning he went away, but he left me with his eyes. Devil eyes to watch and curse me all the rest of my days.”

When I was just a little girl, I’d thought it was a terrible story, a scary story, and I’d felt deep sympathy and fear for my mama. It had been years before I’d understood that by “he left me with his eyes,” she meant he’d left her with me and that the strange green eyes I’d inherited had belonged to him, a monster and a rapist.

It was no wonder she looked at me with such blatant hatred. It was why I wished so much to be someone different when I looked in the mirror. Someone other than the unwanted girl with the devil eyes who had caused my mama so much pain just by being born.

Once my mama had had a young husband and a dream. They’d crossed the border illegally and her husband had died at the hands of a coyote who stole their money and shot him in the middle of the desert just because he felt like it. Then he raped my mama and got her pregnant with me. Even though I knew a coyote was just a name for a human smuggler who helped migrants cross the border, I still couldn’t help picture the evil beast that had attacked my mama as a wild, four-legged predator with my same pale eyes.

After that, my then nineteen-year-old mama had somehow made it to California, starving, pregnant, and barely alive, where she had settled into a migrant farmworkers’ camp and begun working at one of the farms when I was still inside her belly.