I'd rather cut off my own dick than drive all the way across Mexico and the US yet again, but I love Sophia, so here we go.
I take first shift behind the wheel; Inez broods in the passenger seat, the seatback tilted to forty-five degrees, legs stretched out, her hands idly playing with her butterfly knife—snick-snick, open;snick-snick, closed;snick-snick, open;snick-snick, closed.
While I drive, I consider the question of Sophia versus Inez. It's confusing to me, her near-obsession with her name. To me, when I see the woman I love—and have loved for nearly twenty years—I see my Sophia. I see, still, the seventeen-year-old girl I met, at once coltish and curvy, already with steel in her eyesand ice in her veins, already feared and respected by her father's lackeys, minions, and thugs. I see her eyes, so dark brown they're nearly black, watching me from the shadows as I spar with one of Rafael's bodyguards. I see her hands, fluttering over my shoulders like wary, skittish birds the first time I took my life in my hands and dared to kiss her. I see her soft, sleek, nubile, caramel skin gleaming in the moonlight the night she gave me what is still the greatest and most precious gift of my life: her virginity. Her body. Her trust.
That is my Sophia.
But I also see Inez. I see Inez when I think of the moment I discovered what her father did to her—a plan I knew about and could not stop. I warned her. Told her to leave, to flee with me. She refused. Told me I was mistaken. Her father was harsh, yes, but he would never dothatto her.
He did.
I'm keeping a secret from her, regarding that awful day; a secret and a lie. The lie is that I watched her marriage to Rafael through a sniper scope. I didn’t; I watched it from a cell beneath Bruno's estate, a gun to my head so I would not close my eyes or look away. I was forced at gunpoint to watch, every second of every day for three days, as Bruno let his men rape his daughter. I was forced to watch as she was married to that vile, evil, despicable monster. That is the secret.
Bruno's men let their guard down after the so-called wedding, and I escaped. By the time I was able to return to Bruno's estate, intent on freeing Sophia, Rafael had already murdered Bruno and taken control of the drug empire, increasing security to the point that it became obvious rescuing her was simply flat-out impossible.
I remember my superior officer in the Brazilian spec ops team handing me a manila folder full of photographs of the carnage left in her wake upon her escape from Rafael.
Thirty-two people. A mad rampage, it was. Godawful. Horrific. The responding officers who initially reported to the scene vomited. No one—not in law enforcement, not in the Brazilian intelligence community,no one—knew the truth of what prompted the massacre. I could not tell them, either. I could only let them vilify her. Paint her as a psychopathic lunatic dead-set on murdering as many people as possible. They hunted for her all over Brazil, but they were looking for what they assumed was a serial killer or some kind of deranged maniac. They never found her, obviously, and they never could understand why or how she never appeared again, anywhere. She never killed anyone in Brazil ever again—or anywhere in South America. To the Brazilian government, the massacre of Rafael's entire estate staff was an inexplicable mystery.
It wasn't.
To Sophia—or more accurately, Inez—everyone who lived and worked on that estate was complicit in what was done to her. And to be honest, she was right, at least partially. They all knew who Bruno was. They all knew who Rafael is. They all knew the kinds of things both men did. You could not live or work on that estate and not know the evils that were done there. You could not avoid the blood, the corpses, or the screams.
They were paid well, and so they pretended not to know. But they knew.
They knew what was done to Sophia. They knew, and did nothing. Said nothing.
Complicit.
I do not make excuses or justify the massacre of thirty-two people, no matter the reason. But I understand.
Inez was born that day. She was birthed out of trauma. She emerged from the ocean of blood spilled that day, full-formed, with hate in her heart and death in her veins. Inez is fueled by a sun-hot rage, a fission of fury.
I love Sophia.
I'm not sure how I feel about Inez.
I fear her. Respect her. But do I love her? I don't think so. How can one love a creature like Inez? For, in my mind, Inez is not a person. Not a woman. Inez, to me, is a golem, a creature shaped by the hands of hate out of the clay of torment, fired in the kiln of killing, given life by the infernal magic of agony.
Somewhere within the destructive golem that is Inez, there is my Sophia. The girl who loved me. The woman who taught me to love. I will destroy that golem. I will free Sophia.
"Stop looking at me like that, Ren," Inez mutters, without so much as a glance at me.
“Like what?" I ask.
She shakes her head. "Just…don't."
"Why not?" I ask. "We're safe and alone for the moment."
"Lorenzo," she says, sighing. "You should give up."
"On what?"
“Me."
I bark a laugh at this. "Every single day from the moment I escaped your father's estate to the moment you called me to ask for help rescuing Solomon, I thought about you. I searched for you." I pause, but the truth emerges. "In São Paulo, there is a post office box."
I have her curiosity, now. She doesn't look at me or say anything, but the quicksilver blur of her incessantly flipping knife ceases and her body angles ever so slightly toward me.
