Cadillac Payback: Rising Tide by AJ Elmore (the false prince .TXT) 📕

her voice ring out in the otherwise silence, my brain sorting the details from the profanity, then sorting the details into sense. She sniffs.

A hard furrow works its way across my forehead. The gears of thought slow, then jam. I check her. She’s miserable, furious, but she’s not lying.

“He was hit before he pushed you out of the way?” I ask.

Immediately, I bite my tongue. I’m Security right hand, and I’m the one who slipped back to English in front of these strangers who have no choice but to hear me.

She nods.

“¿Estás seguro?”

Again, I don’t think she notices the language switch. Honestly, I can understand why it wouldn’t matter in her brain right now.

She bites her lip, and her eyes rim with tears. The fight she makes against them is a valiant one, but her shoulders shake anyway, and her breaths are too short, too shallow. I lean forward into a personal space I haven’t shared in a year, and reach for her. I move slowly, to give her time to react. Truth is, I don’t know how she’ll react, and that’s as unsettling as the rest of this fucking situation.

She doesn’t spook, so I curl my fingers around her shoulders and look her in the eye. It’s never been hard to be her anchor before. This, it’s hard. A wayward bit of my mind wonders what she was like the last time I was here, when it was me lingering at death’s door.

As I slowly increase the pressure of my grip, the trembling in her body eases some. Her breaths stop catching quite so high in her chest. She sniffs again.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she says, the words barely voiced and wavering. “If they had time to aim at him, they had time to aim at me. Why would they want to kill him?”

It’s comforting in a steely kind of way that, despite her distress, she’s still thinking like the born criminal that she is. The truth is not so comforting. She’s right. Why would someone go through the risk of an old-fashioned drive-by just to put a couple of bullets in the bodyguard?

One of the three people across the room shifts in their seat, and there’s a soft noise made deep in the throat. I don’t dare turn away from her for several reasons. Mostly because I don’t want to lose the progress I’ve made in deterring a panic attack. Also because there’s no way to gauge the other people’s reaction without looking guilty as hell. Least of all, yet still true, I don’t care about them nearly as much as I do about her.

“That’s everything you can remember?” I ask. I sound foreign to myself, softly curved Spanish, volume intimate, concern evident.

She swallows thickly as she lifts her chin with a shred of defiance. Her cheeks are wet, but the tears have stopped. She nods.

I lean forward a little more, and feather my lips against her forehead. Her breath catches in a wholly different way. My psyche screams in two different voices: acting this way isn’t like me, and the action feels like the right thing to do.

When I pull away, her head is slowly shaking from side to side. I don’t think she realizes she’s doing it, but it rings clear to me. This is too much at a bad time. So I back up and let her go. She takes a long breath.

She’s right. I can’t do it, either. I want to, but I can’t. I don’t know that life she gave me a taste of. The hints have always been nice, but the reality is too much. I didn’t grow up with love, and for all the trauma she has endured, she knows what it’s like. I know that it ain’t me.

My phone starts buzzing in my pocket. I knew I should have set it to “do not disturb.” I slip it out and glance down. The screen reads “Rocks.” I can ignore it and risk another week of him not answering me, or I can put business before Maria.

“Yeah?” I say at the offending device.

“Hey, Fred, I got a address for you!”

The body on the other end is yelling. His voice and all the background noise meld together. I can’t tell if what I’m hearing is music, or a TV, or actual people.

“Go on,” I say, quiet enough that I’m not sure if he can hear me.

“Hang on!” he yells.

There’s a stretch of just noise, then the sound of a door slamming, and the background noise muffles significantly.

“So,” he continues, voice still obnoxiously loud, despite the fact that he’s alone. At least I hope he’s not about to scream out the information I asked him for in a room full of people. I’m not confident that he wouldn’t do that.

“So?” I say.

My patience is thin enough that a feather could break it, yet here is not a man who can be rushed or threatened. My jaw clenches hard enough that my back teeth hurt.

I hear a loud and long sniff on the other end, and the details begin to fall into place. Wherever he is, he’s sniffing huge rails, and probably slamming cheap beers. It was a good idea to take the call. He snorts loud enough that the people across the room can probably hear him.

“Turns out yer boy is stayin’ at the Magnolia in the Garden District. I couldn’t get a room number, or phone number. Was hard enough to fuckn’ find that much. Only other thing I could find is that he ain’t staying there on Abuela’s dime, so it must be that flashy broad who put up the cash.”

Usually I’d say something coy like, “You know he’s not my boy,” but his timing really couldn’t be worse. My mood couldn’t get much worse. And Maria is watching me with a narrowed gaze soaked with suspicion. There’s a good chance she can hear every damn word out of Johnny’s mouth.

“Hang on,” he says again, and there’s another giant sniff. The