Page 151

He could not raise his arm high enough to pull off his shirt, so I took my nail scissors and cut through the fabric a little at a time. Beneath it, the claw marks from the night of the Baths had healed into four thin, pale scars. A fresh bruise now spread across his side and stomach, broader and darker than the last one, and four long curved marks had been torn through the center of it.

I ran my fingertips carefully along his ribs, pressing only hard enough to feel for breaks. The third and fourth were injured again, and this time the fifth felt wrong too.

"Same tiger?" I asked quietly.

"Different tiger," he said. He tried to grin, then winced. "Same owner."

I cleaned the cut along his hairline and the blood from his lip, then held a cold, wet cloth against his swollen eye until he stopped flinching every time it touched him. I listened to his breathing and made him take three slow breaths while I watched his chest. After that, I pressed another cold cloth against the worst of the bruising and waited until I was satisfied he could breathe without the pain getting sharper.

When I finally sat back on my heels, the water in the bowl had turned pink with blood.

“Tell me,” I said, looking up at him. “All of it. Please, Jax. Tell me now.”

He looked down at me through his one good eye and said nothing for several seconds. Then, in the low lamplight, he finally began to talk.

He started with his brother, Mateo.

Mateo had been fourteen when he first coughed blood into a dish towel while their mother stood in the kitchen trying not to cry. Jax had been eighteen at the time. By then, their mother had already sold her wedding ring, and the treatment Mateo needed cost more money than their entire building could have put together.

“Fourteen?” I asked.

Jax nodded.

Mateo had always been sick, and by eighteen, Jax was already trying to find enough money to keep his little brother alive.

That was when Vey came to their door.

He called it a loan between friends. He paid the clinic directly, and in return, Jax agreed to fight once a month until the debt was cleared.

“How long have you been doing it?”

“Five years.”

I stared at him. “You’ve been fighting every month for five years?”

“Yeah.”

“How much do you still owe him?”

Jax held my gaze.

“All of it.”

For a moment, I thought I had misunderstood him.

“You’ve been paying him every month for five years, and you still owe the entire amount?”

“Interest, reina.” His mouth tightened. “I’ve spent five years paying for the privilege of owing him. If I stop, the balance comes due against Mamá’s wages, the apartment, and whatever Vey decides Mateo is worth. He made sure I understood that after I signed.”

Then he told me about the Pit beneath the salt mines, where the walls sweated white with mineral residue and the air carried a sweet chemical smell he had learned not to ask about. He told me about Tomás, Vey’s boatman, who had driven the green van up the highway behind the Council car on Sunday and had seen everything that happened in the parking garage.

“Vey knew by midnight,” Jax said. “He knew I’d helped you against the Council. Against his best customer.”

“The Council is Vey’s best customer?”

“Somebody high enough inside it,” Jax said. “Vey doesn’t give me names.” He lifted one shoulder carefully, trying not to disturb his ribs. “But Tomás was waiting at the cove last night with the boat and a message. So tonight wasn’t the usual Friday fight. Tonight was a lesson.”

“You knew he’d tell Vey.”