Chapter 12 – The Girl with the Stained Hands
Valentina Cruz
Blood has a smell.
It's metallic, thick, and clings to your nose like smoke from a kitchen fire.
Even after I showered three times and scrubbed until my skin burned, I could still feel it under my fingernails.
It didn't wash off.
And I wasn't sure I wanted it to.
⸻
Rafael sat on the couch, his arm stitched up, shirtless, calm — like he hadn't just survived a literal gunfight.
He looked at me like he was waiting for something.
Me to cry.
Me to collapse.
Me to fall back into the soft little cage I came from.
But I didn't.
I walked into the room wearing one of his black shirts, oversized and loose, hair wet, face clean.
And I said the one thing I hadn't said since it happened.
"I killed someone."
He nodded. "You did."
"No 'it was self-defense'? No 'you had no choice'?"
He tilted his head. "Would you believe it if I said those things?"
I sat across from him and tucked my knees up under my chin.
"I thought I'd be scared," I said. "Or sick."
"Are you?"
"No."
There was silence.
Then I whispered, "Does that make me a bad person?"
"No," he said. "It makes you honest."
⸻
Rafael poured whiskey into two glasses and slid one across the table.
I stared at it.
"I thought you didn't drink," I said.
"I don't."
"So why—?"
"For moments like this," he said. "You don't forget your first kill. Might as well toast to it."
I stared at him.
Then downed the shot in one gulp.
It burned.
So did everything else.
⸻
"You were supposed to hate this life," he said quietly. "You were supposed to fight against it."
I looked him dead in the eyes.
"Maybe I still will."
That surprised him.
But not as much as what I said next.
"But right now? I want to know everything. I want to know who tried to kill us. I want to know how many more there are. And I want to know what I have to become so no one ever sees me as weak again."
He stared at me like I was an earthquake happening right in front of him.
"Valentina…"
"I'm not the same girl you kidnapped, Rafael."
"No," he said. "You're not."
I didn't smile.
He didn't either.
But something passed between us in that moment — not love, not lust… something darker.
A recognition.
I was no longer just in his world.
I was beginning to belong to it.
⸻
That night, I lay in bed beside him, eyes wide open in the dark.
He was asleep.
I wasn't.
I thought of the man I killed.
His eyes. His hand reaching out. The shock when I drove the blade into his gut.
I didn't even know his name.
But he knew mine.
He had whispered it right before he died.
"Cruz…"
Like a warning.
Or a curse.