Chapter 19: Sacrilegious Vows
The line outside the tiny ferretería—the hardware store with the ancient, hand-painted Coca-Cola sign—had been seven people long. Dom stood at the back, sweating through his tank top, a smudged ledger of parts written in Letty’s sharp hand fluttering in the hot, dusty breeze. He’d paid the machinist in Sonora a king’s ransom and waited five days. The custom camshafts were finally ready.
Inside the dark, cluttered shop, the bored teenage clerk fumbled with the fat cardboard box from the back, dropping it onto the worn wooden counter with a clatter of metal and plastic that sounded like cash registers to Dom. He signed the chit and pushed the massive box toward Jesse, who gave a low whistle.
“You happy, boss?”
Dom laid a stack of crisp pesos on the counter, far above the listed price. “Eager,” he grunted.
He wasn’t thinking about the pressure ratios or the delayed onset of the high-lift lobes. He was thinking about the stone road that snaked up the hill behind the hacienda, the one that demanded perfect torque. He was thinking about the dissonant, simmering quiet that had settled over their encampment after the meeting in the garage a month ago.
Letty had left that night. She didn’t storm out. She’d just finished her beer, placed the bottle carefully on a workbench, looked at Dom and then at Catalina holding the baby, and said, “I can’t see the path.” Then she was gone, the roar of her Skyline receding into the dark city. No goodbye to the baby. A clean, surgical severance.
Vince stayed, his loyalty thicker than his judgement, though he’d refused to look at Catalina directly for a week. Jesse stayed, a nervous bird finding strange purpose in unfindable solutions, devoting himself to creating a digital maze of confusion around their location. He’d found them the old Solís hacienda in Mexico, a half-abandoned property owned by a cousin of a cousin who minded his own business for the right wire transfer. It was a fortress of sorts—dusty, quiet, and far away from windows with neighbors.
Back at the hacienda, the afternoon was oppressive, the cicadas screaming from the high thorn bushes that surrounded the compound. The thick adobe walls made the main house cool and dim, the only real noise the slow hum of the industrial fan Jesse had rigged to the hacienda’s rusty generator. Vince lay on a worn leather sofa in a high-ceilinged room that once held expensive furniture, now stripped bare, napping under the open pages of a Spanish newspaper.
From the wing they’d claimed, the baby’s faint, burbling cry echoed. It had a new sound to it—hungry, not just helpless. Catalina emerged from the arched doorway of their room into the main courtyard, a miracle of natural light and geometry at the center of the house. She carried Mina against her shoulder, patting her back. The baby’s dark eyes were wide open, following the dance of sunlight reflecting off the small, algae-stained fountain in the center. Dom watched as Catalina stood there, turning slowly, letting the baby feel the world. She wore a simple, sleeveless shift, her hair loose and damp at the nape of her neck. The sight still pulled at him—the fierce vulnerability of it, the profound anomaly of his sister and his daughter fused into one impossible, beautiful image.
He set the heavy box down by the entrance, the metal parts shifting inside like a puzzle.
“She see the fan?” Jesse asked, swiveling in an old office chair he’d rescued, laptop balanced on a crate.
“She sees it,” Catalina said, walking closer, a slight sway in her step. “She looks right at the blades. She likes movement.” Her eyes met Dom’s over the baby’s head. A question was there, one they’d been talking around for three days.
Mina’s eyes closed again. Two months old.Strong. Aware. A person with their last name.
“We should take her,” Catalina said softly, her voice cutting through the fan’s hum.
“Take her where?” Vince rumbled from the sofa without opening his eyes.
Dom didn’t look at him. He walked to the fountain, dipped his hands in the cool water, slicked them over his shaved head. The shock grounded him. He looked at the altar in the wall niche, the dried-out, flaking flowers left by whoever had lived here last. He felt that hollow feeling, that statutory emptiness where a certificate should be. The silver box Jesse had crafted, the witness-less pledge in a suburban bedroom—it belonged to a dead life. It felt unfinished here, where the walls breathed indifference and the sun burned away all vague illusions.
“Downtown,” Dom said finally, answering Vince. “We need paper. Paper that covers all of us. Different names don’t cut it.”
“Dawg, that’s a nightmare,” Jesse said, fingers poised above his keyboard. “You wanna try the federal office in Hermosillo? Wait times are months. And the clerks… they ask questions for extra pesos. Dangerous questions.”
“Not a government office,” Dom said, drying his hands on his jeans.
The massive bells, the heavy bronze kind cast centuries ago by Spanish monks for Mass and lament, hung in the twin towers of the Parroquia de la Inmaculada Concepción. They rang now, three slow, lazy chimes that shuddered through the humid afternoon air, shaking dust from the cracks in the orange-tiled rooftops along the town’s central plaza.
Dom knew the rhythm. The bells drew people like a magnet when they pealed for fiesta or for funerals. This was none of those. This was the three o’clock Angelus. A call to prayer few heeded.
“We go for the shadow,” Dom said, as Catalina began threading a delicate, creamy baptismal dress over the baby’s wriggling arms. The dress was yesterday’s find, picked from a cramped, colorful stall in the mercado.
“Huh?” Vince sat up fully, tossing the paper aside.
“The government makes the paper, but the church puts the spirit in the air. A priest signs a marriage registry… it’s a recommendation. A blessing for later,” Dom explained, a ghost of a plan forming. It wasn't about legality, not fully. It was about ritual. It was about saying the words in a place where the earth felt older, and secrets were routinely swallowed up by incense and ceremony.
“That’s crazy risky, man,” Jesse said, shaking his head. “They still have a canonical registry.”
“Did you get the papers for her?” Dom asked.
Jesse sighed. He opened a manila folder beside his laptop. Within lay forged certificates of live birth from the Mexican state of Chiapas. The child was listed as Mina Catalina Ortiz-Ruiz, born a month earlier. The mother was listed as Marta Ortiz, the father as Rafael Ruiz. The names were common. The paper was excellent. The proximity of it all—the family structures codified with artful, sloppy lies—itched at Dom. It felt cowardly. They were running under assumed names that they planned to go on using forever, altering their real past. He looked from the false birth certificate back to his very real daughter.The void widened.
Two hours later, they were dusty tourists. Dom, Catalina, the baby. Vince had argued to stay back, to be a sudden, violent eraser if things went wrong. Jesse monitored local police chatter from his car—their comms loop a low buzz of static in their ears.
The hacienda’s town was only that—a wide place on a dry, scrub-dotted road. The town with the twin-towered church was larger, a proper administrative center thirty miles deeper into the valley, full of shops with papelerías and slow, administrative clerks. The parroquia was its central landmark, a great, crumbling sandcastle of a building seared by centuries of sun. Around it, life swirled in a way that was both lazy and efficient.
They entered through the massive, banded wood doors that had been left ajar, the inside a cool, damp darkness smelling of candle wax, old wood polish, and deep, abiding stone. They walked past deserted pews, feet scraping on the worn stone floor. They found him in a cramped, side office, not the grand sacristy. He was younger than expected, maybe fifty, with thinning gray hair and reading glasses perched low on a long nose. His cassock had a small coffee stain on one lapel. He was writing in a large, cloth-bound ledger, a series of neat, looping entries for baptisms, collections, donations. An efficient accountant for the soul.
He looked up as Dom’s shadow fell across his ledger. Then at Catalina beside him, a model of youthful motherhood in a sleeveless linen shift and sunglasses perched on her head, a baby dressed in what could only be angelic white nestled against her shoulder.
“Buenas tardes,” the priest said, a tone of professional but slightly impatient availability in his voice.
“You perform weddings here?” Dom asked, his Spanish slow but grammatically precise.
“Of course,” the priest smiled a small, non-committal, bureaucratic smile. “Marriage is a sacrament.” His eyes darted subtly between them.
Without hesitation, Cataline reached not for any paperwork, but for the cash. She set one bundle of clean pesos, bound with a simple rubber band, on the edge of the crowded desk. Then she carefully set the forged baptismal record for baby ‘Mina’ down beside it. It named them, falsely, as the parents under their alias. Then she set down two more cash bundles. Finally, she slid her own real US passport onto the desk, open to her photo. Then Dom’s.
“Matrimonio entre hermanos?” The priest asked, his voice a quiet, dead-level statement in the dusty office. His finger pointed between the names on the real documents he’d just aligned in his mental fact pattern: Dominic Toretto (brother). Catalina Toretto (sister). He looked not disgusted or shocked, but vaguely inquisitive. A logical problem.
“Yes,” Dom said. One word. Mi hermano.My brother.
No one moved. Mina cooed softly.
A heavy, palpable silence filled the dim office, thick with a dozen breathing, contained human energies. This was the confession of the source of this sin. Usually such an outlandish request would be met with outrage and voiced judgments from the holiness professions, but in this dusty church office, the priest seemed to sit outside of community judgment. He tapped a finger rhythmically on the open ledger, and then shrugged a tired, clerical shrug. It was the shift of a man who has dispensed cosmic forgiveness for coveting thy neighbor's ass and receiving consignments of silver, and for far worse done under cover of holy war. His words, when they came, were spoken to the dim upper corners of the room.
“En México,” the priest finally breathed, giving a fast, cursory scan through his most cash-dense ledger in months, maybe years, “el amor no tiene reglas.” He muttered and picked up an older book — his local wedding and record of ordination registrations, separate from government civil backups. He did not plan to make a canonical entry. This would be an off-the-books civil proceeding—merely enabling two potential rap-scallions had little to gain versus doing so to have them move beyond recognized interiors of the Church structure. This straight case left would moderate with his dean and own pitiable budget accounting office in mind.
He chose a ready-made all-purpose form to fill out behind the new crop here—a clear ritual literal expression moment. They married in Mexico using their real names, Dominic and Catalina Toretto.
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The humid weight of Mexico clung to them like a second skin. It was a different heat than the dry, choking smog of LA—this was lush, oppressive, smelling of damp earth and diesel. Three weeks on the run. Three weeks of shifting from one faceless safe house to the next, Jesse feeding them coordinates from a nervous continent away.
They sat now in a boxy, Soviet-era car Jesse had arranged, idling on a cracked clay street at the edge of a dusty village. Dying bougainvillea bled violent purple down a whitewashed wall. Ahead was an iron gate, rusted half-open, leading into a property too large to be ignored and too dilapidated to be admired.
The hacienda.
"You're sure about this guy, Jesse?" Dominic's voice was a low rasp through the burner phone pressed to his ear. Behind him in the cramped backseat, Mina squirmed against Catalina's chest. The baby's small cry, thin and grating, filled the space.
"He's clean. Paid off," came the tinny reply. “Well, clean for around here. He deals in property no one asks questions about. Says it used to be a distillery or something.Remote. Room for cars. Should buy you a month, maybe two, to breathe.”
"What's it going to cost us?" Catalina leaned forward between the seats, her hand automatically bouncing the baby in a slow rhythm.
"Fifteen. I wire half now, half when you give the all-clear. He calls himself an empresario. Diego Camacho. Just don't piss in his tequila. He's old school."
Dom ended the call, the plastic phone dropping into the cup holder with a dull tap. He watched a scrawny chicken peck in the dust by the gate. The drone of insects was constant. "Let's see it."
He nudged the car forward, through the gate, up a long, unpaved drive lined with skeletal citrus trees. The house was a low-slung, sprawling structure of pale, salt-weathered adobe, its red tile roof sagging in places like a tired sigh. A massive, crooked pepper tree, heavy with small blood-red leaves, grew through the center of a courtyard that had once been a geometric showpiece. Now the tiles were fractured, spilling weeds.
A thin man with a meticulously trimmed silver mustache emerged from a dark doorway. He wore expensive-looking jeans and a guayabera too crisp for the surrounding decay. A gold watch caught the harsh sun. "Señor Toretto," he called out, his English smooth, accent faint. Diego Camacho.
"Camacho," Dom grunted, switching off the engine.
He and Catalina got out, the heat slamming into them. Mina began to cry in earnest, the unfamiliar place triggering a fresh wail. Catalina settled her again, the sound rough and urgent against the sun-drenched quiet.
Camacho's eyes drifted from Dominic to Catalina, settled for a moment on the baby, and then took in the clinical bond between them—the mirrored posture, the proximity that defied casual interpretation. He didn't remark on their similarity, or why this run-down estate suited them. His face showed only the polite disinterest of a man who had seen everything. If he recognized the desperation behind their composure, he gave no sign. It was just business.
"The main house has power, sometimes water, when the pump works," he began, guiding them through the arched entrance, his sandals whispering on cracked tiles. Inside was dim and astonishingly cool, the thick walls holding out the punishing sun. Slanted light through broken shutters illuminated swirling columns of dust. "Three bedrooms.A kitchen. Plumbing is..." He shrugged, a fluid gesture. "It is enough."
They walked. The place smelled of old lime, wood smoke from a nearby village, and the faint sweetness of forgotten decay. A deep-set fireplace took up an entire wall of a cavernous living room. Beside it, a door led to a ruinous but massive commercial kitchen, the basins huge and stained, the tiles dirty and worn smooth.
"I will handle this payment," Catalina said abruptly, her voice echoing slightly in the empty room. She hoisted Mina's diaper bag onto a grimy counter, unzipped a hidden compartment, and counted out a series of newly acquired thousand-peso notes. Jesse's digital sleight-of-hand money. Her movements were brisk, efficient. She laid the stack on a dusty, polished stone countertop in front of Camacho. "For two months upfront. We call you about renewal. Not the other way around."
Camacho's eyes glinted with approval at her precision, at the implicit warning in her words. No inquiries. No pop-ins. He took the cash, slid it into his own leather folio without counting it, and produced a single brass key on a loop of hemp string.
"The rear building," he said, nodding towards the courtyard. "It was the works. High ceilings, steel doors that open to the fields beyond. For your... more industrial projects."
Dom went to one of the rear windows, blew dust from the pane. Across the courtyard, a separate, low structure stood, its wide garage doors patched but seeming solid. A tire lift. A blackened, sunken pit for a forge. A mechanic's graveyard.
A ghost of a plan settled over him.A sanctuary. A place to build. To fortify.To wait. He turned to Camacho and nodded once. "We'll take it."
Camacho bowed his head slightly, a formal acknowledgement. He looked once more at Mina, who had fallen into a shuddering sleep against Catalina's shoulder, exhausted by her own anxiety. "My congratulations," he said, words neutral and devoid of meaning. A moment later, he was gone, his figure disappearing into the bright crucible of the afternoon.
Silence pooled back into the house. Real silence, broken only by the distant hum of the fields and Mina's soft, congested breaths.
They stood there in the dusty golden light filtering through the failing shutters. Four shattered weeks of constant motion, of watching each door and window, of breathing canned air and stale motel air, began to slough off. They were exhausted. They were filthy. They were together.
They explored the place in silence, forming a wordless perimeter. There was a room that could be Mina's, with old iron bars on the windows that were more for deterrent than safety. There was a master suite off the courtyard, windows opening onto the grim beauty of the diseased pepper tree. The walls were feet thick. After Dom checked every shutter, they found water—murky, rust-colored at first, then bleeding to lukewarm clear.
By evening, they’d carried in the essentials from the car. Without discussion, Dom took the gray utility toolbox from their stash of gear and disappeared into the darkened workshop.
The sounds that emerged an hour later were the sounds of a sewing needle. Catharsis. They weren't mechanical, exactly. There was the deep, hollow ringing of sheet metal being taught its new shape. A measured pounding that traveled through the bones of the hacienda. Each measured bang was a decompression. Catalina, sitting on the bare mattress they'd laid down, feeding Mina, listened. Every heavy impact echoed the furious clenching and releasing in her own chest. Mia’s face, pale and horrified. The muted, sliding panel van Bennett might be sitting in right now. The disbelief in Vince’s eyes. The stony appraisal in Letty’s.
She heard him stop. His footsteps, heavy in the corridor, approached. He stood in the doorway, his silhouette a solid dark cutout against the less-dense dark of the hall. He wore a sheen of fine white silicate dust from mortar and ancient lime. One of his knuckles was bloody, the gash washed clean, but weeping fresh. It wasn't an accident. It was an argument he’d had with something sharp and unyielding.
“We’re fine here. For now,” he stated. The dust coating his shoulders and shaven head gave him the look of something ancient, statues. La muerte.
"We need to talk to them. Make them understand. Before Bennett twists the story," Catalina said. She set the baby in a makeshift carrier made of scarves atop their clothes suitcase. Her body felt stiff.Empty.
"They're already twisted, Cat. If they believed in us—really believed in this—they wouldn’t be… missing. No calls."
The words hung heavy, bitter in the stagnant room air. The absence of their phone buzzing was a physical noise. The fact that Jesse and Letty or Vince hadn't found a way to say, "Heard the coast is clear, go forth and be freaks," confirmed the ugliest truth: The taboo wasn't just in the outside world. It had bled through their foundations, cracked their impervious crew. It lived inside the only circle he’d ever truly thought family.
His punched face tightened. The settled dust on his brow made his glower, turn theatrical, preternatural. "Then we need a reason. More than what anyone thinks is two crazy orphan kids, screwing and running."
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