Chapter 20: Wedding Night Claiming
The iron bedframe gave a raw, shuddering shriek against the lime-cured floor tiles, scraping a fresh scar into the grout. Catalina’s scream was swallowed by Dom’s mouth, the sound vibrating through their joined lips into a muffled groan. He had her pinned beneath him, the thin silk of her wedding-version-of-underwear dress shredded off her shoulders and down to her waist.
He’d kicked the heavy, banded wood door of the hacienda’s supposed “honeymoon suite” shut with a force that rattled the archaic windowpanes. The splash of bottled coconut water she’d been sipping had gone flying, droplets darkening the sun-bleached wool rug. Before the door rebounded, his hand was fisted in the intricate lace at her hip, tearing the delicate fabric apart with a vicious rip. It wasn’t ceremony. It was a claiming, immediate and carnivorous.
The air in the room was still, thick with the dry afternoon heat, now tainted with the sharp aroma of sex, dust, and nervous sweat. The priest’s soft, dispassionate words – En México, el amor no tiene reglas – rang in Dom’s head like the buzzing after a grenade blast. It wasn’t permission. It was just the dusty reality of their world now. Love has no rules, only hunger. The hunger was a living thing inside his ribcage now, gnawing outwards.
“You’re my wife now,” he growled against the frantic pulse beating in her throat. His tongue licked a hot, wet trail up her neck. “Wife. Hermaná.”
“Dom, please—” she gasped, not to stop him, but to get to it. Her legs were already hooked around his waist, her back arching off the mattress, grinding the wet, aching center of her against the brutal ridge of his erection straining through his cargo pants. Two months of static—fear, watching, nursing, holding their breath, parenting out of instinct, communicating in signs and whispers—funneled itself into this raw demand for flesh.
His hand—the one not clutching her hip—came up, smearing moisture from the root of his swollen cockhead across her abdomen. Then it slid down, past the dark triangle of her pubic hair. He didn’t tease. His thick, calloused fingers parted her. One circled her clit roughly, bringing a choked yelp from her lungs, and then two plunged inside her cunt to the knuckle, a hard, assessing thrust.
She was drenched, her inner muscles clenching violently around the intrusion, the proof of their mutual, filthy need slicking his hand. He could feel the pulse of her, a hot, squeezing velvet.
“Fuck,” he grunted, his face buried between her sweat-damp breasts. “Been dreaming of this. All that noise outside… every minute. Waiting to get back in here. Back inside you.” He crooked his fingers, finding a spot that made her hips buck uncontrollably.
Her head thrashed on the pillow. “I am back. I’m here. God—don’t fucking wait.”
He withdrew his fingers, brought them to his mouth, his eyes locked on hers in the fractured light from the slatted shutters. He sucked her taste from his skin, the low groan in his chest more animal than man. Then he was yanking his pants open, freeing his cock.
It stood rigid, thick and veined and flushed dark. He pumped it once in his fist, his grip tightening. He spat into his palm, slicking himself. The coarse, wet sound was obscene in the quiet room.
He gripped her thigh, lifting it higher, spreading her wider. He didn’t position himself; he just aimed and drove.
Catalina cried out, a raw, broken sound, as he sheathed himself inside her with one brutal, bottoming thrust.
The feeling was a homecoming. It was a destruction. Every separate particle—brother, sister, mother, father, thief, fugitive—dissolved in that perfect, agonizing union.
“Jesus fuck,” he hissed, going still, buried to the hilt, the muscles of his ass and back cording with the effort of not fucking her straight through the mattress right then. “So tight. So fucking wet.”
Her cunt was clutching him in frantic, hot waves. She met his gaze, her eyes glazed, her lips swollen from his bite. She drove her own hips up, grinding deeper, challenging him. “More,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare fucking stop. Show me who I belong to. Do it.”
The dam broke. He pulled back, almost to the tip, watching her hiss at the loss, and then slammed home.
He started a rhythm—piston-like, unyielding, deep. Each withdrawal an agony of separation, each forward drive a spear-thrust of reunion, the bed shrieking a percussive scream against the ancient tile floor with every impact. The wet slap of their joining skin echoed, a lewd metronome underscoring their guttural breaths.
She raked her nails down his sweat-slicked back. Felt every ridge of his musculature working. He shifted, driving himself impossibly deeper at an angle that caught the searing inner edge of her need, making her scream, a ragged, vocal thing that scraped at the quiet hacienda, as good as a confession of their transgression to the dusty eaves outside.
“That’s it,” he grunted, his voice choked. “Scream for me. Let the walls hear it. Let Mina hear it, for fuck’s sake. They all goddamn need to hear it, Cat. What we are.” He drove the point home with another punishing thrust, pushing a stream of tears from the corners of her eyes.
The cruelty in his words was tangled up with the devotion; he wasn’t shaming her, he was making her complicit, forcing them both to carry it all—stigma and union as one coiled, agonized beast.
“I’m gonna come,” she choked out, the world tightening to a white-hot point low in her belly. “Dom—look at me.”
He did. His hips never stopped their hammering. Their sweat mingled on their torsos, cooling and rising as fresh moisture took its place. He gripped the iron headboard behind her, veins standing out along his forearm, his jaw a stone ledge of concentration. And inside him, the knot tightened. She watched it in the dilation of his eyes, in the baring of his clenched teeth. He was coming with her. To do it any other way was impossible now.
He dropped his head onto her shoulder, his teeth sinking not gently, but with a sharp, brutal affection, into the rigid muscle at the base of her neck. Their personal scripture. The spasm that wracked her body tore something from his—his release pulsed thick and molten inside her, the unstoppable flood sealing his presence, his claim, his participation in every part of her.
He swore again, a deep, protracted line of filth and reverence into her skin. She unraveled around him with a sob, her inner walls milking him until it was past pleasure and into an echoing, glorious ache.
He was still inside her, softening, his full weight crushing her into the damp sheets. They lay like that as one breath, two broken components trying to repair as a single, uneven machine. The faint scent of bougainvillea teased the air from the courtyard, a waft of honey sweetness under the layers of satiation and animal musk.
His hand, shaky, came up to wipe the wet, tangled hair from her forehead. She turned her head, looked out the warped slats of the shutter. Their open duffels spilling clothes were half-shaded. Mina’s portable fold-out bed Dominic had lugged all over Mexico sat in a patch of dark, undisturbed. A paradox—their daughter lay ten yards away in a bedroom Jesse had pronounced ‘secure’, and they’d just fucked each other into the mattress like wild beasts, the noise of it a kind of blasphemy against her innocence. The contradiction wasn’t logical. It just was. Their ground-state of hell.
He finally eased off her, rolling to his side, but pulling her with him, his arms a cage of force that kept her fastened against him.
“They’ll find it,” she whispered, her throat raw. She touched the fresh bite mark on her collarbone. “When they see it.Vince. Mia. Anyone.”
He traced his own drool and sweat trail over her body with rough pads of his fingers. “Let ‘em.” He propped himself up. A new sensation settled into the sticky quiet: not just release, but menace. Or maybe concentration.
Her practicality asserted itself, a ghost of control reasserting its dominance over her squall of lust-conflict feelings. “What source arc photos.”
Her question dissipated, unfinished, into the heavy air.
His answer was to roll her roughly onto her stomach, his palm pressing the small of her back until her face was buried in the tangled sweat-damp sheets. The wind had picked up outside; it whistled through a crack in the plaster, a lonely, desolate sound that was swallowed by the pounding of her own blood in her ears. He shifted his weight, and she felt his cock, half-hard again, nudge against the wet curve of her ass.
He shifted his weight, and she felt his cock, half-hard again, nudge against the wet curve of her ass. His other hand slid possessively between her legs from behind, his fingers gliding through the slick proof of their coupling. "Still open for me," he murmured, his voice raw. He was circling her entrance, coated in both their mess."Dom." Her voice was worn thin. It wasn't a protest.
He pressed the blunt head against her. But as his hips began to push, a different sound cut through the air, clean and sharp, ignoring the closed door, clawing through the slow, sex-laden quiet.
A thin, plaintive wail.
It gained force—hungry, lonely, utterly authentic. Catalina froze, her body tightening. Dom went utterly still above her, a looming shadow, the tension in his frame shifting instantly, virulently, from want to an almost frightening attention.
“Mina,” Catalina breathed.
Dominic’s cock slid away, limp now, a grotesque detail forgotten. He sat up and swung his legs off the bed with a controlled exhale that seemed to push the lust and anguish out through his gritted teeth.
“I’ll get her.”
He stood, pulled on his discarded pants, ignoring the stains. He walked from the room barefoot, his bare back still striped with her scratch marks.
Catalina turned onto her side, pulling the top sheet around herself, a shield against nothing but the abruptly empty air. Her breasts ached. She heard his heavy tread cross the main courtyard, heard the softer grunt as he crouched.
The crying stopped for a beat, startled, and then it swelled again, but a little different.Closer.
Dominic returned, a tiny, red-faced bundle against his vast shoulder. His expression was a mask of sheer purpose. He placed Mina gently in Catalina’s already unfolding arms, a jarring, seamless transfer of focus between his two absolutes. The child’s heat and soft weight grounded the tumbling axis of the world.
Catalina shifted the sheet, put Mina to her breast. The baby latched with an avid, desperate pull, a sound like small bubbles in the quiet. Her face, all gummy need just moments before, smoothed into a profound, contented line. In this moment, she wasn't a tragedy's proof. She was just a mouth eating.
Dominic sat on the edge of the mattress, close, his bulk bending the springs. He watched. The rise and fall of Catalina’s chest, the slow suckling rhythm of his daughter. He extended one heavy hand and rested his fingertips so lightly on Mina’s downy head.
The peaceful silence stretched, padded by the smell of their spent bodies and the rise of jasmine with the cooler evening air. The crack under the window now brought the sound of geckos chirping, a staccato natural code.
“I miss Mia,” Catalina said, so quietly he had to lean his good ear in closer. Her eyes weren't on him. They were fixed on a moth beating frantic circles against the pale ceiling in the failing light.
Dom’s hand paused. He didn't speak.
She stroked Mina’s back. “Really miss her.Not just family. Her. She knew which line of bullshit I was spinning just by how I stood.”
He grunted.Sympathetic. He missed Mia in his own way, like missing a moral lubricant, a gentler set of hands on his sister’s edges he’d thought forged only for himself.
A tear slipped, hot and foolish, down Catalina’s cheek. It made no noise. “Our girl. She’s never gonna know her aunt, is she? Never gonna crawl into her lap while Mia untangles her hair with that stupid horse-brush she kept from Juárez.” Her breath hitched against Mina’s oblivious little feed. “Because her aunt is disgusted in her parents.”
There. The word, cruel, formal. Not by what they had done. By who they were. To be was far worse.
The confession hung in the sick-to-sweet air of the room, thrumming between their bed and the cracked tile floor.
Dominic’s face darkened, carved in that stolen lowland light. His thumb wiped the tear from her cheek. His grip tightened for a millisecond, almost bruising. Then it gentled. He watched Mina’s eyelashes fluttering toward dream.
“Don’t matter what Mia thinks,” he said finally, his voice so deep it was more a tremor Catalina felt from the mattress than a sound wave hitting her ear. It wasn’t meant to be soft. It was a precept dropped between them as indisputable as fire law or metal stretch. “She’s got parents.”
Catalina looked up at him, her defiance smothered in exhaustion and milk-plasma-weary compliances.
“She’s got me. She’s got you.” Dom’s fingertips went to her raw bit-mark. “For every hair she ever needs brushed… for that,” he said, paying minimal ocular clairinscenerebi profit.
His hand remained on Mina’s head even after she finished, a warm, heavy seal against her perfect skull. Catalina’s tear dried into a cold, tight track on her skin. The confession about Mia had loosened something, an ugly truth now hanging in the air with the dust motes. Vulnerability always made him restless.
He withdrew his hand, stood up, and walked naked to the window. He pushed the warped shutter open wider with a dull crack of protesting wood. The last blood-red light of the day washed over his marked back and the powerful sweep of his ass. He stared out into the darkening courtyard, at the twisted silhouette of the pepper tree.
“Mia’s a ghost now,” he said, his voice flat, final. “Along with Letty.Vince. That part of the map is burned. We plot a new one. Just us.”
He turned back to face her. The dying light sculpted the hollows of his face, the set of his jaw. His cock, soft and thick, hung heavily against his thigh, a monument to their exhausted, furious intimacy minutes before. He looked at her, at the child in her arms, and something hardened in his gaze—not cruelty, but a terrifying, focused pragmatism.
“The priest’s paper won’t hold in daylight. Not in any system that matters. It’s just ink on old cloth.”
“So what do we do?” She shifted Mina, who slept now with the profound stillness of the milk-drunk.
“We make a system that doesn’t give a shit about their ink.”
He pulled his pants on, buttoned them. The motion was decisive. “I’m going to the workshop.”
He left. Catalina lay in the cooling mess of their sweat and sex, listening to his footsteps fade into the house’s deep quiet, replaced by the distant, purposeful clang of metal from the outbuilding. It was his language. He wasn’t brooding; he was building. The thought was more unnerving than comforting.
She found him three hours later, bathed in the stark white glare of the single shop light he’d rigged. The workshop was a cathedral of grease and potential. He wasn’t working on an engine.
He was bent over a heavy, pitted steel worktable, an angle grinder shrieking in his hand, throwing a cascade of orange sparks into the gloom. The air tasted of burnt metal and ozone. He was cutting notches into a long, black steel bar—the start of a custom breacher bar, or maybe a heavy-pry tool for a vehicle they didn’t own yet.
He shut the grinder off. The sudden silence was deafening, ringing. He pulled his welding goggles up onto his forehead, leaving a soot-darkened ring around his eyes.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. She’d dressed in a tank top and his discarded flannel shirt. Mina was in the sling against her chest, a warm, sleeping weight.
“Wasn’t trying to.” He set the grinder down, picked up a file, and began smoothing a burr on the steel with long, rasping strokes. The sound was surgical. “We need a car.A real one. Not that junker out front.”
“We need a lot of things.”
“Starts with a car.” He looked at her, the file pausing. “Something with a V8.Heavy. Anonymous, but fast. Something we can put Mina in the back of and disappear into the desert in thirty seconds flat if Camacho shows up with company. Something that can carry the tools we’ll need.”
“Tools for what?”
“For living.” He went back to filing. “For making sure no one ever questions who we are again. For getting paid, off-grid, in ways that don’t leave a signature.”
The implication settled over her.Not just hiding. Not just surviving. Re-arming. Re-fortifying as a unit of two… three. Becoming formidable again, but cut off from the network that had given their old strength meaning. It was a chilling, lonely ambition.
“How?”
“I’ll find out.” He set the file down with a definitive clack. “Tomorrow. I’ll go into the bigger town. The one with the car yard on the north highway. You stay here with her. Keep the doors bolted.”
The thought of him leaving, of being alone in the vast, whispering hacienda with only the baby, sent a cold wire of fear down her spine. It was a different fear than the cops or Bennett. It was primitive.
“Don’t be long,” she said, her voice smaller than she intended.
He crossed the space between them in two strides. His hands, smelling of iron and sweat, came up and framed her face, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones. His gaze was a physical force.
“I’m always coming back to you,” he said, low and guttural. “That’s the only rule that matters now.”
He kissed her. It wasn’t like the fevered bite from earlier. It was deep, slow, a transfer of certainty. A silent vow in the language of their shared breath. When he pulled away, his eyes dropped to Mina, swaddled against her breast.
“She’s the engine,” he murmured, his voice rough. “We’re the frame. Everything else is just parts.”
The town at noon was a blast furnace. Dominic parked the rusty sedan a block from the fenced lot piled with the picked-over skeletons of cars. He moved with a deliberate, surveying slowness, his eyes missing nothing. He wasn’t just looking for a car. He was absorbing the rhythm of the place, the cadence of the bored lot attendants, the flow of trucks on the highway.
The lot itself was a graveyard of poor decisions and collision damage. But in the back, under a corrugated tin lean-to, he saw it. A late-90s Chevy Suburban, once dark blue, now faded to a sun-bleached bruise. It sat high on blown-out shocks. One rear window was replaced with sheet metal screwed directly into the body. It was ugly. It was enormous. It was perfect.
A young man with a wispy mustache and an oil-stained Liga MX jersey ambled over.
“Se vende?” Dom asked, nodding at the beast.
“Sí, señor. Runs. Mostly.” The kid grinned, missing a tooth. “The price is… negotiable.”
Dom popped the hood himself. The engine bay was a cathedral of greasy, simple components. A big, cast-iron Vortec V8 sat in the middle, choked by a dirty air filter but fundamentally sound. The belts were cracked but not shredded. He saw the potential instantly: torque for days, space for a hidden compartment behind the torn third-row seat, four-wheel drive for the desert tracks.
“Mostly?” Dom grunted, straightening up.
“The transmission, it hesitates sometimes.