Chapter 21: The Heresy
Catalina’s voice was a low murmur, a spoken vibration against Mina’s soft temple that felt less like a confession and more like the planting of a flag. A terrible, beautiful flag on poisoned ground.
“Yes, bebé… your daddy fucks his sister.”
The words hung in the dusty, sunlit air of the nursery, amidst the ghosts of two other babies who had slept here decades ago. The faded yellow wallpaper with its cartoon ducks seemed to warp, the pattern shimmering with the heat of the transgression.
Dominic didn’t pause. The creak of the door was still echoing when he crossed the room in three silent strides. The floorboards, older than both of them combined, didn’t make a sound under his weight. His shadow fell over her, over the crib, blotting out the sunbeam that had been warming Mina’s fist.
His calloused hand—the one that had filed steel, that had torn lace, that had held a steering wheel through a hundred illegal midnights—closed over hers where it gripped the smooth, polished crib rail. Not to pry her off. To join.
His grip was furnace-hot. His fingers laced through hers, squeezing until the knuckles paled, a silent ratification of her heresy. He looked down at Mina, whose eyes were heavy-lidded, fighting sleep, staring up at the two dark shapes that were her entire world.
“And one day,” Catalina continued, her voice gaining a fierce, unsteady edge, “you’ll understand why we broke every rule to make you.”
A low growl started deep in Dom’s chest. It wasn’t anger. It was acknowledgment, a feral echo of her vow. He brought their joined hands up, pressing their tangled knuckles to his lips. He kissed them, a hard, dry press. Then he turned her hand over within his, exposing her palm, and dragged his teeth across the life line.
She gasped, a sharp intake that made Mina’s eyelids flutter.
“She won’t need to understand,” he rumbled, his voice thick. “She’ll just know. It’ll be in her blood. In her bones. She’ll look at the world and see the lie of it… and she’ll know her parents saw it too.”
He released her hand. The imprint of his grip remained, a phantom pressure. He reached into the crib, his movements, for the first time, possessing a gentleness that was almost shocking. He curved one enormous finger around Mina’s tiny, perfect ear.
“The world’s gonna try to tell her a different story,” he said, not to Catalina, but to the baby. “It’s gonna call us sick. Wrong. Monsters.”
Catalina’s breath hitched. Hearing the words aloud, in this room of all rooms, was a fresh wound.
“But you,” Dominic whispered, his brow furrowing with a concentration more intense than any engine rebuild. “You’re the proof it ain’t. You’re the perfect thing that came from the ‘wrong’ thing. That makes the world the liar, not us.”
He straightened up. The moment of tenderness snapped shut, replaced by the familiar, brooding tension. He scanned the nursery—the twin crib now a single, the outdated mobile, the scent of baby powder and ancient wood.
“We can’t stay in this room,” he said, his voice flat.
“Where else is there?” Catalina retracted her hand from the rail, flexing her fingers. The ghost of his grip tingled. “The whole house is a museum of what we were.”
“Then we burn the museum.” He said it without heat, a simple statement of fact. “Starting with the memories in here.”
He walked to the corner where a faded, stripe-patterned rug lay. He bent, grabbing a corner, and yanked. The rug slid, revealing darker, less worn floorboards beneath. Dust motes exploded into the sunbeam, performing a frantic dance.
“What are you doing?”
“Making it hers.” He dropped the rug in a heap by the door. “Not theirs. Not some shrine to the babies we should’ve been. A room for the baby we are.”
He went to the closet, an old, heavy thing with a sticking door. He braced a shoulder against it and shoved. It gave with a splintering crack. Inside, stacked neatly, were two tiny hand-painted wooden trucks, a pair of faded christening gowns yellowed with age, and a bundled baby book with two names inscribed in careful cursive: Dominic & Catalina.
He stared at it for a long moment. Then he pulled the bundle out, handling the book as if it were a relic from someone else’s life. Which it was.
“We’re not them,” Catalina said, watching him. She felt unmoored. This violence against the past was more unsettling than the fiercest physical fight.
“Never were.” He carried the bundle to the window. He didn’t open it. He just stood there, holding the evidence of their separate, sanctioned infancy. “Our story started later. In garages.On streets. In each other’s beds. This?” He hefted the bundle slightly. “This is somebody else’s prologue.”
“So get rid of it.”
He turned, his eyes meeting hers. There was a question in them. Not of what to do, but of how far she was willing to go in this erasure. She gave a single, slight nod.
He left the nursery, the bundle under his arm. Catalina listened to his heavy tread move through the quiet house, out the back kitchen door, into the walled courtyard where a rusty, charcoal-filled asar stood from long-ago family barbecues.
She didn’t follow. She stayed, rocking Mina gently, listening.
The sound of a match striking was faint.A pause. Then the distinctive, soft whoosh of dry fabric and paper catching. The smell reached her a minute later—not just burning paper, but the acrid scent of old sizing from the gowns, the cleaner tang of varnish from the toys. A funeral pyre for ghosts.
When he returned, his hands were clean, but the smell of smoke clung to his shirt. He stood in the doorway again, a silhouette.
“The Suburban’s next,” he said. “Got the kid down to a price that’s almost theft. Needs a transmission, new plugs, fluids. A day’s work, maybe two.”
“You need help.”
“I need you here. With her.” He finally entered, walking to the now-bare corner. “But you can help with this.”
He began moving the few pieces of furniture that remained—a heavy oak changing table that had likely changed them both. He pushed it against a different wall, changing the room’s entire geometry. It was a small thing, but the act was profoundly symbolic. He was rewriting the space.
“When you’re with her,” he said, straining slightly as he shifted a low shelf, “you talk. You tell her stories.”
“What stories?” Catalina asked, a bitter laugh in her throat. “The one about the time her uncle—her father—outran the LAPD on the 110? The one about how her aunt—her mother—boosted her first Mustang at sixteen?”
“Yes.” He stopped, wiping his brow with his forearm. “Those are her stories.Her inheritance. Not the fairy tales they put in that book. She needs to know where she comes from.The real place. The garage. The smell of high-octane and grease. The feel of a stolen night. The sound of her parents…”
He trailed off, his gaze locking with hers.
“Fucking,” she finished for him, her voice steady.
He held the look. “Loving,” he corrected, the word foreign and awkward on his tongue, but delivered with the force of a verdict. “However it sounds. However it looks. That’s her truth. You build her a world out of that truth, brick by brick, so when the outside world comes calling with its rules and its disgust, she’s already living inside a fortress.”
Catalina looked down at Mina, who had finally surrendered to sleep, her lips parted slightly. She imagined filling those tiny ears with tales of nitrous oxide and loyalty sworn in engine oil. It felt insane. It felt like the only possible education.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Okay.”
He finished shifting the shelf. The room was different. Not new, but repurposed. A frontier homestead built atop ruins.
He came to her side again, looking down at their daughter. “I’ll start on the truck tomorrow at first light. You should get some sleep.”
“I’m not tired.”
“You are.” He cupped the back of her neck, his thumb stroking the tight cord of muscle there. “Your eyes are doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where they look like they’re seeing everything and nothing at the same time.” He leaned in, his forehead resting against hers. The smoke smell was stronger now, mixed with his own sweat.“Sleep. I’ll watch her.”
It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an exchange of duty. She nodded, the fatigue she’d been denying suddenly a weight in her limbs. She carefully extricated herself from the sling, transferring the sleeping Mina into the crook of Dom’s arm. The baby seemed to shrink in his massive hold, yet settled instantly, a trust so complete it was anatomical.
Catalina walked toward the door, but stopped on the threshold. She looked back. Dominic stood in the center of the rearranged room, a giant holding a slumbering infant, surrounded by the faint, haunting smell of their own incinerated childhood.
He wasn’t looking at the baby. He was looking at the empty corner where the rug had been, at the fresh scuff marks on the floor from the dragged furniture. He was surveying his work.
“Dom?” she whispered.
He turned his head.
“What if the fortress isn’t enough?” The question was a tiny crack in her resolve, allowed only here, in the dark hallway, with him holding their sleeping child.
He shifted Mina, cradling her closer to his chest. The movement was primal, protective.
“Then,” he said, his voice a low promise that vibrated in the quiet house, “we get bigger guns.”