Chapter 26: Sister's Siren Song
The heat from Mina’s small body seeped through the quilt, a solid, real weight against Mia’s side. The child’s breathing slowed, deepened. She was asleep in minutes, a miracle of trust. Mia stayed frozen, her arm going numb, afraid any movement would shatter the fragile peace she’d been granted. She stared into the dark, listening to the house breathe around her. The low hum of the refrigerator. The sigh of the ancient air conditioner kicking on. A car passing far away.
Then, a different sound. A soft click from down the hall.
A door opening, then closing again, quieter. The master bedroom. Mia held her breath, straining. Silence for a long moment, thick and expectant. Then, a floorboard creaked, a heavy, deliberate step. Another.
She felt Mina stir slightly, a sleepy murmur. Mia gently, so gently, eased her arm out from under the child and laid her down on the cushion, tucking the quilt around her. Mina sighed, her face burrowing into the rabbit.
Mia stood. Her legs were stiff. The living room carpet was rough under her bare feet as she padded to the mouth of the hallway. The house was a dark tunnel, the master bedroom door at the end a monolith. Light leaked from beneath it, a thin, golden line.
She didn’t know what she was doing. Her heart was a frantic bird against her ribs. She took one step, then another, drawn by a magnet of dread and a horrible, insatiable need to know. The door wasn't fully latched. She could see a hairline crack of vertical light.
She stopped three feet away. Her breath was too loud. She could hear the rustle of sheets. A low murmur, Dominic's voice, too deep to decipher words. Then Catalina's reply, a soft, indistinct answer that was more tone than language. Intimate.
Mia’s skin prickled. She should go back to the couch. This wasn't her. This was the sickness she’d run from. But her feet were lead weights bolted to the floor. The conversation from the kitchen echoed. He wants to get me pregnant again.
A thump. The headboard hitting the wall. Not violent.Firm. Rhythmic.
Mia closed her eyes. A wave of nausea, hot and sour, rose in her throat. She swallowed it down. The sounds began in earnest. The rhythmic, rustling friction of bodies. A sharp, bitten-off gasp from Catalina. The low, animal grunt from Dominic. Not the sounds of love-making as Mia understood it. It was something else. A physical conversation that was as familiar to them as breathing, a language forged in the womb and perfected in shadow.
She was shaking. She inched closer. The air around the doorframe seemed to vibrate.
“Fuck,” Catalina’s voice, strained, guttural. “Right there. God, right there.”
Mia’s hand flew to her mouth. She bit the fleshy part of her palm to keep from making a sound.
“Tell me,” Dominic’s voice came, ragged, a command wrapped in gravel. “Tell me.”
“I want it.” Catalina’s words were rushed, punctuated by the relentless rhythm. “I want… another. Fill me up, Dom. Do it.”
Mia felt the words like physical blows to her stomach. She sagged against the cool wall, her forehead pressing into the plaster. It was thin.So thin. She could hear every wet slap, every hitched breath.
“This cunt,” Dominic growled, the sound raw and possessive, shaking the wall against Mia’s brow. “This dirty, perfect cunt. Gonna put another baby in it. Where it belongs.”
Catalina’s answer was a high, broken cry, half-sob, half-scream of affirmation. “Yes! Breed your sister again.Do it. I’m yours. Always yours.”
The violence of the language, the crude, wrenching ownership of it, stripped away any last pretense of romance or forbidden love. This was raw biology.Territory marking. A誓约 made of sweat and blasphemy and a furious, consuming need to manifest their bond in flesh, over and over, a defiance made incarnate.
The rhythm became frantic, a storm cresting. Catalina was chanting now, a hoarse, desperate litany. “Yours, yours, yours, hermano, please…” And Dominic’s answering groans were like something being torn from the roots of the earth, a final, shuddering release that seemed to make the very foundations of the house tremble.
Then silence.
A profound, ringing silence broken only by the ragged symphony of their breathing, slowing, syncing, as it always had.
Mia was crying. Silently, tears tracking hot paths down her cold cheeks. She slid down the wall, her back against it, sitting on the hallway floor. She hugged her knees to her chest, making herself small. The words echoed in the dark chamber of her skull. Where it belongs.
A few minutes later, a soft sound from the bedroom.Sheets rustling. The heavy, contented sigh of Dominic. The pad of bare feet—Catalina’s, lighter—moving to what sounded like the connected bathroom. The faucet ran. The toilet flushed.
Mia didn't move. She was a statue of shame and revelation, eavesdropping on the aftermath.
She heard Catalina pad back. The bed groaned softly as weight settled.
“She’s listening,” Catalina said, her voice low, clear, and utterly calm.
Mia’s blood turned to ice.
A beat of silence. Then Dominic’s voice, flat, unsurprised. “I know.”
He’d known. The whole time. The performance, if it was one, had been for an audience of one.
“Leave her,” he said, the finality of a king granting a reprieve. “She heard what she needed to hear.”
More silence. Mia waited for the door to fly open, for the confrontation, for the shame to be made mutual. It didn't come. The light under the door went out.
They were done. They had said their piece, in every possible way.
Slowly, limbs stiff with cold and shock, Mia pushed herself up. Her legs were unsteady. She crept back down the hallway, past the living room where Mina slept on, oblivious. She didn't stop there. She needed air that didn't smell of them, of sex and confession.
She slipped out the front screen door, onto the porch. The night was cool now, the sky a bruised purple bleeding to black. She collapsed onto the top step, the worn wood familiar under her palms. She dropped her head into her hands and finally let the sob come, a harsh, ugly sound she muffled in her own skin.
The squeak of the screen door hinge made her jump.
Catalina stood there, backlit by the dim glow from the living room. She wore one of Dominic’s t-shirts, her hair a dark cascade over her shoulders. She looked washed out, weary, but her eyes were clear. She held two cans of beer.
She didn’t speak. She just stepped out, sat on the step beside Mia, leaving a foot of space between them. She popped the top on one can, handed it to Mia. Then opened her own.
Mia took it. The aluminum was shockingly cold. She took a long, desperate swallow. The bitterness was an anchor.
They sat in silence for a full minute, drinking, staring at the shadowy shapes of the cars in the driveway.
“You weren’t subtle,” Catalina said finally, her voice quiet. “Your breathing was louder than we were.”
Mia flinched. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”
“Stop.” Catalina cut her off, not harshly. “You needed to hear it unfiltered. The pretty version is for other people. The one with the soft lighting and the tragic music. That’s not what this is.”
“What is it, then?” Mia asked, her voice thick. “Because what I heard… it sounded like hate.”
Catalina took a slow sip. “It’s the opposite of hate. It’s so far past love it needs its own word. It’s… claiming. It’s knowing every single part of another person, the ugly, selfish, violent parts, and choosing them anyway. It’s looking at the thing the whole world says is wrong, and deciding the world is deaf and blind.”
“He talks about you… about your body…” Mia couldn't finish.
“Like it’s his,” Catalina finished. “Because it is. And mine talks about him the same way. It’s not poetry. It’s fact.” She looked at Mia, her gaze direct in the gloom. “That scare you?”
“Yes.”
“Good.It should. It scares me sometimes. The size of it.” Catalina took another drink. “But walking away from it scared me more. Living that half-life you’re living, where you have to carve out pieces of yourself to fit into a normal-shaped hole… that’s a different kind of violence, Mia.”
The words landed. Mia thought of Kevin, of her condo, of the careful, polite distance she maintained with everyone. The constant editing of her own history. “So you just… give in to the monster?”
“We stopped calling it a monster,” Catalina said softly. “We named it. We feed it. It lives in our house. It sleeps in our bed. It gave us Mina.” She nodded towards the window. “And it’ll give us another. That’s the deal.”
Mia absorbed this. The sheer, terrifying commitment of it. “What happens when they find out? The next school? The doctors?”
“We handle it.” Catalina’s tone shifted, a glint of the old streetfighter hardness. “Like we handled the last one. We move if we have to. We lie if we have to. We fight if we have to. This is our crew. This is our family. It’s just a lot smaller than we planned.”
The finality was absolute. This was their line in the sand. They would build their world here, on this fault line, and defend it to the death.
Mia finished her beer, the empty can light in her hand. “I don’t know if I can stay.”
“I know,” Catalina said.
“I don’t know if I can leave, either.”
Catalina nodded. “Also know that.” She stood up, her joints cracking faintly. She looked down at her sister. “The couch is yours as long as you need it. But the hallway listening post? That’s a one-time pass. You want to know something, you ask. We might not answer, but you ask.”
She turned to go inside.
“Cat,” Mia said.
Catalina paused, one hand on the screen door.
“Is she… is Mina happy?”
Catalina looked back, and for the first time that night, a real, quiet smile touched her lips. It was the most beautiful and the saddest thing Mia had ever seen. “She’s the happiest kid I know. She’s loved. Completely. Unconditionally. By two people who would burn the city down for her. That’s more than most people get.”
She went inside. The screen door whispered shut behind her.
Mia stayed on the porch. The sky was fully dark now, the first defiant stars piercing the haze of city light. She could hear the highway, a constant, rushing sound like blood in a giant’s ear.
Inside that house was a child who drew her family tree with two trunks from the same root. Inside was a man who spoke filth as prayer and a woman who welcomed it as sacrament. Inside was the thing she’d run from, made real and thriving and planning its future.
Her suitcase was by the door. Her normal life was a forty-minute drive away.
She stood, her body aching. She walked to the rental car, not to leave, but to pop the trunk. She took out her laptop bag, her toiletry case. She slammed the trunk shut.
She was going back inside. Not because she understood. Not because she approved.
Because Mina was in there, asleep on the couch. And because the sound of her sister’s smile, in the dark, had felt more like home than anything she’d known in five years.
It was a start.
It was a start. She left the empty beer cans on the porch, a pair of silent witnesses.
Back inside, the living room was just a room again. Moonlight through the blinds striped the carpet and the sleeping shape of Mina. Mia’s heartbeat finally settled into something resembling normal rhythm. She took the afghan from the back of the recliner and spread it over herself in the armchair, giving the couch fully to her niece. Sleep was a distant country. Every time she closed her eyes, the wall shook with phantom sound.
Down the hall, in the dark of their room, Catalina lay on her side. Dominic’s broad chest was a solid wall of heat against her back, his arm a heavy weight draped over her waist. Their breathing had synchronized, a faint double rhythm in the quiet. The sweat had dried. The house was still.
“She’s staying,” Catalina whispered into the darkness.
Dominic’s thumb stroked a slow arc over her hipbone. He didn't answer right away. “For now.”
“She heard everything.”
“Good.”
Catalina shifted, turning her head slightly on the pillow. She could just make out the hard line of his jaw in the diffuse light. “It was cruel.”
“It was honest,” he rumbled, his voice a quiet vibration against her spine. “She wanted the truth. You gave it to her straight in the kitchen. I gave it to her straight through the wall. No more guessing.”
She exhaled, a long, slow release. “She thinks we hate each other when we talk like that.”
“She doesn't know the difference between hate and having no walls left.” He tightened his arm, pulling her closer. His lips brushed the juncture of her neck and shoulder, not a kiss, just contact. “You worried?”
“About her? Or about the fact that she's sleeping thirty feet away and now knows exactly what we sound like?”
“Both.”
Catalina considered it. The shame she might have felt years ago was a ghost, long since exorcised. “No. It’s liberating. In a fucked-up way. Like a tooth’s been pulled.” She traced the veins on his forearm. “It’s out. She can’t pretend we’re just… emotionally entangled pen pals anymore. It’s physical. It’s primal. She has to deal with what it actually is.”
“She’ll leave,” Dominic said, a simple prediction. “Sunlight makes things look different. She’ll remember her normal boyfriend and her clean condo and she’ll go.”
“Maybe.” Catalina closed her eyes. She pictured Mia on the porch, the shock softening into a kind of weary defeat. “Or maybe she’s tired of being normal. Tired of the lie she tells herself about us. Hearing it… it might have been the only thing that could make her see it’s real.”
He was silent for a long moment. The refrigerator cycled on in the kitchen, a distant hum. “And if she stays? What then?”
“Then she’s family.” Catalina opened her eyes, staring at the closet door. “Real family. Which means she helps. She lies for us. She protects Mina. She becomes part of the secret, not a critic of it.”
Dominic’s hand stilled on her hip. “Big risk.”
“She’s my sister. Our sister. It’s always been a risk.” She turned then, rolling to face him in the dark. Their noses were almost touching. She could smell the beer on his breath, the salt of her own skin on his. “You were louder than usual. On purpose.”
A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched his mouth. “Wanted to make sure she got the message.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Your asshole.” He leaned in and caught her mouth in a slow, deep kiss that held no urgency, only possession. It was a punctuation mark. When they broke apart, he rested his forehead against hers. “The next one. We really doing this?”
Her answer was immediate. It lived in her bones. “Yes.I want it. I want the proof. I want the world to look at us with two kids and have to really wonder.”
He nodded, the scrape of his stubble against her skin a familiar comfort. “Okay.”
That was it. The plan was made, not on paper, but in the dark, in the bed they shared. It would happen in this room, in this house that was both sanctuary and fortress. Mia’s presence was now just another fact of the landscape, a new variable in their already complicated equation.
“Go to sleep,” he murmured.
Catalina settled back against him, molding her body to the curve of his. The last thing she thought of before sleep took her wasn't Mia, or the future, or the risks. It was the taut, fierce look on Dominic’s face in the moment he’d told her what he was going to do. It was a look she’d spent her whole life belonging to.
In the armchair, Mia finally drifted into a thin, fitful sleep.
Her dreams were soundless and grey, a relief. She woke with a jerk just before dawn. The room was pale blue with early light. Mina was still a small lump on the couch, one arm flung out. The house was profoundly quiet.
She stood, her back stiff. She needed coffee. She needed to move.
She padded into the kitchen, avoiding the squeaky board by the fridge. She filled the old machine with water, spooned grounds from the canister that still sat on the same shelf. The routine was a lifeline. As it brewed, its gurgle and hiss the only sound, she leaned against the counter and watched the backyard emerge from shadow.
The garage door was open.
Inside, under a single hanging work light, Dominic’s charger was a hulking silhouette. He was there, already, a mug beside him on a stool as he ran a cloth slowly over the car’s fender. He moved with a quiet, focused rhythm. This was his church. His meditation.
The coffee pot finished with a final sputter. Mia poured two mugs, the steam warming her face. She added milk to both, the way she remembered. She hesitated at the back door, then pulled it open.
The morning air was cool and smelled of cut grass and oil. She walked across the dewy concrete, the silence stretching. He didn't look up as she approached, just continued the long, slow stroke of his cloth.
She set one mug on the stool next to his. “Black, with two sugars. Right?”
He paused. His eyes, when they flicked to the mug then to her, were unreadable in the low light. He gave a single, slow nod. He picked it up, took a sip. “Right.”
She stood beside him, sipping her own coffee, watching his hands work. They were broad, scarred, capable of terrifying violence and this meticulous care. The same hands.
“I’m not going to apologize for listening,” she said, her voice quiet but clear in the garage. “You knew I was there. You wanted me to hear.”
He resumed polishing. “So we’re even.”
“Are we?” She turned to face him. “I walked out on you. You gave me a… a demonstration. That’s not even. That’s just a new kind of war.”
“It’s not a war, Mia.” He didn’t stop moving the cloth. “Wars have winners. This is just what is. You can stand there with your coffee and judge it, or you can get a rag and help me wipe this chrome down. Your choice.”
He gestured to a stack of clean cheesecloths on a nearby bench. The challenge was absurd. Domestic.A test.
Mia looked at the gleaming car, at her brother’s implacable profile, then at the rags. She set her mug down. She picked up a cloth. She dipped it in the open can of polish he gestured toward, then moved to the opposite side of the massive hood. She began to wipe, mirroring his long, circular motions.
The polish smelled sharp and chemical. The metal beneath her hand was cool, then warmed with the friction. They worked in silence for several minutes, the only sounds the soft shushing of cloth on paint and the distant waking of birds.
“Is it always like that?” she asked finally, not looking up. “What I heard?”
He thought about it. “Sometimes it’s slower. Sometimes it’s in the shower. Sometimes it’s just her hand on me at three a.m. because we can’t sleep.” He glanced at her across the hood’s expanse. “But the core of it? Yeah. It’s always that real.”
Mia absorbed that. A strange calm was settling over her, born of exhaustion and the simple, focused action of the work. “It sounds brutal.”
“It’s honest.” He stopped, leaning on the fender. “You ever have sex where you didn’t have to think? Where you didn’t have to wonder what the other person was thinking, or if you were doing it right, or what it meant for tomorrow?”
She thought of Kevin, of the careful, considerate exchanges. “No.”
“That’s why.” He went back to work. “There’s no gap. No performance. It’s just… need. Recognition. It’s the only time the noise in my head stops.”
She understood noise. Her own was a constant, buzzing static of anxiety and second-guessing. She polished a spot that was already pristine. “What about Mina? What do you tell her?”
“We tell her we love each other. That we’re a family. The rest is ours.” His tone left no room for debate. “When she’s older, if she has questions… we’ll face that then. On our terms.”
They finished the hood. He moved to the driver’s side door; she moved to the passenger side. A team, of sorts.
“Catalina says you’re serious. About another baby.”
His hand stopped mid-wipe. He looked at her, his gaze steady. “Yes.”
“The risks… the genetic…”
“We did the homework, Mia. After the first time. We found a doctor, far away, cash. We got tested. It’s a risk, but it’s a manageable one.” He said it flatly, a logistical report. “We’re not idiots. We’re not just rolling dice.”
It was the most he’d said to her at once in five years. It was a massive, shared secret, laid between them on the garage floor. The trust implicit in the confession was staggering.
“Why tell me that?”
“Because you’re here. And if you stay, you need to know what you’re staying for. It’s not a phase. It’s a plan.” He finally put his cloth down. He picked up his coffee, now lukewarm, and drank. “Your move, little sister.”
The screen door slapped. Catalina stepped out onto the back step, holding her own mug. She wore leggings and the same Dodgers shirt from last night, her hair a wild tangle. She watched them for a moment, two figures on opposite sides of the car, the air between them clear of yesterday’s poison.
She walked over, not to Dom, but to Mia. She leaned against the passenger door Mia was polishing. “She make you work for your breakfast?”
Mia managed a thin smile. “Seems like it.”
Catalina’s eyes were softer in the morning light. She searched Mia’s face, looking for the judgment, the revulsion. She saw only exhaustion and a wary, fragile curiosity. “Sleep okay?”
“No.”
“Me either.” Catalina sipped her coffee. “Pancakes? Or are we feeling spiritually aligned with egg whites and regret?”
The casual offer, the throwback to a thousand childhood mornings, cracked something open in Mia’s chest. She looked from Catalina to Dominic, who was watching them, his expression inscrutable but no longer hostile.
This was the choice. The sunny kitchen, the smell of pancakes, the secret buzzing at the center of it all like a live wire. Or the clean, empty silence of the freeway back to her other life.
Her stomach growled, loud in the quiet garage. Mina would be waking up soon, hungry.
“Pancakes,” Mia said, her voice firm. “With chocolate chips. The way Dad used to make them.”
A real smile broke over Catalina’s face, brilliant and unguarded. “Now you’re talking.” She hooked her arm through Mia’s, a sudden, easy gesture that felt both strange and familiar. She started leading her back towards the house. “You’re on bacon duty. I don't trust Dom not to burn it to carbon.”
From behind them, Dominic’s voice came, a low rumble. “I heard that.”
“You were meant to!” Catalina called back, not turning.
As they reached the steps, Mia glanced back. Dominic was watching them go. He gave her a slow, single nod. Then he turned back to his car, picked up the cloth, and resumed his work.
He was already somewhere else, his mind on the next turn, the next stretch of road. Mia followed her sister into the bright, warming kitchen. She’d stay for breakfast.