Chapter 3: Highway Penance
The Coyote Bar was a concrete box marooned in a sea of cracked asphalt, fifty miles west of anywhere useful. Its only selling point was a still-functioning neon sign buzzing with blue and pink light that seemed to vibrate against the gathering desert dusk. Behind the bar, under a lone, feeble ceiling lamp illuminating the carcass of a disassembled Ford V8, was Letty Ortiz.
She was wrist-deep in engine grease, her dark hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, a streak of black oil painted across her cheekbone like war paint. She heard the convoy before she saw it—the distinct, muscle-bound rumble of Dom’s Charger, followed by the lower diesel growl of a truck and trailer. Her hands stilled. She knew that sound. She also knew he wasn’t due here.
Wiping her hands on a rag that had long since surrendered to being permanently stained, she walked to the garage’s open roll-up door. She watched the three vehicles swing into the barren lot. Dom’s Charger with its spectacularly shattered driver’s window. A Ford F-150 she didn’t recognize, hauling an enclosed trailer. And Brian, getting out of the driver’s side of Dom’s car.
Her eyes narrowed. Then the passenger door of the Ford opened. Catalina stepped out, moving stiffly, a bandage starkly white on her knee against her torn jeans. Letty’s breath caught. Cat was supposed to be in Mexico.Or gone. That had been the quiet, desperate hope humming in the garage air after Dom tore out of there.
Dom got out from the driver’s side of the Ford. He didn’t look at Letty. His attention was on Catalina, a hand hovering near the small of her back as she tested her weight on her leg. It wasn’t a touch. It was an intention.A readiness.
Letty felt a cold, clear understanding click into place in her mind, connecting a dozen disjointed moments: the way Dom’s gaze followed Catalina across a room only to snap away when noticed; the electric, volatile silences that could fall between them; the brutal, almost angry way Dom had taken Letty against the workbench last night, his eyes squeezed shut, his head turned away from her kiss. “Letty meant nothing—I closed my eyes and saw your tits bouncing instead of hers.”
She’d thought it was just cruel heat in the moment. Now, seeing them stand together in the alienating vastness of the desert, it felt like a terrible, ugly truth.
Brian approached first, offering a sheepish shrug. “Ran into a detour.”
“I see that,” Letty said, her voice flat. She looked past him as Dom and Catalina walked toward the garage.“Cat. Heard you took a trip.”
Catalina met her gaze, unflinching. There was no guilt there, only a profound exhaustion and a familiar, defiant fire. “Took a slide instead. Bike’s in the trailer. Needs a look before Vegas.”
“Vegas,” Letty echoed. She looked at Dom. “The meet’s still on?”
“It’s on,” Dom said, finally looking at her. His eyes were hollow, the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. “We’re a man short for the scouting run. Need you.”
It was business. Clean, simple.An order. She hated how part of her still responded to the call, the need to be part of the machine. “What’s the play?”
Inside the gloomy bar, which served as Letty’s temporary workshop and haven, they huddled around a map spread on a sticky table. Dom laid it out. The Blue Moon Diner. Approaches, exits, sightlines. Catalina, blonde wig, inside. Dom, in something nondescript, outside. Brian and Leon handling the actual exchange elsewhere, after the all-clear.
“Letty, you’re my shadow,” Dom said, tapping a secondary road behind the diner. “You see something I don’t. We stay linked, silent protocol.”
Letty nodded, absorbing the details, but her focus was split. She watched Catalina as she leaned over the map, the neck of her tank top gaping slightly. There, on the sharp ridge of her collarbone, was a bruise. Fresh.Dark. A perfect, damning oval. The kind made by a mouth, not a crash.
Letty’s own neck felt suddenly hot where Dom had bitten her last night. A mark of possession, she’d thought in the dark.A lie. Her eyes flicked to Dom. He was staring at the same spot on Catalina’s skin, his expression a stone mask, but a muscle in his jaw ticked like a frantic clock.
Catalina straightened, pulling her jacket closed. “We should get the bike unloaded. I want to check the forks.”
“I’ll help,” Letty said, the words out before she could stop them. An excuse.A confrontation.
In the garage, with the trailer open like a dark mouth, the air was cooler. The Monster stood tethered inside. Letty grabbed a rear stand. Catalina took the front. They wheeled it out onto the concrete floor with a soft clatter of wheels on metal.
“Knee looks nasty,” Letty said, her tone deliberately casual as she crouched to examine the front tire.
“It’ll heal.”
“Some things don’t.” Letty looked up, her gaze direct. “He punched out his window looking for you.”
Catalina’s hands froze on the handlebars. “I know.”
“You know.” Letty stood up slowly. “What else do you know, Cat? You know why he was in such a foul mood last night? You know what he said to me?”
The only sound was the distant hum of the neon sign.
Catalina’s face was pale. “I don’t want to know what he said to you, Letty.”
“He said he saw you when he was with me.” The words fell like stones. “He said you meant nothing.”
A flinch. A real, physical recoil. Catalina looked away, towards the open desert door, her profile sharp against the dying light. “He shouldn’t have said that.To anyone. It’s not true.”
“Which part?” Letty pressed, stepping closer. The scent of jasmine and desert dust and injury enveloped her. “The part about you, or the part about me?”
“Both!” Catalina spun back, her eyes blazing. “It’s all… it’s a fucking mess, Letty. You think I want this? You think I want to tear my family apart? I left. I tried to disappear. He followed me. He always follows me.”
“Because you let him.” Letty’s voice dropped to a venomous whisper. “You leave your gloves in his car. You wear his marks where everyone can see them. You are screaming for him in a language only he understands, and the rest of us just have to live with the echo.”
Catalina stood very still. A single, traitorous tear tracked through the dust on her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to make a choice.” Letty’s heart hammered against her ribs. “Him, or the family. Because you can’t have both. This… this poison will kill everything. It’s already started.” She gestured vaguely, encompassing the shattered window, the hidden bike, the tension thickening the air between the bar and the lot where Dom and Brian stood talking. “Pick a side, Catalina. Before there’s nothing left to pick.”
She turned and walked out, leaving Catalina alone with the gleaming, wounded motorcycle.
Outside, Dom was leaning against the Charger’s fender, speaking in low tones with Brian. As Letty approached, Brian nodded and moved off towards the bar, giving them space.
Dom watched her come. “You good?”
“No,” she said honestly. She stopped a few feet away, crossing her arms. The desert night was fully upon them now, a dome of stars so sharp they looked artificial. “You used me last night.”
He didn’t deny it. He just looked at her, waiting.
“You used me to exorcise a ghost that wasn’t a ghost,” she continued, her voice surprisingly steady. “You tried to fuck her out of your system. With me.”
“It wasn’t about you,” he said, the brutal simplicity of it more an apology than an excuse.
“I know that now.” She let out a long breath, fogging slightly in the chill. “I’m not asking for an explanation, Dom. I’m telling you I see it. I see you. And I’m telling you to fix it. Clean. Before it blows up in all our faces.”
He pushed off the fender. “How do you fix a wrong that feels more right than anything else?”
It was the first time he’d ever admitted the core of it aloud, not in a heat of passion, but in the cold clarity of night. The confession hung between them.
“I don’t know,” Letty said softly. “But you don’t fix it by dragging everyone else into the crash site. You sent Brian away. You brought Cat here. To my place. You’re drawing a circle, Dom. And you’re putting her inside it with you. The rest of us are outside, wondering when the blast is coming.”
He had no answer. He just stared at the ground, his shoulders a tense line.
“I’ll be your shadow in Vegas,” she said, turning to go back inside. “For the family. But after this job… you need to figure out what ‘family’ means to you. Because this version is breaking.”
Inside, Brian was at the bar, nursing a beer. Catalina was gone, presumably to one of the two spare rooms in the back. Letty grabbed a beer of her own, the bottle cold and welcome in her hand.
“Rough couple days,” Brian ventured, not looking at her.
“You could say that.”
“He’s not himself.”
“He is,” Letty corrected, taking a long pull. “He’s exactly himself. We’re just finally seeing all of it.”
Later, in the deep quiet of the desert night, Letty lay awake in her narrow bed. The thin walls of the roadside bar did little to muffle sound. She heard the creak of a floorboard in the hall. A pause outside her door. Then, soft footsteps moving away.
She knew it was Dom. She knew where he was going.
She listened, her body tense, for any sound from Catalina’s room. A voice. A protest. The click of a lock. There was nothing. Only the vast, consuming silence of the desert, which felt, in that moment, like consent.
She pulled her pillow over her head, not to block sound, but to block out the image her mind insisted on painting: the two of them, mirror images in the dark, finally, terribly, choosing the wrong that felt more right than anything else. Choosing each other, and letting the rest of the world—her included—burn.
Outside, a lone coyote howled, a long, mournful sound that was swallowed whole by the stars. Underneath it, barely audible, was the low, steady rumble of a single engine starting up. Not the Charger. The Ford.Leaving.
Letty sat bolt upright. She was at the window in two strides, peering through the grimy glass. The Ford was pulling away, its headlights cutting twin blades through the darkness. Alone. It wasn’t Dom going to her. It was her leaving. Again.
She heard Dom’s door fly open down the hall, his heavy footsteps pounding through the bar. The front door slammed. She watched from the window as he burst outside, standing in the pool of neon light, watching the taillights of the Ford diminish to pinpricks and vanish.
He didn’t roar. He didn’t smash anything. He just stood there, a solitary statue in the empty lot, his head bowed as if under a physical weight. He had drawn his circle. And she had stepped out of it.
Letty turned away from the window, a strange mix of relief and dread settling in her stomach. The crash had been averted. For now. But the fallout was still coming. And they were all driving straight toward it, Vegas glowing on the horizon like a neon promise of a better lie.
He stood there until the taillights were swallowed by the ink-blotted horizon. The neon buzzed overhead, a sound like a trapped fly. Inside, Letty heard the slam of the cooler door, the clink of glass. She didn’t go to him.
Her phone, charging on the crate she used as a nightstand, lit up with a soft glow. An unknown number. The desert had terrible service; it could only be one person routing a signal through a satellite. She picked it up, her thumb hovering over the answer icon, but it stopped ringing. A missed call. A moment later, her screen displayed a new voicemail.
She put the phone to her ear. The connection was brittle, shot through with static that ebbed and flowed like electronic tide.
“Mia? It’s Cat.” Catalina’s voice was raw, scraped thin. The sound of wind rushing past a car microphone filled the background. “I’m on the 15. I don’t know where I’m going yet.” A pause, filled only with that hollow roar. “Letty gave me an ultimatum. Him, or the family. She’s right. She’s… she’s not wrong.”
Another stretch of static. Letty closed her eyes, pressing the phone harder against her ear.
“This time it’s for real. I mean it. No notes. No Charger scent on a jacket. I dumped the phone I used to call you at a truck stop outside Barstow. I’m taking the next exit, buying a burner, then ditching this Ford too. It’s got a tracker in the axle, he taught me that. I’ll walk to a bus station.”
The wind noise dropped suddenly. She must have rolled up a window. Her voice became clearer, a desperate, aching clarity.
“Please. If you talk to him… tell him I love him. Tell him I’m doing this for him. So he can… have a life. A real one. A wife.Kids. Kids who are… healthy. Who are right.” The word ‘right’ broke on a sob she tried to smother. “He can’t have that with me in it. I’m the fault line. Tell him to be happy, hermano. Without me.”
The call ended. The voiceman prompt beeped. Letty lowered the phone, staring at the cracked screen. The message was for Mia. But it had come to her. A wrong number in the desert, or a confession she was meant to intercept.She understood now. The ultimatum in the garage hadn’t been the end. It had been the catalyst. Catalina had chosen the family. By removing herself from the equation entirely. The severity of it—ditching phones, cars, her very identity—wasn’t drama. It was surgery. Amputation.
She walked to the bar’s front door, pulling it open. Dom hadn’t moved. He was a silhouette against the night, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched against a cold that wasn’t in the air.
“She called,” Letty said, her voice carrying across the empty lot.
He turned slowly. His face in the neon’s glow was stripped bare.Not anger. Not even pain. A kind of terrible, hollow anticipation. “Where?”
“She didn’t say. She called Mia. Wrong number, maybe. I got the voicemail.” She hesitated, then recited the only part that felt like hers to give. “She said she’s ditching everything. The Ford.Phones. That she’s leaving for real this time. No trail.”
He absorbed this. His eyes went back to the black line of the highway. “What else?”
Letty leaned against the doorframe. The chill seeped through her thin shirt. “She said to tell you she loves you. That she’s doing it for you. So you can have a life. A wife. Kids. Healthy kids.”
The word ‘healthy’ hung in the space between them, a grenade whose pin had been pulled long ago. It explained the self-annihilating ferocity of her exit in a way nothing else could. It wasn’t just shame. It was a twisted, sacrificial genetics.
A bitter, ragged sound escaped him. It was almost a laugh. “That’s her choice? To give me a life she decides I should have?” He shook his head, finally looking back at Letty. “She doesn’t get to make that choice for me.”
“She just did, Dom.”
“No.” He walked toward her, his boots crunching on the gravel. The hollow look was gone, replaced by a focused, predatory intensity. “She’s running on emotion. On guilt. She’ll make a mistake. She’ll get a ticket. Use a card at a gas pump. She’ll call again.”
“She said she won’t.”
“She will.” He was past her now, into the bar, heading for the map on the table. “Because she wants to be found. This whole thing, the note, the dramatic exit, this call… it’s a cry. Not a goodbye.” He stabbed a finger onto the map. “Vegas is tomorrow. The deal is set. We need the money from that. After, we look.”
Letty followed him in. “We? You heard the message. She’s doing this because of us. The crew. The family. You dragging everyone to find her defeats the whole point.”
“I’m not asking the crew,” he said, his voice low and final. He refolded the map with sharp, precise movements. “I’m asking you.”
The air left her lungs. She stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”
“You’re the only one who heard the message. You know what she’s thinking. You saw her. You see it.” He met her gaze. “After Vegas. You and me.”
“So I can help you undo the one good thing she’s trying to do?” Letty’s laugh was short, harsh. “So you can drag her back into this… this thing that’s eating you both alive? That’s not family, Dom. That’s a sickness.”
He didn’t flinch. “You said to fix it clean. This isn’t clean. This is a severed wire, sparking. I’m not bringing her back to how it was. I’m going to find her to end it. To tell her to her face that she doesn’t get to martyr herself for my hypothetical future.” He took a step closer. The scent of gasoline and despair clung to him. “And I can’t do that alone. I need someone there who… understands the cost.”
The admission disarmed her. He wasn’t asking for a accomplice in his obsession. He was asking for a witness.A anchor. Someone to ensure the ending was real. The monumental weight of the ask settled over her.
She thought of Catalina’s voice, shattered on the word ‘healthy’. She thought of Dom’s fist going through the Charger window. The bleeding knuckles, the glittering safety glass like fractured ice. This wasn’t a love story. It was a disaster in slow motion, and he was asking her to walk into the epicenter with him to help pronounce the dead.
“Why would I do that?” she whispered.
“Because you’re family,” he said, the word heavy with a new, complicated meaning. “And this is what’s left to do.”
Outside, a semi-truck roared past on the highway, a momentary earthquake of sound and light that passed and left the silence deeper. The decision coiled in the room, tight and live.Vegas first. Then the real hunt. She gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
“After Vegas,” she said, the words tasting of dust and resignation.
He nodded back, a business concluded. But his eyes, in the dim light, held a terrifying gratitude. Brian wandered out from the back hallway, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“Everything cool? Sounded like a car left.”
“Everything’s cool,” Dom said, his voice shifting back into its familiar, grounded register. He clapped a hand on Brian’s shoulder. “Cat had to roll. Family thing back east. We’re on for tomorrow. You and Leon set?”
“Yeah, man. We’re good.” Brian yawned, looking between them, sensing the altered atmosphere but misreading its source. “Just a late-night vibe, I guess. We pulling out at dawn?”
“First light,” Dom confirmed.
As Brian shuffled off toward the coffee maker, Dom’s gaze returned to Letty. It wasn’t the look of a leader to a soldier, or a man to a lover. It was the look of one survivor to another, on the deck of a ship they both knew was doomed. The momentum was no longer toward Vegas.
It was toward whatever came after, in the silent, trackless place where Catalina was trying to disappear. They would go there together, not to save anyone, but to finally turn out the lights.
Dawn came, a searing orange line on the horizon that turned the desert into a flat expanse of bruised purple and burnt gold. The silence was thick. Letty, Dom, and Brian loaded the recon cars without a word. Every movement felt rehearsed and loaded.
Dom’s jaw was a locked vise. He checked and rechecked the concealed firearms in the Dodge Dart they’d use for the scouting run. Letty watched his hands, the raw skin over his knuckles from the Charger’s window. They were a map of what was to come.
“Heads in the game,” Dom said, not looking up. He slapped the Dart’s trunk shut. The sound echoed.
Brian nodded, sliding into the driver’s seat of a nondescript sedan. “Meet you at the secondary. Two hours.”
Vegas rose from the desert floor like a mirage, its gaudy colors washed pale by the harsh morning sun. The Blue Moon Diner sat on a bleached strip of asphalt south of the Strip, a low-slung building of chrome and faded pink neon that hadn’t lit up in a decade.
From a service road two hundred yards back, Letty watched through high-powered binos. Beside her, Dom was a statue, his eyes fixed on the building. Their thighs almost touched in the confined space of the Dart, the air between them vibrating with everything unsaid.
“She’s in position,” Letty murmured, watching a blonde figure—the wig was a cheap one—slide into a booth by the window. Catalina, moving with a familiar, loose-hipped grace even undercover.
A dirty brown van pulled into the lot. Dom’s posture shifted a millimeter. “That’s them. Call it.”
Letty keyed the secure mic, her voice a flat monotone. “Bread is in the basket. One loaf, one plate. Standby.”
Everything was precise, clinical. This was the machinery of their world, the ballet of illicit exchange. The transfer happened inside the diner’s dim interior, visible only as a briefcase passing under the table. Minutes later, Catalina stood, stretched, and walked out into the glare. She got into an old Corolla they’d parked earlier and drove east, away from the city.
“Clear,” Letty said.
“Not yet,” Dom whispered.
His eyes were locked on the diner door. The men from the brown van stayed inside.
Five minutes stretched to seven. Dom’s breathing was the only sound. Then the diner door burst open.Not the men. A waitress, her apron flapping, pointing toward Catalina’s exit route. The two men rushed out, their faces contorted.
“She tipped the waitress,” Dom breathed. A ghost of a smile touched his lips, pride and frustration mixed. “She never could just follow the script.”
The men scrambled into the van. It squealed out of the lot, not after the Corolla, but in the opposite direction. A classic misdirect. Wrong. They were heading straight for the secondary exchange point where Brian and Leon waited with the real merchandise.
“Go,” Dom barked, twisting the key. The Dart’s engine snarled to life. “Brian, they’re coming to you blind. They know they were played. It’s hot.”
He floored it, the car fishtailing onto the main road, a plume of dust hanging in the air. Letty held onto the dashboard, the world blurring outside her window. The chase was short, brutal. The van never made it to the warehouse district.
Dom boxed them in against a chain-link fence surrounding a vacant lot. Brian and Leon arrived from the other side. There was a chaotic, violent minute. Shattering glass. The wet thud of fists on flesh. A single, choked-off yell. Then silence, broken by the hiss of a ruptured radiator.
Dom got out. He walked to the van’s driver, who was slumped against the fence, bleeding from his nose. “The deal’s off,” Dom said, his voice devoid of anger, just finality. “Tell your boss his product isn’t clean. The serials were flagged. You were walking into a Customs sting.”
The man’s eyes widened. He’d been set up by his own people.
“Take that message back,” Dom said, turning away. He left the man alive, stumbling. A message was more useful than a body.
In the sudden quiet, leaning against the Dart’s hot fender, Dom looked exhausted. The adrenaline bled away, leaving the raw substrate of the last forty-eight hours. Brian and Leon looked at him, waiting for the next move, the payout, the celebration.
“There’s no money,” Dom said, rubbing a hand over his shaved head. “The whole thing was a poisoned pill.”
Leon cursed softly. “A whole setup for nothing?”
“Not for nothing.” Dom’s gaze met Letty’s across the roof of the car. “We needed the run. Now it’s done.” He tossed the Dart’s keys to Brian. “Get it scrapped. You two head back. We got other business.”
Leon’s eyebrows raised. “We? Who’s ‘we’?”
Dom didn’t answer. He was already walking toward the battered, sandy Corolla Catalina had left in a pre-arranged lot a mile away. Letty fell into step beside him, her own heartbeat loud in her ears. The real job started now.
For three days, they operated on instinct and fractured clues. They found the Ford dumped behind a defunct auto shop in Needles, the tracker still dutifully pinging. A dead end. They checked bus stations from Kingman to Flagstaff.Nothing.
Dom worked in a cold, relentless silence. He drove, his eyes scanning sidewalks, parking lots, diner windows. Letty navigated, called in favors, hacked shaky motel Wi-Fi to check registers. The scent in the Corolla was still Catalina’s—jasmine and oil—and it filled the small space, a constant, painful reminder.
“She’s not running from the law,” Letty said on the fourth morning, nursing bad coffee in a Tucson truck stop. “She’s running from a pattern. She won’t do anything predictable.”
Dom stared at his untouched eggs. “She’ll go to water.”
“What?”
“Somewhere with water.” He looked up, his eyes distant. “Our dad took us to the ocean once.San Diego. She’d never seen it before. She just stood there, letting the waves knock her over, laughing. She said it was the only thing that ever made her feel clean.” He pushed the plate away. “She wants to feel clean.”
The logic was unbearably sad. It made perfect sense. They turned the car west.
They found her two days later, not at the ocean, but beside a vast, unnatural lake in the Arizona desert, created by a dam. It was late afternoon. The water was a flat, brilliant blue, a shocking color in the burnt landscape.
She was sitting on the rock-strewn shore, knees drawn up, watching the light shatter on the surface. She’d cut her hair herself, a jagged bob that fell just below her ears. She looked smaller. The Corolla, now sporting New Mexico plates, was parked on the gravel above her.
Dom stopped their car a hundred yards back. He got out slowly. Letty stayed put, the engine idling. This was his walk.
He moved across the rough ground, his shadow stretching long ahead of him. Catalina didn’t turn. She must have seen his reflection in the water. Her posture stiffened, but she didn’t run.
He stopped a few feet behind her. For a long moment, there was only the sound of the water lapping weakly at the stones.
“You’re a hard woman to find, Cat,” he said, his voice quiet, carried by the wind.
“You shouldn’t have looked,” she replied, still facing the lake. Her voice was thin, worn out.
“You left a trail of breadcrumbs made of pain. You wanted to be found.” He took a step closer. “To end this. So here we are.”
She finally turned her head to look at him. The fierce light in her eyes was gone, replaced by a deep, empty surrender. The bruise on her collarbone had faded to a sickly yellow-green. “To end it,” she repeated, a confirmation.
He nodded, his own face like carved stone. He had planned this speech, lived it in his head for hundreds of miles. “I came to tell you… it’s over, Cat. This thing between us. It’s done.”
A flicker in her eyes. Hope, maybe, or dread.
“I don’t want you,” he said, the words coming out flat and hard, each one a deliberate nail. “Not like that. Not ever again. You were right to run. You should have kept running.”
He saw the words hit her. Not like a slap, but like a slow, deep cold, starting in her core and spreading outward. Her skin paled. Her lips, chapped from the desert, parted slightly.
“You don’t mean that,” she whispered, a last, fragile defiance.
“I do.” He crossed his arms, a wall. “You’re my sister. That’s it. That’s all you get to be. The rest of it… it was a sickness. A mistake we couldn’t stop making. I’m stopping it. Right now.”
He took a deep breath, looking past her at the implausible blue lake. “You trying to disappear? That’s your penance. But making me complicit in it, making me chase this ghost… that’s your last selfish act. I’m done with it. I’m done with you.”
Catalina’s body seemed to fold in on itself. She looked down at the rocks between her feet. A tremor ran through her shoulders, but no sound came out. The absolute finality in his voice was a weapon he’d honed for this moment, and it cut everything away.
“Be happy, Dom,” she said, the words so soft they were almost lost in the wind. A plea from a gutted husk.
“I intend to,” he said. “Without you.”
He turned then, and walked back to the car. He didn’t look back. Not once. His strides were long, certain, a performance of utter conviction for her, for Letty, for himself. Every step screamed that this was the only way.
Letty watched him come. His face, as he slid into the passenger seat, was blank. A terrifying, empty calm.
“Drive,” he said, his gaze fixed straight ahead.
She put the car in gear. As they pulled onto the access road, she glanced in the rearview. Catalina was still a small, dark shape on the shore, utterly still, as if she’d been turned to salt.
They drove for an hour in absolute silence. The sun dipped below the horizon, bleeding red across the sky. Letty’s phone, sitting in the cup holder, buzzed with an incoming call. An unknown number, Arizona area code.
She looked at Dom. He gave a single, stiff nod.
She answered, putting it on speaker. The connection was clear, silent. For a moment, there was nothing. Then, a shaky, wet inhalation.
“Mia?”
It was Catalina. Her voice was ruined, a hollow scrape. There was no wind now. Just this terrible, quiet emptiness.
“It’s me,” Letty said softly, her eyes on the darkening road.
A beat of silence. Catalina recognized the voice. It didn’t seem to matter. The dam had broken.
“This time it’s real, hermana,” Catalina whispered, the Spanish term a heartbreaking brush of intimacy. “He… he said he doesn’t want me. Ever. He said I’m just his sister.” A choked sob escaped, raw and ugly. “He’s right. He’s finally right.”
“Cat, where are you?” Letty asked, her professional calm fraying. “Just tell me where you are.”
“No.” The refusal was gentle, final. “I’m saying goodbye. For real. Please… tell him to be happy. Tell Mia… I’m sorry.”
Her breath hitched, a desperate, gulping sound. “Tell her… maybe she’ll see something in the news. A young woman. In a lake. Or with a pistol. Maybe she’ll just… know it was me.”
“Catalina, don’t you dare—” Letty’s voice rose, sharp with fear.
The call ended.
The click was deafening. Letty slammed her hand on the steering wheel. “Jesus Christ.” She pulled the car over onto the gravel shoulder, the tires crunching. She looked at Dom. “You heard her.”
He was staring out the windshield, his hands limp in his lap. His eyes were wide, unblinking. The performance on the shore was gone. All that was left was the dawning, monstrous reality of what he’d just done. The vacuum in his chest was now infinite.
His breath left him in a ragged, torn gasp. His body curled forward, forehead almost touching the dash. A low, animal sound, the kind made when something vital is being ripped out by the roots, welled up from deep inside him and filled the car.
Letty reached for him, her hand stopping an inch from his shaking shoulder. There was no comfort to give. This was the crater. This was where the light went out.
Outside, the desert night swallowed the world whole. Inside the car, the only sounds were Dom’s shattered breaths and the soft, meaningless hiss of the empty phone line, still cradled in Letty’s frozen hand.