Chapter 5: The Monster Revealed
Mina’s words lay between them like a live grenade, its pin pulled.
Why does the monster look like you?
In the too-bright spill of the hallway light into her bedroom, Dom felt the ground dissolve beneath him. He’d stood guard at the doorway, Catalina hovering just behind his shoulder, both of them trying to project a wall of safety against her night terror. And she had looked at them—her eyes no longer blurred by sleep but sharp, painfully lucid—and asked the question that cleaved their world in two.
Catalina made a sound, a tiny, choked intake of breath like she’d been struck.
Mina didn’t cry now. She sat rigid in her tangle of princess sheets, her small face pale, her gaze darting from Dom’s frozen expression to Catalina’s shattered one. The logic of a child’s nightmare was its own terrible, unfiltered truth.
“The sad man in the engine,” Mina whispered, her voice thin. “In my dream. He had your eyes, Tío Dom. And Mama’s hair.”
Silence, thick and suffocating, swallowed the room. The humidifier hissed a plume of vapor into the still air. The weight of the lie, of the secret they’d built her entire life upon, pressed down on Dom’s shoulders with a physical force. This wasn’t a monster under the bed. It was the monster they’d made, and she’d finally seen its face.
He had to move, to speak. To defuse this. But his muscles were locked. He was a statue of guilt caught in a child’s flashlight beam.
It was Catalina who broke. She moved past him, her movements jerky, and sat on the edge of Mina’s bed. She didn’t reach to hug her. She just sat, her hands clenched in her lap.
“Sometimes,” Catalina started, her voice unsteady, “dreams are like… like a broken TV. They show you pieces of things, but they get mixed up. They use faces you know to tell a story that’s not real.”
Mina’s brow furrowed. She was five, but she wasn’t a fool. “But he was sad. So sad it hurt my tummy. You look sad like that sometimes. When you think I’m not looking.”
Catalina’s composure cracked. A single tear tracked down her cheek, and she quickly wiped it away with the heel of her hand. Dom watched, helpless, as the fortress of her control crumbled under the direct hit of their daughter’s perception.
He finally found his voice. It came out rough, scraped raw. “Yeah, I get sad sometimes, bug. Everyone does. But that doesn’t make me a monster.”
“Do you… do you live in the engine?” Mina asked, her nightmare logic stubbornly holding on.
“No.” This time, Dom took a step into the room. He knelt beside the bed, putting himself lower than her. He needed her to see his eyes, to believe him. “I live right here.With you. That’s the deal now, remember? I’m not going anywhere.”
He saw the tension in her tiny shoulders ease, just a fraction. The concrete promise of his presence was stronger than the ephemeral horror of the dream. The monster had his face, but he was also the one standing guard.
She yawned, the adrenaline of the fear finally ebbing, leaving the heavy drag of exhaustion. Her eyelids fluttered.
“Stay,” she murmured, already slumping back onto her pillow. “Till I’m asleep.”
“Yeah,” Dom said. “I’m right here.”
He didn’t move from his spot on the floor. Catalina sat on the bed, her hand now resting lightly on Mina’s blanketed leg. They stayed like that, silent sentinels, until Mina’s breathing deepened into the slow, even rhythm of sleep.
The shared vigil should have felt like unity. It felt like a confession booth with no priest, just the heavy air of things unsaid.
When they were sure she was under, Catalina stood up, her movements stiff. She didn’t look at him. She walked out of the room and down the hall toward the kitchen. Dom pushed himself up, his knees protesting, and followed.
The kitchen was a battlefield of clean countertops. It always was after Mia left. Catalina was at the sink, gripping the edge of the stainless steel, staring out the black window at her own reflection.
He leaned against the doorway, the frame cool against his back. “She knows.”
“She doesn’t know,” Catalina said to the window, her voice tight. “She feels it. There’s a difference. Kids feel the cracks in the world before they understand them.” She finally turned around. Her eyes were red-rimmed, fierce. “How long before she does understand, Dom? Before she starts asking questions we can’t answer with ‘broken TV’?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“How?” The word was a sharp exhalation. “She saw the truth in a damn nightmare. You think she won’t see it in daylight? She’s going to watch us. Every move. Every time we look at each other a second too long, or don’t look at each other at all. Letty said build a life that looks whole from the outside. But Mina’s on the inside. She’s in the goddamn walls.”
He had no answer. Letty’s plan, which had seemed so brutally clear just hours ago, now felt like a house of cards built on a fault line. The primary witness was their own child.
“We be boring,” he said, the words sounding pathetic even to him. “We be parents. We pack lunches. We fix bikes. We make it so normal, so everyday, that the dream fades.”
Catalina let out a short, humorless laugh. “Boring.” She looked at him, her gaze travelling from his face down his body, a quick, involuntary sweep. The memory of the car, of the speeding dark and her mouth on him, ignited in the space between them like a struck match. “You really think we can be boring? After that?”
He felt the heat rise in his neck. “We have to try.”
“Trying is what got us here!” She slammed her palm flat on the countertop. The sound was like a gunshot in the quiet house. She froze, listening for any sound from Mina’s room.Nothing.
When she spoke again, it was a desperate whisper. “Every time you walk out of the shower. Every time I bend over to get a pan from the lower cabinet. Every silent breakfast. It’s a minefield, Dom. We’re going to step on one. And she’s going to be watching when we blow up.”
He pushed off the doorway and walked into the kitchen, stopping an arm’s length away from her. He could smell her shampoo, the faint, clean scent of her skin. It was a torture. It was a homecoming. “So what’s the move, Cat? You want me to leave? You want to pack up and run? We tried that for five years. It didn’t work.”
“I don’t know what I want!” Her voice broke. “I want my daughter to have a father. I want my brother to not look at me like I’m the only thing keeping him from drowning. I want to not feel like my skin is on fire every time you’re in the same room. I want to not hate myself for wanting it.”
He reached for her then. He couldn’t help it. His hand came up, not to pull her to him, but just to touch her arm, to offer some anchor in the storm. His fingers brushed the bare skin of her forearm.
It was a mistake.
The contact was electric.
It went through him like a bad voltage, a straight shot to his core.
She flinched as if burned, jerking her arm back. But her eyes, wide and dark, held his for a suspended, breathless second. The air between them was static-charged, thick with everything unsaid from the highway, from every stolen glance across the garage, from the lie they told their daughter every single day.
He pulled his hand back, shoving it into the pocket of his jeans. His knuckles throbbed where they’d brushed her skin.
“Right,” he said, the word coming out hoarse. He cleared his throat, forcing a flat practicality into his voice. “So we don’t touch. New rule. We’re roommates. Co-parents. We’re business partners running the Mina franchise.”
A faint, incredulous smile touched her lips, gone as fast as it came. “Business partners who had a kid together. And share a mortgage. And a last name. Real smooth operation.”
“It’s our operation.” He leaned back against the counter, putting solid granite between them. “We make it work. We stick to the script. For her.”
Catalina nodded slowly, wrapping her arms around herself. She looked at the clock on the microwave, its digital glow reading 2:17 AM. The whole world was asleep. Their whole world was awake, fraying at the edges in this sterile light.
Their whole world was awake, fraying at the edges in this sterile light. The hum of the refrigerator became a maddening drone. Each second stretched, brittle and transparent, revealing the raw scaffolding of their lie.
She was holding herself so tight her knuckles were white.
“Go to sleep, Dom,” she said, her voice stripped down to the wires. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at a scratch on the tile floor, her focus absolute.
He pushed off the counter. “Where are you going?”
“Just out. I can’t breathe in here. I’ll be back before Mia gets here for breakfast.” She finally looked up, and her eyes were flat, vacant. The fire from moments ago had been smothered into ash. “Don’t follow me. I mean it.”
He wanted to argue, to block the door. The man who fixed every problem with his hands or his presence was utterly disarmed. The rule about not touching was a fresh, wet wall between them. He gave a single, stiff nod.
He listened to her footsteps fade down the hall, the soft rustle as she grabbed her keys from the bowl, the definitive click of the front door closing. It was the quietest explosion he’d ever heard.
The house settled into a deeper silence without her.
He paced the living room, the phantom taste of highway whiskey on his tongue. He checked on Mina, a dark shape curled in her bed, innocent of the fault lines beneath her. He stood in the kitchen doorway, replaying the way Catalina had flinched from his touch. His fingers tingled with the memory, a ghost-limb sensation of her skin.
He lasted maybe twenty minutes.
A cold dread, different from the hot panic of before, seeped into his gut. It was the emptiness in her eyes when she left. The flat finality. Go to sleep. He knew that tone. It was the one she used when a decision was made, past the point of discussion.
He moved.
He was in the Charger, the engine snarling to life in the silent garage, before he’d fully formed a plan. He didn’t have to guess where. There was only one place she went when the walls closed in. The old concrete bridge over the dried-up wash on the edge of town, where they’d skipped stones as kids and smoked stolen cigarettes as teenagers.
He drove fast, the city lights blurring into streaks, his headlights carving a lonely path through the dark.
The bridge was a gray slab in the moonlight, a relic from a time when the river meant something. Her car, a low-slung Nissan she’d built herself, was parked haphazardly on the gravel shoulder, driver’s side door still open. The interior light was a tiny, pathetic yellow square in the vast dark.
He killed his engine and lights, rolling to a stop fifty yards back.
He saw her silhouette against the rail, backlit by the moon. She was leaning over, her hair a dark curtain, the phone a white slash against her ear. He got out, the gravel crunching softly under his boots, and moved into the shadow of the bridge’s support pillar.
The night air was chill and carried her voice, thin and shredded by the wind, straight to him.
“...she saw it, Letty. In a damn dream.” A pause. Catalina’s shoulders hitched. “No, not like that. She said the monster had his eyes. My hair.”
Dom’s breath caught in his throat. He pressed a palm against the cold, rough concrete.
He couldn’t hear Letty’s responses, just the low murmur from the phone. Catalina listened, her head hanging low. Then she shook it violently.
“That was the deal,” she said, her voice rising. “Look normal. Be a family. But we’re not. We’re a… a crime scene with a child living in it.” She slumped against the railing. “Every day. Every single day, it kills me to not be near him. To pretend he’s just my brother, her uncle.”
She was crying now. The sound was raw, ugly, torn from somewhere deep.
“I don’t know how much longer I can hold this,” she sobbed into the phone. Her next words were a whisper he had to strain to hear, a confession carried on the cold breeze. “I’m so tired, Letty. I’m standing here looking at the drop, and I’m thinking about it. Really thinking about it. Just to make it stop.”
Dom’s blood turned to ice.
His feet were moving before his mind caught up, the gravel skidding under his boots.
Catalina heard the noise, whirling around, the phone falling from her hand to clatter on the concrete ledge. Her face, silvered by moonlight, was a mask of tear-streaked horror. “No. Dom, no, you weren’t supposed to—”
He didn’t stop. He closed the distance in three long strides and pulled her away from the edge, his arms wrapping around her, pinning her arms to her sides. She fought him, a frantic, weak struggle.
“Let me go!”
“Never,” he grunted, his voice thick, his own vision blurring. He held on, his face buried in her hair, her back against his chest. He could feel her heart hammering against his forearm. He held her until the fight bled out of her, until she went limp, her sobs shaking them both.
On the ground near their feet, Letty’s tiny, frantic voice called from the speaker. “Cat?Catalina! Dom, is that you? Talk to me!”
He just held his sister tighter, staring at the dark void beyond the railing, his own promise to her echoing in the hollow place her words had carved in him. I’m not going anywhere.
He held her until the vibration of her crying slowed to a tremor, then to a fragile stillness. Her back was a tense line against his chest, a bowstring finally un-notched. The Charger’s headlights, still off, left the world in shades of blue and gray.
The phone on the concrete continued to emit Letty’s worried voice, tinny and distant.“Hello? Somebody say something, dammit!”
“I’ve got her,” Dom said, his voice raw against Catalina’s hair. He wasn’t sure if he was speaking to Letty or to the ghost of his sister clinging to the rail. “She’s right here.”
Catalina didn’t move. Her breath hitched, a final, shuddering release. She leaned her full weight into him, a surrender that was more terrifying than her fight. Dom kept one arm locked around her waist. With the other, he bent, awkwardly, never letting her go, and scooped the phone from the cold ground. He brought it to his ear.
“Letty.”
A sharp exhale crackled through the speaker. “Is she—”
“She’s safe,” Dom said, cutting her off. The word ‘safe’ felt inadequate, a thin bandage on a wound that went to the bone. “I’ve got her. She’s… standing down.”
“Thank Christ.” Letty’s own breath was shaky. “Don’t let go of her, Dom. Not for a second.”
“I’m not.” He could feel Catalina listening, her body rigid again, absorbing the conversation. The night air was a cold wash on the sweat at the back of his neck. The moon illuminated the scuffed toes of his boots, the glitter of mica in the concrete. Normal details in an unfathomable scene. “We’ll be home soon.”
“The bridge?” Letty asked, her tone shifting from panic to something harder, more tactical.
“Yeah.”
“Get her out of there. Now.” Letty’s voice dropped, urgent. “And Dom… the script is shredded. We need a new play. Tonight. Just get her home in one piece first.”
“Copy that.” He ended the call, the screen going dark. He slid the phone into his own pocket. Its weight was a new kind of gravity. The conversation had lasted less than a minute. It felt like an epoch had passed.
He loosened his hold, just enough to turn her gently within the circle of his arms. She didn’t resist. Her face was a pale oval, slick with tears, her eyes hollowed out by exhaustion and something worse. She looked at his chest, not his face.
“You heard,” she whispered. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know.” He cut her off again, his thumb brushing a tear-track from her cheek. The contact was deliberate this time, a point of warmth in the chill. “It doesn’t matter what you meant. You said it. That’s enough.”
Her gaze finally lifted to his. In the moonlight, her brown eyes were black, deep wells of a pain he recognized because it was his own. The monster in the engine. The sad man. It was him, reflected back at her. They had built their daughter’s nightmare together.
“I can’t do the business partner thing,” she said, her voice drained. “The roommates. The… script. I tried. I broke the first rule in the kitchen.”
“I started it on the highway,” he said. “We’re past rules.”
“Then what’s left?” The question hung between them, simpler and more devastating than Mina’s.
He didn’t have an answer. He had actions. He always had actions. “Home,” he said, his voice firming. “Right now. We’re going home, and we’re sitting at that table, and we’re not moving until we figure out how to live in this. All three of us.”
She searched his face, looking for the lie, the easy fix. She wouldn’t find it. There was only the solid, stubborn set of his jaw, the unflinching hold of his gaze. The same certainty he used to align a chassis or torque a headbolt.
“Okay,” she breathed, the word a w
The same certainty he used to align a chassis or torque a headbolt.
“Okay,” she breathed, the word a white plume in the cold air. He walked her to the Charger, his hand on the small of her back, a steady, grounding pressure. He didn’t open her door for her. He opened the passenger side of his car. She slid in without a word, the leather sighing under her weight. The drive back was a silent tunnel. The radio was off. The only sounds were the tires on asphalt and the low, constant rumble of the Hemi, a vibration that felt like it was coming from inside his own ribs. He kept his eyes on the road, his knuckles pale on the steering wheel, stealing glances at her profile lit by passing streetlights. She was staring out the window, but he knew she wasn’t seeing the sleeping city. She was seeing the drop.
Mia’s minivan wasn’t in the driveway yet. The house was exactly as they’d left it, steeped in the ghost of their earlier panic. The lavender scent from Mina’s humidifier lingered in the hall. Dom locked the front door behind them, the click echoing with finality.
He led Catalina to the kitchen table, pulling out a chair for her. She sat, compliant, hollow. He went to the sink, filled a glass with tap water, and set it in front of her. He didn’t sit. He paced the length of the table, the linoleum floor cool under his socked feet.
“We need coffee,” he said, more to the machine than to her.
“I don’t want coffee.”
“I need it.” He started the brew, the gurgle and hiss fracturing the quiet. “My brain feels like it’s packed in broken glass.” He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, watching her. “Look at me, Cat.”
She dragged her gaze from the grain of the wood table. Her eyes were still red, but dry now. Empty.
“Okay,” he started, the word feeling too small for the canyon they had to cross. “We lied. To everyone. For five years. That lie built this house. It built our mother’s peace of mind. It built Mia’s version of us.”
“It’s a shit foundation,” she murmured, running a fingertip around the rim of her water glass.
“It’s crumbling,” he agreed. “And Mina’s standing on it.” He pushed off the counter and pulled out the chair opposite her, sitting down heavily. He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, bringing his face into the space between them. “So we stop. We stop today.”
She looked at him, a flicker of the old fire returning. Skepticism. “Stop lying? Just like that.”
“Just like that.” His voice was low, gravelly with a lack of sleep and an excess of resolution. “We tell Mom. We tell Mia.Today. When Mia gets here for breakfast. We sit them down and we tell them the whole thing.”
“The whole thing,” she echoed. It wasn’t a question.
“Everything. From the beginning.” He swallowed. “That I’m Mina’s father.”
The words hung in the kitchen air, more real and terrifying than any gun. Catalina flinched, but she didn’t look away.
“We tell them you weren’t some random one-night stand,” he continued, the plan forming with each word, a clear, brutal path opening in the fog. “We tell them it was me. It’s always been me. We tell them why we left for five years. Why we came back with a story we all had to memorize.”
“They’ll hate us.” Her voice was flat.
“Maybe,” he admitted. The possibility was a physical pain, a tightness behind his sternum. His mother’s disappointed eyes. Mia’s stunned betrayal. “Probably, at first. But it’s a clean wound. It can heal. This… this infection we’ve been letting fester? That kills everything. It’s already in Mina’s dreams.”
A cold, practical part of his mind, the part that calculated risk and reward on midnight streets, took over. “We give them the truth. The whole, ugly, unforgivable truth. And then we give them a choice.”
She blinked. “What choice?”
“We tell them we’re together. Not just co-parents.Together. For real. No more hiding in cars or pretending we don’t know how the other takes their coffee. And if they can’t live with that…” He took a deep breath, the air scraping his lungs. “If they can’t accept it, if they make you feel like that bridge is the only option again, then we leave.”
Catalina’s eyes widened.“Leave? Leave where?”
“Far away. Somewhere new. Somewhere no one knows our last name or our history.” He paused, the next part of the plan locking into place with a quiet, irrevocable click. “Somewhere where the legal paperwork says it’s okay. For a brother and sister to be together. To be a family. Legally.”
Her mouth fell open slightly. She looked winded. She’d expected a firefight. He was offering exodus.
“You’re serious.”
“Dead serious.” He reached across the table, slowly, telegraphing his movement. He covered her hand with his. This time, she didn’t pull away. Her skin was cold. He warmed it. “I almost lost you tonight, Catalina. To that drop. I’m not risking that again. Not for this house. Not for this street. Not for anybody’s peace of mind but ours. And Mina’s.”
Her fingers turned, lacing with his. The grip was fierce, desperate.
“They’ll never forgive us for leaving,” she whispered.
“They might never forgive us for staying, either,” he countered. “But this way, we’re living in the light. All three of us. No more monsters in the engine.”
The coffee maker beeped, a shrill note that made them both jump. They didn’t move.
A car door slammed outside.
They froze. Their hands stayed locked on the table. It was Mia.Early.
The key turned in the front door.
Dom stood up, but he didn't let go of Catalina’s hand. He pulled her to her feet beside him. They faced the kitchen doorway, side by side, a united front bracing for the coming quake. Her grip was like iron. His was anchor-steady.
The front door swung open.
“Hey, I brought those croissants Mina likes—” Mia’s cheerful voice cut off as she stepped into the hallway and saw them standing there in the silent, bright kitchen. She saw their faces, raw from tears and adrenaline and lack of sleep. She saw their joined hands, held openly on the table between them.
The bag of groceries slid from her grasp, hitting the floor with a soft thud.
Her smile vanished, replaced by a slow, dawning confusion that tightened into suspicion. Her gaze went from their hands to their eyes, searching.
Cat’s hand trembled in his. He squeezed it, hard. A silent signal.Now.
“Mia,” Dom said, his voice filling the quiet house. “We need to talk.”