Chapter 12: Sacred and Profane
The chapel was a pocket of unnatural quiet, carved out of the hospital’s constant low-grade panic. Colored light from a stained-glass window depicting a benevolent, somber saint pooled on the floor near Catalina’s knees. The air smelled of furniture polish and faint, floral-scented candle wax that couldn’t quite mask the underlying hospital bleach. It was the kind of silence that pressed on your eardrums.
Catalina wasn’t praying, not exactly. She was kneeling, head bowed, Mina a warm, heavy weight against her chest, breathing the milky-sweet scent of her daughter’s hair. Her lips moved, but the words weren’t for the statue of the Virgin Mary watching her with painted, placid eyes. They were a mantra, a mechanical repetition to keep the terror at bay. Breathe. Plan. Move. Breathe. Plan. Move.
Behind her, the silence was shattered by the scrape of a pew and Letty’s pacing footsteps on the flagstone floor. Her voice was a low, urgent growl, completely at odds with the surroundings.
“Yeah, I got it. Schengen zone, via private airstrip outside Basel.” A pause. Letty scoffed. “Don’t insult me. Of course I have the number. The Falcon 900 is ready? Good.” She listened, her free hand jangling the car keys she’d been spinning nervously. “The paperwork’s the priority. It has to hold up under a real check, not just a glance. No, not Toretto. Ancel.”
Catalina’s head lifted slightly at the unfamiliar name. Mina stirred, nuzzling deeper into her neck.
“Husband and wife,” Letty continued, her voice dropping even further. “Dominic and Catalina Ancel. Swiss residency permits, the whole nine. Mina as a dependent. Yeah, get the pictures from the cloud folder, the ones from the Barstow trip last year. Photoshop the rings on.” Another pause. Her pacing stopped. “The medical transfer docs are more important. He can’t travel commercially, not in this state. We need the whole narrative: elective cranial procedure abroad, private medical flight, the attending physician’s signature… No, I’ll get the signature.”
Catalina closed her eyes. A signature. That meant involving someone else, pulling another thread into their already unraveling world.
Letty’s tone shifted, became flinty. “The money’s already moving. You’ll have the first half in twenty minutes. The second half lands when we’re wheels up over international waters. Don’t fuck with me on this, Tej. You know better.”
She ended the call. The silence in the chapel rushed back in, now feeling charged, brittle. Letty slid into the pew behind Catalina, her body radiating a tense energy.
“The clinic in Zug is prepped. Isolated wing, their own security, the works,” Letty said, her voice now a husky whisper meant only for Catalina. “Plane’s fueled. Tej’s forging the documents. He says twelve hours for the passports and medical file to be airtight.”
“Twelve hours,” Catalina repeated, the words hollow. Dominic was lying in a bed five floors up with a piece of his skull in a freezer. Twelve hours was a lifetime. “León’s people could be here in twelve minutes.”
“Which is why we’re not waiting for the pretty paperwork,” Letty said. Her hand came to rest on Catalina’s shoulder, a brief, solid anchor. “We move him tonight. The documents meet us at the airstrip. We use the chaos, the shift change at three AM. Jess is already prepping the ambulance.”
Catalina turned to look at her. Jess was an old friend from the racing circuits, now a paramedic. Another thread pulled. “Does Jess know…?”
“Knows Dom’s in trouble. Knows we need a ride. That’s all.” Letty’s eyes were dark, serious. “The forged transfer order will be in the system by two. We just have to walk him out the front door.”
“Walk him out,” Catalina murmured, looking down at Mina’s sleeping face. It sounded like a suicide mission. “He can’t sit up, Letty. He can barely whisper.”
“He’ll have to,” Letty said simply, no sugar coating it. “There’s a wheelchair. There are blankets. There’s you, looking like a terrified wife, which you will be. We sell it.”
A desperate, half-hysterical laugh caught in Catalina’s throat. “A terrified wife.” She looked up at the Virgin Mary’s serene face. “I’m praying to your son,” she thought, the words sharp and internal. “But I’m lying to everyone else’s. What does that get me?”
“Cat,” Letty said, her voice softer. “The ‘husband’ thing… It’s the only way. The clinic needs next-of-kin access. The flights, the borders… it has to be spousal.”
“I know.” Catalina’s voice was a thread. She did know. It was the only shield they had, a piece of paper that would call their sin a sacrament. It felt like a final, grotesque joke. “Does he know? That we’re… married?”
“Not yet.” Letty stood up, her leather jacket creaking. “I’ll go up, prep him. You stay here, out of sight for a bit longer. Get your head right.”
After Letty left, the chapel felt even larger, emptier. Catalina shifted Mina to her lap, smoothing the toddler’s dark hair. She looked so much like him. The curve of her cheek, the stubborn set of her brow. The evidence was everywhere, in plain sight, a secret everyone was too blind to see.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A number she didn’t recognize, with a 323 area code. Los Angeles.
Her blood went cold. She stared at it, the vibration a tiny, insistent threat against her thigh. It buzzed again. Stopped. A moment later, a text banner flashed on the screen.
Beautiful flowers for room 614. Wanted to confirm delivery. Should we leave at the nurse’s station?
Catalina’s grip tightened around Mina. Room 614. Flowers. Nobody sent flowers. Their crew didn’t work that way. Letty would have brought a six-pack, not roses. It was a probe. A gentle, polite knock on the door to see if anyone was home.
She stood up so fast her vision spotted. Mina whimpered in her sleep. Catalina stumbled out of the pew, her heart hammering against her ribs. She burst through the chapel doors into the bright, sanitized hallway, the noise of the hospital a shocking assault.
She ran, not to the elevators, but to the stairs, taking them two at a time, Mina a precious, jostling burden in her arms. The burn in her lungs was good. It grounded her. She hit the sixth-floor door and entered the ICU corridor at a fast walk, trying to look like a concerned family member, not a fleeing animal.
Letty was standing outside Dominic’s room, talking in a low voice to a nurse. She saw Catalina’s face and excused herself immediately.
“What?” Letty’s hand went to the small of her back, a habitual touch to a weapon that wasn’t there.
Catalina showed her the phone, the text. “They’re here. Or they’re checking.”
Letty’s face hardened into a mask of cold calculation. She glanced at the nurse’s station, then back to the room. “Change of plan. We go now. Not at three. Now.”
“How? The docs, the ambulance—”
“We take him ourselves. Right out the fire exit. You get the car, bring it around to the loading dock. I’ll get Dom.”
“You can’t carry him!”
“I don’t have to carry him,” Letty said, her eyes locking on a empty, wheeled office chair parked by a cleaning cart. “I just have to roll him. Go.”
There was no time to argue. Catalina looked through the window into Dominic’s room. He was awake, his head turned toward the door, as if he’d sensed the shift in the air. His eyes met hers. He gave the faintest nod. He was ready. Or as ready as he’d ever be.
Catalina turned and ran, Mina crying now, confused by the sudden movement, the fear thrumming through her mother’s body. The elevator was too slow. She hit the stairs again, her sneakers slapping on concrete, each flight a descent away from him. Her mind raced faster than her feet. The car was in the visitors’ lot. Keys in her pocket. Loading dock was on the east side.
She burst out into the cool night air, the parking lot lights a hazy orange. She found the beaten-up, anonymous sedan Letty had procured, fumbled the keys, and got Mina into the car seat with shaking hands. “Shhh, mi amor, shhh, it’s okay,” she soothed, her voice betraying her completely.
She gunned the engine, the sound too loud in the quiet night. She swung around to the east side, the headlights sweeping across the blank metal doors of the loading dock. She parked, killed the lights, and waited.
Every second was a lifetime. She watched the doors, her fingers drumming a frantic rhythm on the steering wheel. Come on. Come on.
The metal door banged open. Letty emerged backward, pulling the office chair. In it, draped in a stolen hospital blanket, his head lolling weakly against the back, was Dominic. He was still in his hospital gown, an IV bag clutched in his lap like a macabre bouquet, the tube snaking under the blanket to his arm.
Letty maneuvered the chair down the ramp with brutal efficiency. Catalina jumped out, opening the rear passenger door.
“Easy, easy,” Letty grunted as they hauled him, a dead weight of muscle and pain, into the backseat. He groaned, a sound that ripped through Catalina. They shoved the chair aside, Letty piling in next to him to support him.
Catalina slammed the door and threw herself behind the wheel. She didn’t look back at the hospital, at the safe, sterile prison they were escaping. She pulled away smoothly, merging into the late-night traffic, just another car in the dark.
In the backseat, Dominic’s voice, ragged and thin, cut through the hum of the engine.
“They’ll watch the routes to the safe houses.” Each word was a pulled stitch, tight and painful. He coughed, a wet, wrenching sound. “Jess… the ambulance plan…”
“Is blown,” Letty finished for him, her arm braced across his chest to keep him upright as the car turned a corner. “We’re improvising.”
Catalina’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, searching for headlights that matched pace. Every set of lights felt predatory. “Where, Dom? Tell me where to go.”
He was silent for a long moment, his breathing a shallow rasp. The city lights streaked across his pale, sweaty face in the mirror. “The yard,” he whispered finally. “Where we stripped the ’72 Charger.”
She knew it instantly. An old, fenced-in auto-wrecking yard on the industrial edge of the city. It was a ghost of their past, a place of grease and forgotten metal. “Why there?”
“Hector… never knew about it.” He sucked in a sharp breath, riding out a wave of pain. “Van’s there. Under the tarp… by the crusher.”
Letty’s eyes met Catalina’s in the mirror. A plan, however fragile, was taking shape. Catalina pressed the accelerator, steering them away from the highway and toward the darker, quieter grids of the industrial district.
The transition was abrupt. The clean, lit order of the hospital zone melted into a landscape of potholed streets and shadows cast by hulking, silent warehouses. Chain-link fences blurred past, topped with ragged coils of rusted wire. The air coming through the vent changed, carrying the scent of concrete dust, old oil, and decay.
“There,” Dominic breathed, his head nodding weakly toward a fence crowned with dead vines. The gate was secured by a heavy chain and padlock.
Catalina stopped the car a block away, killing the lights. The sudden darkness was suffocating. The only sound was Dominic’s labored breathing and Mina’s soft, sleepy fussing in her car seat.
“I’ll go,” Letty said, already opening her door. “You stay with them.” She vanished into the gloom, a shadow among shadows.
The silence in the car was a live wire. Catalina turned in her seat, reaching back to find Dominic’s hand. It was cold. “The van better start,” she said, her attempt at levity falling flat.
“It’ll start.” His fingers tightened weakly around hers. His gaze drifted to Mina, then to the swell of Catalina’s stomach under her sweatshirt. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.” The word came out sharper than she intended. “You didn’t do this. León did.”
“I took the job.” His voice was full of a gravelly self-loathing. “I brought this home.”
A shape materialized at Catalina’s window, making her jump. Letty’s face appeared, a slash of tension in the dark. “Gate’s open. The van’s there. It’s a dirty white Econoline. Can you walk, Dom?”
“Have to,” he grunted.
The transfer was a slow, painful ballet. They half-carried, half-dragged him from the sedan, his weight sagging between them. His legs buckled twice on the gritty asphalt. Each stifled groan from him felt like a blade twisting in Catalina’s gut. They bundled him into the passenger seat of the van, Letty buckling him in like a child.
Catalina ran back for Mina, who was now fully awake and quiet, her wide eyes taking in the fearful movements in the dark. She settled her in the van’s back seat, amidst the ghostly shapes of covered car parts. Letty slid behind the wheel.
The van’s engine turned over with a protesting cough, then caught, rumbling to life with a deep, diesel chug. Letty flicked the headlights on, illuminating the skeletal remains of crushed cars. It was a cemetery of steel.
“Where now?” Letty asked, easing the van toward the open gate. “The airstrip isn’t for hours. We can’t just drive.”
Dominic’s head was leaning against the cold window glass. “Train yard,” he murmured, his eyes closed. “The old maintenance sheds. We camped there once.”
Catalina remembered. A summer night years ago, the air thick with the smell of creosote and wild grass. It felt like a lifetime from this clenched, metallic fear.
Letty nodded, steering them onto the deserted service road. The van’s cabin was a bubble of shared breath and dread. Mina started to cry, a soft, confused whimper.
“It’s okay, baby,” Catalina soothed from the back, her hand on Mina’s leg. Her own voice sounded unconvincing. The headlights caught the reflective eyes of a cat slinking between the wrecks, then swept away.
They were two blocks from the train yard when the headlights appeared behind them. Not just headlights. High beams, blinding in the rearview, closing fast.
“Company,” Letty said flatly, her hands tightening on the wheel.
A black SUV surged up behind them, riding their bumper. Its lights flooded the van’s interior, casting their startled faces into sharp relief. It was conspicuously clean, a predatory shark in this sea of decay.
Dominic turned his head slowly, wincing at the light. “Don’t stop,” he whispered.
The SUV swung out and pulled alongside them. The passenger window was down. Catalina saw the glint of a watch, a bored, hard face. The man looked at the van, at Letty, at Dominic slumped in the seat.
His eyes lingered for a second too long. He said something to the driver.
The SUV’s engine roared. It shot ahead, cutting sharply in front of them. Letty slammed the brakes, the van’s worn tires screeching in protest. They were boxed in. Another set of headlights flared to life directly ahead, blocking the narrow road.
Doors opened on the SUV ahead. Two men got out, their movements casual, deliberate. One held a tire iron loosely at his side.
One held a tire iron loosely at his side. The metallic tap it made against his leg was the only sound beyond the van’s idle rumble. Letty’s fingers flexed on the gear shift. “Options?” she muttered, her eyes scanning the shadows behind the men.
“Only one,” Dominic said, his voice a strained thread. He leaned forward slowly, his face ghastly in the dashboard glow. “Give it gas.”
Letty didn’t hesitate. She slammed the van into reverse, the tires screaming again as they lurched backward. The men shouted, scattering. She cranked the wheel hard, throwing the vehicle into a jerking three-point turn that slammed Dominic against his door. He cried out, a sharp, bitten-off sound of pain.
The van’s headlights swept across the second car blocking their path. A man was still in the driver’s seat. Letty aimed for his front quarter-panel. “Hold on!” she yelled.
The impact was a jarring crunch of metal and glass. The van shuddered, bucking over debris. Catalina threw herself over Mina in the back, bracing against the cold, corrugated metal wall. The blocking car was shoved aside with a shrieking protest of twisted steel.
Then they were free, accelerating down a narrow alley between two warehouses. The van’s steering pulled sharply to the left, a grinding noise coming from the front axle. “We’ve got damage,” Letty reported, wrestling the wheel.
In the back, Mina was wailing, a high, terrified sound. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” Catalina chanted, her own heart hammering against her ribs. She looked back. Headlights swerved into the alley behind them, high beams bouncing wildly.
“They’re coming,” Catalina said.
“I see ‘em.” Letty took a hard right, the van’s battered body groaning. They were in another labyrinth of storage lots and fenced yards. “We can’t outrun them in this thing. Not for long.”
Dominic was breathing in short, pained gulps, one hand pressed to his bandaged head. His eyes were squeezed shut against the pain radiating through his skull from the impact. “The railyard,” he managed to grit out. “Go ground-level. Through the underpass.”
Letty nodded, swerving onto a crumbling service road that dipped beneath old train tracks. The tunnel was short and poorly lit, a stripe of pitch black in the middle. She killed the headlights for three seconds as they entered, plunging them into utter darkness, then flipped them back on as they exited.
She pulled the van sharply behind a towering stack of rotting railroad ties, killing the engine. The sudden silence was violent, broken only by Mina’s fading sobs and their ragged breathing. Dust motes swirled in the light of a single, distant sodium vapor lamp.
They waited, ears straining. Seconds bled into a minute. No headlights pierced the tunnel mouth behind them.
“Maybe we lost them,” Catalina whispered, the hope fragile in her throat.
A engine gunned in the distance, the sound echoing off the concrete underpass. It wasn’t behind them. It was ahead. On the other side of the railyard.
“They’re flanking,” Letty said, her voice flat. She peered through the grimy windshield. “They know the area.”
Dominic shifted painfully in his seat. He turned to look into the back. Catalina was holding Mina close, the little girl’s face streaked with tears, her small hands fisted in her mother’s shirt. Her blue eyes, so much like his own, were wide with a fear he had put there.
He reached a trembling hand back between the seats. Catalina took it, her grip fierce.
“Look at me,” he whispered, each word costing him. His gaze held Catalina’s, then dropped to Mina. “We are going through this.” He swallowed, his throat dry. “We are going back to our home in Switzerland, okay?”
A tear traced a path through the grime on Catalina’s cheek. She nodded, unable to speak.
“We are going to have these babies in Switzerland,” he continued, his voice gaining a sliver of strength, a promise woven into the pain. “And we are going to get married. In Switzerland. With our real names.”
It was the first time he’d ever said it out loud, a dream spoken into the dusty, dangerous dark. Mina, soothed by the sound of his voice, quieted, her breath hitching.
Letty stared straight ahead, giving them this shred of privacy in the collapsing world. “Gotta move,” she said softly, but with finality. “That dream needs a driveway, Dom. And we ain’t in it yet.”
She pointed. Beyond the tracks, maybe five hundred yards away, the skeletal roof of an old maintenance shed was visible against the lighter sky.
“On foot,” Letty said. “It’s the only way.”
They moved like ghosts through the graveyard of steel and timber. Catalina carried Mina, the child’s face buried in her neck. Letty supported Dominic, his arm draped over her shoulders, his steps a stumbling drag. Every shuffled footfall on the gravel seemed thunderous.
They were twenty yards from the shed’s broken door when headlights arced across the field from the right, pinning them like insects.
A door slammed. A voice, calm and conversational, carried across the night. “Dominic Toretto. You’re a hard man to visit.”
A figure leaned against the hood of a sleek black sedan, backlit by the glare. He was silhouetted, but the stance was casual, confident. It was the man from the SUV, the one with the watch.
Letty gently lowered Dominic to sit against a rusted coupling box. “Get her inside,” she hissed at Catalina.
Catalina didn’t move. She stood frozen, shielding Mina with her body.
The man pushed off the car and took a few steps forward. “León sends his regards. He’s very upset about Hector.” He gestured with the tire iron, still held loosely. “The money, we can work out. The disrespect… that’s a different conversation.”
Dominic tried to speak, but only a cough came out. He slumped lower against the cold metal.
The man’s gaze slid to Catalina, to the child in her arms. A slow, unpleasant smile touched his lips. “Family outing?” he called. “Bring them. Maybe we talk better somewhere more comfortable.”
Letty took a single step forward, placing herself directly between him and her people. Her hands were empty, held loosely at her sides. “The conversation’s over,” she said, her voice carrying a strange, almost bored calm. “You’re lost. Turn around.”
The man laughed. He nodded to his partner, who began to circle wide to the left. “The lady in the ICU said you might be feisty.”
He never saw the rusted brake rotor Letty had palmed from the ground. She threw it not at him, but at the sedan’s windshield. It struck with a startling crack, a spiderweb blossoming across the glass.
The distraction was a split second. It was enough. As the man flinched, looking at his car, Letty closed the distance. She moved not with the wide brawler’s swing he expected, but with a sharp, efficient violence. Her foot snapped up, catching his wrist. The tire iron spun away into the darkness.
He grunted, surprised, and swung a heavy fist. She ducked under it, driving her shoulder into his ribs. The air left his lungs with a whoosh. She followed with a knee to his thigh, buckling his leg.
It wasn’t a fight; it was a dismantling. In five seconds, he was on the ground, gasping, disarmed and disoriented. The partner rushing in froze, uncertain.
Letty stood over the first man, breathing steady. She looked at the partner. “Drive away,” she said, her voice low. “Tell León he got his answer.”
She didn’t wait to see if he obeyed. She turned her back on them, a gesture of utter contempt, and walked back to where Dominic sat. Together, she and Catalina lifted him, their arms under his, and half-carried him the final steps into the dark maw of the shed.
They disappeared into the deeper blackness just as the second man hauled his companion to his feet. The sedan’s engine started. The headlights swung away, sweeping across the shed’s door once before retreating into the night.
Inside, they sank to the dirt floor, pressed against a cold, brick interior wall. The only light came from a cracked skylight far above, a square of weak moonlight on the ground.
Dominic’s breathing was shallow, his skin clammy. The bandage on his head was dark with fresh blood.
“The stitches,” Catalina murmured, her hands fluttering near the wound. “They’ve opened.”
“Later,” he whispered, his head lolling back against the brick. He found her hand in the dark, and Mina’s small one, and held them both. “Switzerland,” he breathed, the word a talisman against the dark, a map point in a future that felt impossibly far away. Outside, the wind whistled through a broken pane, carrying the faint, fading sound of an engine.