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My stomach flip-flops, and I’m not sure if it is in excitement or dread.
Chapter 16
Tino
A message from Dom pings on my phone.
Good luck with that, I think.
Dom believes he can solve every problem in life by being a bossy asshole. He’s like his dad in that regard. I’m worried about him, and Kirill. I’m even more worried about Mackenzie.
My whole body hurts today, and my head is pounding. I’m at the point where if I don’t take the Oxy, my head splits. I never used to have headaches like this until I started taking increasing doses of my painkillers. I also start to get panicky and sweaty.
I open my toiletry bag and pluck out the bottle of pills. I give it a shake. I can tell there aren’t many left, and my body floods with anxiety.
I’ve been through an ever-changing roster of doctors. I’m getting to the point where there isn’t a private doctor on the eastern seaboard I haven’t seen. I don’t want to start getting my drugs on the streets, because you don’t know what they’ve been cut with or what you’re actually buying, but I might not have a choice. I know I need to stop, or at least cut down, but right now isn’t a good time. There’s too much stress going on all around me. The pills help with my physical pain, but they also help me deal with all that other shit.
I promise myself every day that I will stop at some point. It’s never the right time, though. I’m aware that I keep making excuses.
I ball my hands into fists and stand, pacing the room. These fucking dorms are so claustrophobic. The square walls, and the gray floor, and the small windows. Academic jail cells for the kids of criminal elites. That’s all they are.
Deciding I can’t sit in my room and wait, I tip one of the pills out of the bottle and swallow it down dry. Then I change into some running gear and pull on my track shoes. I’ll go for a run and see if that helps.
Once I’m outside, with the sun on my face and the wind blowing gently over me as I race through the trees, I start to feel better. I’ve been having a new and disturbing symptom recently. Every now and again, when I’m least expecting it, I’m taken back to the events of that day. The day my world erupted into pain.
The gunfire. The screams. The men dragging me from my room and beating me over and over with sticks and fists. Kicking me with their boot-clad feet.
I should be grateful. My sister got it a lot worse than I did. The things they did to her are the kind of things no one will ever forget. Least of all her. She’s been in therapy ever since. Twice a week, paid for by our father. Me, though, I’m expected to suck it up. I wasn’t assaulted in the way she was, and also, as my father always reminds me, I’m the man of the house. Once Father has retired, everything will fall to me. I will be the one in charge. I will be the one who needs to fight the battles.
Women can be weak, and they can need help. We men can’t. I learned that lesson as a very young boy.
I stop running and take a seat on the bench with a view out over the track field. I take a swig of the water from the bottle attached to my waist. Catching my breath, I let myself think back to the first time my father told me that big boys don’t cry.
I’d only been around seven or eight years old. A bigger boy, José, a son of one of the men who worked as an armed guard for my father, had pushed me so hard that I fell over and broke my nose.
I’d been in so much pain that I’d immediately started to cry. The kid laughed at me for being a big baby, and I told him that when my father found out what he’d done, he would be in so much trouble. My father was the man in charge. No one got to do that kind of thing to me. I understood as much because I’d seen Father threaten men with their lives for looking at my mother the wrong way.
I’d raced back to the house, at the far end of the compound where we lived. I was shouting for my papi and at the same time trying to wipe away the blood that kept pouring over my mouth and chin and down my throat.
My mother had come first, running out of the living room and crying out when she saw me. Not long after her, my father appeared, with two of his regular guards. They both stood by his side with their hands on their hips, resting casually on the guns they had there.
My father had hunkered down to my level and looked me in the eye. “What has happened, my son?”
“José pushed me, and I fell over, and I’ve hurt my nose, Papi,” I had said truthfully. Tears and snot mingled with the blood, and Mami gently dabbed at my face with a handkerchief.
“Did you hit him back?” my father asked.
“Of course not, Papi. He’s bigger than me, and older.”
“Those things don’t make him a better fighter than you, though. Or they wouldn’t if you knew how to defend yourself properly. We will start lessons soon. No son of mine is going to be beaten by the hired help.”
“For God’s sake,” Mami had cried. “I think his nose is broken. He needs to go to the hospital.”
“He can see the doctor here at the compound,” Father had insisted. Then he looked back at me. “Stop your sniveling, boy,” he snapped. “It’s okay to cry when you’re small, but now that you’re turning into a big boy, you can’t cry like this.”
I remember trying to blink back the tears. And every time I sniffed, searing pain burned through my nose and into my eyes.
