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I also needed answers.
I waited in the station shop, flipping through magazines, until the train pulled out, and I knew that Omar was gone. I grabbed a phone card from the wall of gift cards and prepaid Visas and paid for it. It was a risky move. If Omar saw the charges before I had things straightened out, he would come after me, but I had been left without a cellphone.
I found a bank of payphones and used the card to place a call to Matteo, praying he would answer an unknown number. Luckily, the call connected after the third ring “Hello?”
“Matteo!”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment. “Lyse?” Matteo’s voice broke over my name. “Lyse, is that really you?”
“Of course, it’s me,” I said, trying not to snap at him. “Why do you sound so surprised?”
“Where are you?” he asked instead of answering my question. “I’ll come get you!”
It was on the tip of my tongue to agree and tell him where I was, but the image of Jesus with such a hateful expression on his face came to mind. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to be picked up. Can you meet me? I have questions.”
“What? Lyse, let me pick you up. I’ll bring you home.”
“No,” I insisted. “I’m not ever going back there. Do you hear me?” The very thought made my blood boil in my veins. “Can you meet me or not?”
Matteo was quiet for a moment. “You sound like you don’t trust me.”
I blinked at the burning in my eyes again.You’re not crying again, I told myself. I’d already done that enough for today. “I don’t trust you,” I said.
“Lyse.”
“If I can trust you, meet me at the Amtrak station in half an hour. Comealone. If I see anyone with you, I’ll get on a train, and you’ll never see me again.”
“Okay, okay,” Matteo said. “I’ll be there.”
“Promise that you’ll come alone. Don’t tell Apá.”
“I won’t tell him,” he said, though it sounded like it pained him to say those words. “Wait for me.”
CHAPTER32
Omar
“You shouldn’t be here, Omar.Jefegave you a time limit to be gone.” One of the guards, a third or fourth cousin whose name I couldn’t be bothered to remember, tried to put his hand on my chest to stop me from getting inside.
I grabbed his hand and bent it backward, on the edge of snapping his wrist. “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet,primo,” I snarled at him and put more pressure on his wrist until the man whimpered to be let go. “Who trained you?” I spat. “Tell me that I didn’t. I wouldn’t put anyone in a security detail who had this little spine.”
He didn’t answer. He was looking a little gray, and when he made a gagging sound, I let him go and stepped back so that when he threw up, it didn’t get on my shoes.Fucking pathetic.While he was busy emptying his stomach over a little bit of pain, I stepped past him and entered the house. I’d only just left, but it felt different now, like it wasn’t my home anymore. I pushed past that feeling and forced myself to walk to Angel’s office.
My older brother was in the same spot that I left him, bent over papers at his desk, but this time, he didn’t make me wait for him to say something. “What the hell are you doing here? Why would you come back?”
“I’ve been your second our whole lives.”
Angel scoffed. “Things change.”
I shook my head. “Not this. I have always been loyal to you.”
Anger flashed across his face. “Until today, I would have said the same, but you chose that woman over your family.”
“If Emma had been in her place?”
Angel made an ugly, almost animal sound. “Don’t bring my wife into this.”
The urge to smash my fist into something was great; I clenched my hands into fists, digging my nails into my palms. “Padre went after Emma, and you staged a fucking coup,hermano,” I reminded him. “I stood by you through that.”
