Fire & Dark (The Night Horde SoCal Book 3) (24 page)

“Fucking hell.” Deeper understanding dawned in his eyes. “They knew my mother was there. They thought she was alone. They meant to kill her.”

Pilar couldn’t say the answer to that out loud. “I’m sorry, Connor. I know it was me who brought all this down on you.”

“Yeah. It was us. I got caught up in you. I should have…I don’t know. Fuck, I don’t even know if I’d do it differently if I could.”

“Where does this leave us?”

He stepped away from the bed and leaned back heavily against the wall. “I love you. I thought before that I wanted to be done, but I don’t. I can’t. I need you.”

“We’re okay, then?” The thought that they had found their breaking point had shaken her badly, and the hope that they hadn’t was shaking her more. She went to him and slid her hands under his kutte. She’d never needed someone this way before; she’d never felt so afraid to lose a connection. It made her feel weak and afraid. It hurt so deeply that it buried the conflicted, confusing pain of losing Hugo and the electric anxiety of what she faced when she told her grandmother. Right now, the most important thing in her life was to be solid with this man.

Connor’s big, heavy hands wrapped around her arms. “Do you love me?”

“Yes. So much it hurts.”

“Then I guess we’ll be okay.”

Will be.
Meaning that they weren’t yet.

Afraid and exhausted, she leaned into him and took what comfort she could when his arms enclosed her and pulled her close. Snaking her arms around his waist, she tried to give him the same comfort back.

She had given herself to this man, her real self. Pilar, not Cordero. Or both of them, really, all of her—the strong and the weak, the fierce and the vulnerable. She needed him to keep safe what she had never given to anyone else.

~oOo~

Pilar’s grandmother worked as an office manager at an accounting firm in San Bernardino. She’d been the receptionist there when Pilar and Hugo were children, and she’d worked her way through the administrative ranks. When she’d moved her grandchildren to what she’d meant to be a safer life, she had picked up a second job, cleaning the offices of the very same building she spent her days answering phones in.

She’d also worked weekends at a little boutique. When Pilar became a firefighter, she was able to help out with bills, and being able to cut back to one job had been almost like retirement for her grandmother.

Pilar hated the idea of breaking this news to her while she was at work, but she had no choice. Connor had told her that the Horde’s ‘cleaner’ was dumping the Assassin bodies with the ink intact. They would be quickly identified, and Pilar didn’t want her to hear it from some fucking detective who thought the Assassins were all scum.

It had to be her, and it had to be now. Staying with Connor this long had delayed the news too much already.

So she walked into the building, still wearing the uniform she’d jumped into from her bunk, answering the call of the fire on Nutmeg Ridge Drive. How long ago had that been? Hours? Days? She didn’t even know anymore. A lifetime ago.

She took the elevator up to the fourth floor and went into the office. A young receptionist sat at a desk that was far larger than was practically necessary. Pilar rarely visited her grandmother at work, so she didn’t know many of the people she worked with.

The woman smiled up at her. “May I help you?”

“I’m here to see Renata Salazar?”

“Is she expecting you?”

“No, it’s not business. I’m her granddaughter. It’s a family matter—an urgent one.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. One minute.” She picked up the phone and pressed a button. “Renata? Your granddaughter is here to see you.”

Hanging up, the girl smiled again. “You can go back. Do you know her office?”

“I do. Thanks.” She went back.

‘Office’ was a fairly optimistic term for the room that her grandmother called her own. Small and windowless, two walls dominated by shelves of office supplies, it was more of a closet. But she had a desk and a phone of her own, and a door that set her apart from the cubicles that took up most of the office suite, and she was proud of how far she’d advanced.

She was standing at the door when Pilar went back, and she looked worried. “What is it,
mija
? It’s Hugo, isn’t it? He’s hurt again?”

Pilar took hold of her hands. “Can we sit, Nana?”

“Oh, no. Oh, no. He’s dead. He is, isn’t he? Oh, Hughie, ah,
mijo
, no.”

The workers in the cubicles were starting to notice this little family scene. “Nana, let’s go in and close the door. Please.”

Pilar had never been someone who cried, not since she was a little girl. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel emotion—quite the opposite. She felt it so much that it became inexpressible. She turned tearful emotions into focus, in the same way that she had shut her fear down. She had learned to channel feeling into focus. She got intent, single-minded, but not emotional.

Except with Connor. Her emotions broke her control and focus all the time with him. She recalled the last time she and Connor had been intimate, when she’d bawled hysterically. She hadn’t yet had taken the time to figure out what had happened then to loosen pipes that had been dry for years—another question that might be better left unanswered.

Still, feeling her grandmother’s aged hands shaking, seeing the fear and sadness in the beloved brown eyes behind her bifocals, Pilar was spun.

She led her grandmother into her tiny office and closed the door.

~oOo~

It took weeks for the coroner to release her brother’s body. By the time Pilar and her grandmother could bury him, November was half over.

They had planned a traditional funeral for him, with a Mass before the burial service. Renata went to the church every day for more than a week beforehand to light a candle and to pray the rosary. She was a deeply, quietly religious woman and always had been, but her tenacity regarding Hugo’s end made Pilar think that their grandmother was trying to will him into God’s grace.

Pilar didn’t join her for those daily trips; she had long ago left behind most of the trappings of the religion she’d been born into, though when asked, she still readily identified as Catholic. It was hard to leave so much tradition and belief behind entirely.

But the rituals didn’t give her much comfort. Hugo was dead. Despite their grandmother’s efforts to save him from the life of their fathers and their mother, he had swirled down the same drain. Pilar had escaped it, for the most part, and in the weeks between Hugo’s death and his funeral, she embraced that truth. She went back to her life, away from Mission Street and the High Life, away from the Aztec Assassins. Away from her history. Away from her brother, her mother, her father, her stepfather. They were all dead. Their bodies had all fallen within a radius of about a hundred feet, and a quarter century, of each other.

But Pilar was free of it.

She checked in on her grandmother daily, and she helped with the planning of the service, but otherwise, she set Hugo to the side of her mind, with all of her unanswered questions and focused on the life she had made. She was still mostly numb, detached from almost everything except Connor. She could feel herself detaching.

Moore was on medical leave for three weeks. They made up a story about a climbing fall to cover for an unreported bullet wound. For almost their entire careers, they had been a team, and neither of them had been out hurt or sick in all that time. They’d even taken leave at the same time. So she’d never worked with anyone else. The captain rearranged the schedule to bring in someone from another watch to cover for Moore, and Pilar felt dislocated and territorial. She hadn’t realized how much she relied on her easy symbiosis with Moore until she’d lost it.

So work was strange and unfamiliar to her in these weeks. Even the vibe at meals was off.

The vibe was off between her and Connor, too. Ever since the fire. They’d only been together a handful of times in the two weeks since, and they hadn’t been really alone together at all. He was either doing club business, or he was at the hospital. If she wanted to see him, she had to go there.

And she didn’t mind it; he belonged with his parents. His father remained unconscious, and his prognosis hadn’t improved. They were all still, two weeks later, stuck at ‘wait and see.’ But his mother was recovering well and had been released after not much more than a week. Connor was bringing her to the hospital every day to sit at her husband’s bedside.

He blamed Pilar. She could feel it. He said that he was working through it, that he loved her, wanted her, needed her, but she could feel the distance that was growing between them.

And she hated it. She had let him in, let him closer to her than anyone else, and now he was in there, rattling around like a ghost. She didn’t know how to fix it, or how to go back to the way her life was before she’d met him. He was the only thing in her life right now that felt significant, but he was moving away from her, losing substance. She could feel him detaching.

As they stood at Hugo’s graveside, listening to the priest intone the words of ritual, Pilar was thinking about Connor. Who was not there. She knew why, and yet she didn’t. Hugo had torn his family up, and Connor had no grief over his death. But
she
did. She would have liked to have had his hand to hold as she buried her baby brother. The boy she’d failed. She would have liked the man she loved to stand with her. More than that—she needed it.

Instead, Moore stood at her side, holding her hand.

There weren’t many mourners for Hugo. A couple of people Pilar didn’t know, who might have been old school friends of his. Most of Pilar’s crew. And their grandmother’s friends. Usually, Chicano funerals were big, but there was no one left to mark Hugo’s passing. Their parents were dead. Pilar and their grandmother were his only living family. He’d had few friends outside the Assassins, and they were all—all but Sam, who was still in jail—dead. So the mourners made a small circle around the grave. When the priest was done, they took their turns adding handfuls of earth to his resting place. And then they headed back to their cars.

It was done. Hugo was no more.

Pilar felt a small, shameful frisson of relief. She was free.

Moore had his good arm around her shoulders as they walked across the grounds. He gave her a quick squeeze, dropped his arm, and said, “I’ll take Nana back to the house.”

“What?” Pilar had been lost in thought, and she was confused. They were all supposed to ride together; the mourners, such as they were, were headed to Nana’s house. When she turned to Moore, he tipped his head, indicating a point off to the front and side. She followed his gesture.

Connor was standing next to his bike, his arms crossed over a dark brown button-down shirt and a plain black leather jacket. No kutte, even though he was riding.

He had told her that he always wore his kutte when he rode, but she also knew enough to know why he wasn’t wearing it today. Because he wouldn’t show his colors at an enemy’s funeral. Hugo had been an enemy. An Assassin. Knowing that the club had a lengthy and arcane list of rules and traditions, she assumed he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. She was only assuming, however; he hadn’t said one way or the other.

Even with his sunglasses on, he was telegraphing jealousy so strongly, watching her walking up with Moore, that she could almost see the hate beaming through his lenses. God, she was tired of that. But for now, she focused on her relief that he was there at all.

She needed him. So she kissed her grandmother’s soft cheek, gave Moore a hug, and crossed the grounds to Connor.

“Hi. You came.” She walked straight to him and leaned her body into his. He had unwound his arms as she’d approached, and now he folded her up and kissed her head. When he held her like this, she could feel that there was a chance they would get through all of this and be okay.