First Grave on the Right

shoulders, the disappointment thinning her lips and pinching her brows told me everything I needed to know. Reyes wasn’t the only one in the family who’d been abused.

“Please don’t be angry with yourself,” I said, still not feeling guilty so much as empathetic. “I do this stuff for a living because I’m good at it.” She eyed the rag in her hands as I continued, her grip tightening. “Why would Reyes want your identity to remain a secret? There’s nothing about you in his prison jacket. He’s never listed you as a relative or a contact of any sort. There’s not a word about you in any of the court transcripts.”

After a long pause, she spoke with a sadness that seemed almost palpable. “There wouldn’t be. He made me promise not to tell anyone who I was. We have different last names. It was easy to fade into the shadows at the trial. No one suspected a thing.”

Why on Earth would Reyes want her to remain anonymous during his trial? If anything, she should have been a key witness. “Do you know what’s happened to him?” I asked.

Her chin dropped farther, her hair shielding her eyes. “I know he was shot. Amador told me.”

“Ah. Does Amador keep you informed?”

“Yes.”

“So you know the state is going to take him off life support tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice catching.

Finally, we were getting somewhere. This might just work after all. “You have to fight it, Kim. No one else can. You seem to be his only living relative.”

“I can’t,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. “I can’t get involved.”

Astonishment sucked the air out of my lungs, and I stared at her, shocked and bemused.

She twisted the rag between white-knuckled fists. “Please don’t look at me like that. You don’t understand.”

“Obviously not.”

A soft sob escaped from her chest. “He made me swear I would never contact him again. He said when he got out, he would find me. That’s why I’ve stayed here in Albuquerque. But I don’t go visit him, I don’t write him or call him or send him gifts on his birthday. He made me swear,” she said, her eyes pleading with me to understand. “I can’t get involved.”

Though I couldn’t imagine why Reyes made her swear to such a thing, the situation had clearly changed. I decided to go for the jugular. Desperate times and all. “Kim, he protected you all those years,” I said, my voice acidic with accusation. “How can you do nothing?”

“Protected is not the right word,” she said, sniffing behind the dish towel.

“I don’t get it. Was there … sexual abuse?” I couldn’t believe how presumptuous I was becoming, how much nerve I’d suddenly garnered in the face of adversity. To just blurt out something so sensitive like that bordered on brutality.

Tears pushed past her lashes and flowed in rivulets down her cheeks, answering for her.

“And he protected you the best he could. How can you turn your back on him now?”

“I told you, protected is not the right word.”

The end of my patience was rocketing toward me. Why would she not want to help him? I saw how much he’d worried about her, how he’d risked his life that night just to stay with her. He could have run away, gone to the police, turned his psychotic father in to the authorities and been free. But he stayed. For her.

“What is the right word, then?” I asked, a caustic edge to my voice.

After a long moment of thought, she looked up at me, her green eyes shimmering in the afternoon sun. “Endured.”

Okay. That threw me. “I don’t understand. What—?”

“My father”—she interrupted, her voice cracking under the weight of her words—“my father never touched me. I was simply the weapon he wielded to control Reyes.”

“But you just … implied there was sexual abuse.”

Her gaze lifted to mine, her green eyes almost hostile at what I was forcing her to say. “He never touched me. Me. I didn’t say there wasn’t sexual abuse.”

I sat blindsided, stunned into silence a full minute, absorbing what Kim told me, turning it over and analyzing it in my mind. It was painful even to contemplate, like the thought itself was a physical entity, a box covered in razor sharp shards of glass, slicing through my fingertips every time I tried to open it.

“At first, he used animals to control him.”

Refocusing on her fragile face, I stumbled back to her.

“When Reyes was little, he used animals. If Reyes misbehaved, the animals paid the price, suffered because of him. Our father learned early on he couldn’t control him otherwise.”

I blinked, allowed the words to sink in despite my sudden reluctance to hear them.

“Then my mother, a drug addict who ended up dying from complications due to hepatitis, gave him the ultimate weapon. Me. She dropped me on his doorstep and never looked back. She gave my father power over Reyes. If he did not obey the man’s every command, I went without dinner. Breakfast. Lunch. And eventually water. On and on, until Reyes gave in. Our father had no interest in me whatsoever except as a tool. Leverage over my brother’s every move.”

I sat speechless, unable to comprehend such an existence. To even imagine Reyes so helpless, a veritable slave to a monster. My chest tightened and my stomach knotted and I felt my breakfast edging back toward my mouth. I swallowed hard and took several deep breaths, disgusted with myself for making Kim relive horrors I could barely imagine.

“But you have to understand how Reyes is,” she continued, unaware of my predicament, “how he thinks. What I’ve just told you is the truth, but the way he sees it, our father hurt me because of him. He took the burden onto his own shoulders all those years, carried the weight of my well-being like a king shoulders the welfare of his people.”

I fastened my jaw shut to keep my chin from quivering.

“He told me that no one would ever hurt me because of him again. How can he think that? It was just the opposite. My father hurt him because of me.” After she wiped at a tear, she leveled a hapless gaze on me. “Do you know why I’m telling you this?”

Her question surprised me, and I shook my head. I hadn’t thought of it.

“Because it’s you.”

I did my best to focus, to get past everything she was telling me and listen.

“From the time Reyes was little, he’s had seizures. Sometimes they would last for over an hour. When he came out of them, he would have the most bizarre memories. Memories of a girl with dark hair and sparkling gold eyes. I knew the minute I opened the door, it was you.”

He had memories? Of me? My pulse quickened.

“He said he saved your life once. Said a man had taken you into an apartment.” She leaned forward. “In case you’ve ever wondered, you weren’t going to make it out of that apartment alive. The man was going to do what he wanted and then smother you. He’d done it before.”

A jolt of anxiety rushed through me. “Reyes knew I was in danger?” I asked, finding my voice at last.

“Yes. Another time, he only thought you were in danger, but he said your stepmother was yelling at you in front of dozens of onlookers. You were scared and mortified. Those strong emotions are what caused him to seize. He was so outraged when he got there, so worried about you, he said he almost cut your stepmother in two just to teach her a lesson. But you begged him in soft whispers to let her be.”

With the images of that day swimming in my head, I said, “I remember. He was so angry.”

“Later, he learned how to find you without the seizures. He would go into a trancelike state just to see you, just to watch you.” She smiled, remembering happier times. “He called you Dutch.”

Shaking visibly, I released a long, labored breath. Every word she spoke only evoked more questions, an even deeper lack of understanding.

“If Reyes learned to control what he is, to harness the power he had and to use it, why didn’t he … stop your father?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think he believed it.”

My brows slid together. “I don’t understand.”