Wind Therapy - A.J. Downey Page 0,74

gun that appeared like magic in his other hand into my cousin’s cheek that wasn’t pressed into the lift.

Fernando’s eyes widened and he held up his hands in surrender.

“Now, I’m not asking nice anymore,” Maverick declared coldly. “Where’s your fucking daddy at?”

“Come on, man!” Fernando’s voice was high and tight with panic and I stared at the scene in front of me. I stared at my cousin’s wide and frightened eyes and wondered how many times he’d put that same look on my face. How many times he’d backed me into the side of one of the houses and put his nose practically to mine and threatened me into silence. How many times he’d told me if I didn’t shut the fuck up about his father, how he would make sure I was raped for real. Or how he would hurt me so bad I would wish I were dead.

A moment of clarity overtook me in that moment, staring at him like that. So, scared he was about to piss himself, all his power stripped away.

My eyes tracked to Maverick, my lover, my man, and his words came back to me… you just point, and I’ll unleash hell.

I’d pointed, and he was here, and if this wasn’t hell, I didn’t know what was but for once I wasn’t the one expected to suffer. What’s more? I hadn’t done anything wrong unlike Fernando.

I mean, I couldn’t say that Fernando had done anything wrong either; at least not initially. In one regard I did pity him… he had a child molester for a father and his only sin was that he didn’t want to believe that. I could understand that. I could… and so watching what was happening now made my gut do an uncomfortable twist.

“Fernando,” I pleaded. “Just tell him what he wants to know so we can go!”

Maverick pressed a little more insistently with the barrel of the gun and Fernando cried, “Okay, okay!” and babbled like a brook. Information flowed freely after that. The brook giving way to a torrent.

I breathed a silent sigh of relief and didn’t understand why Maverick didn’t back off when he’d gotten what he wanted.

“He ever lay a hand on you?” Maverick asked and it was only when Fernando yipped out, “What? No!” that I realized that he was talking to me.

“Not sexually, no,” I answered, because that time pinned against the side of my grandmother’s house, his fingers digging into my face as he grabbed my chin was all too fresh in my memory.

“Not sexually, but he’s hurt you?” Maverick demanded.

I nodded.

“Where you want him shot?” he asked me.

“I don’t want you to shoot him,” I said, and Mav bore into Fernando that much harder.

“You hear that, Junior? She doesn’t want you shot. She doesn’t want you hurt, but we don’t always get what we want, now do we?”

He clubbed my cousin in the head with his gun. Blood spurted from Fernando’s eyebrow and he planted on his ass on the cement beside the lift, a hand going to his head in a daze. Maverick leaned down and grabbed my cousin’s chin in an eerie echo of how he’d grabbed mine, forcing Fernando to look up at him. Fernando gripped Mav’s wrist and Maverick doubled down, forcing the barrel of the gun into Fernando’s mouth.

“Mav, stop!” I cried, alarmed.

“You listen here,” Maverick commanded, ignoring me. “That there had better leave a scar. I mean it. I want it to be a reminder, every time you look in the mirror, that that girl showed you mercy today. The mercy you never afforded her, you ignorant fucking fuck. Next time a woman tells you something, you better fuckin’ believe her and I swear to God, you call the cops? You tell anyone about this at all, I’m gonna find you, and I’m gonna finish what I fucking started here. I’m all outta mercy. Now nod if you understand me.”

Fernando nodded emphatically and I felt like I was going to throw up.

“Marisol, get on the bike.”

I did what I was told, and Maverick let my cousin go. Straightening, he kneed him in the face, Fernando’s nose crunched, and his hands flew to cover it and to catch the blood spilling down it.

“Glad I could make myself clear,” Maverick said, tucking the gun into the back of his pants and coming over to me. I handed him his helmet and he got onto the front of his bike, starting her up.

I clung to him, giving one last